Analysis:
#739-740
Energy Solutions Arena, Salt lake City, UT
4:30pm ET / 1:30pm PT
Vanderbilt Commodores vs Northwestern Wildcats
1* Play on: UNDER the TOTAL
We’re going lightly in the official Day One of the first-round. Just enough to make things interesting… and seeing if our early week research in the database pays off with a profitable day. We have not released very many Over / Under plays thus far in the 2016/2107 season. But I did pull an all-nighter on Sunday in doing some of the early ‘grunt work’ for the PLAYBOOK March Madness newsletter. And I pulled another one on Tuesday night as I was preparing for the Marc Lawrence March Madness ‘Against the Spread’ podcast that we recorded on Wednesday morning. What we ARE doing is fading the line move toward the OVER in all three of these games… and going in the opposite direction. A direction that we have gone numerous times in the recently concluded NFL and College Football season with some decent success.
Our second and third games take us to the same site: The Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City. The OU line for the Vanderbilt / Northwestern game opened at 128.5 points. As of this writing, it has gone up a few points to a solid 130. That’s 68% to 70% of the early action that has driven the line up. We’ll go the other way with a solid degree of confidence. And a lot of that has to do with Vanderbilt’s maturation on defense as the 2016/2017 progressed. It took about half a year, but the Commodores finally bought into Bryce man-to-man D. Down the stretch, this team allowed only 61.7 points per game in their last eight (SEVEN of which went UNDER the Total). And that included good opponents like Florida (twice), Kentucky, and South Carolina. Vandy has gone 8-21-2 O/U in their last 31 neutralist games… and 1-5-1 O/U in their last 7 NCAA Tourney games. On the opposite side, this experience is ALL NEW for the Wildcats of Northwestern. Not a very potent offensive team. Ranked in the bottom half of the Big 10 in virtually very offensive category. Wildcats: 4-10 O/U on neutral sites… 3-9-1 O/U last 13 as underdogs… and 2-7 O/U last 9 non-conference games.
Pick Made: Mar 15 2017 3:08PM PST