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College basketball player prop – Auburn’s Johni Broome has been one of college basketball’s best players this season. After an uninspiring game at Texas A&M this week, he will look rebound against Alabama on Saturday.
The market has his points prop at 21.5, and this is too high even for Broome. He has gone over this in only four of 14 SEC games he has finished, and he faces two 6’11” bigs along Alabama’s front line (Grant Nelson and Clifford Omoruyi).
There is value in Johni Broome under 21.5 points, -122 at FanDuel (game tips at 2:30pm Eastern).
College basketball future – Gonzaga seems to have struggled to a 23-8 record in the not so strong West Coast Conference. However, all of their losses have been by single digits against top 100 teams in my college basketball team rankings.
Gonzaga and St. Mary’s both get a bye to the semi-finals in the conference tournament, and my member numbers give a 73% chance that Gonzaga wins the tournament. St. Mary’s has beaten Gonzaga twice this season, but Gonzaga shot an awful 22.6% from three (7 of 31) in those games.
There is value in Gonzaga -140 to win the West Coast Conference tournament (number available at DraftKings but shop around).
College basketball predictions for Sunday – The college basketball predictions available to members of The Power Rank have been better than the opening markets this season (a root mean squared error of 11.40 points compared to 11.43 for the opening market). I post these the day before the games to take advantage of the opening market.
Here are predictions posted for Sunday:
- Michigan State will beat Michigan by 6.8 points at home.
- Nebraska will beat Iowa by 5.4 points at home (Iowa played on Friday night).
College basketball analytics – Dr. Nick Giffen has a Ph.D. in mathematics from North Carolina State. But when it comes to one aspect of college basketball projections, he does it manually.
Nick makes his player minute projections by hand. He talked about two factors that go into this:
- The spread. Players might play less in blow out games.
- Foul rate. A foul prone player might player fewer minutes against opponents that tend to draw fouls.
Nick also discussed other aspects of betting college player props and his surprise March Madness team in a must listen episode of The Football Analytics Show podcast.
NFL humor – “40 days of suffering. Lent is basically just a month of being a Jets fan.” Preach, Annie Agar.
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