Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Day 2 Open Thread + Picking The Lines

Well, the NCAA Tournament is underway... sort of. Starting off with Charles Barkley breaking down Liberty vs North Carolina A&T, and then watching those two teams stumble their way through a game, does not exactly bring echoes of classic NCAA Tournament moments of the pass. But so it goes.

We've got one more night of the First Four before the the real NCAA Tournament gets underway. Please join me in the comments below for a discussion or catch me on twitter. Below are my picks against the spread:

2013 Tournament ATS: 1-1-0
2012 Tournament ATS: 30-35-2
2011 Tournament ATS: 40-26-1
2010 Tournament ATS: 35-25-3

James Madison (+2) over LIU: Once again, you have to be a pretty degenerate gambler to touch these 16/16 games. Last night's 16/16 game was pretty terrible basketball. It was exciting because it was close, but good grief was execution terrible down the stretch. But hey, it's on tv and it's (kind of) the NCAA Tournament, so let's talk about it. Once again, I previewed this game here, so you can read my argument in more detail there. I thought that the only way LIU wins this game is if they march to the free throw line all night, and these First Four games tend to be more cautious and sloppy. I think James Madison is just the better team.

Boise State (-2) over La Salle: As I argued here, I think Boise State is the favorite to win this game. I just haven't seen proof that La Salle is a good team. Boise State has had much more success against high level opponents, and their team quality is much more in line with their seed than a La Salle team that got lucky in close games this season. Don't worry about a two point spread - just pick the team you think is going to win.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think James Madison is a good pick. Their leading scorer and rebounder is suspended for the first half of the game.

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/2013/story/_/id/9069053/2013-ncaa-tournament-rayshawn-goins-suspended-james-madison-dukes-first-half-first-four-game

Daffy Duck said...

Obama has my exact same round of 64 and final four...thinking about taking sd st over oklahoma now just to be different...maybe I'll just redo it completely

Jeff said...

LOL.

And Anonymous, I talked about that suspension on twitter. It was way overrated - Goins is a "volume scorer", and he's not as valuable as the media makes him out to be.