WOW!! What a day ladies and gents, this is why they call it March Madness. We had the future CEO's of America at Yale take down the mighty SEC tourney champ Auburn Tigers. Then we had the fourth president of the United States take down the Big Ten tournament champion Wisconsin Badgers. We closed out the night with Grand Canyon, who has only been D1 for ten years, beat the regular season WCC champion and 15th-ranked team in the nation Saint Mary's. If you read yesterday's article, I called this, and I actually picked Grand Canyon to go to the Sweet 16 in all my brackets!
My model performed fairly well yesterday and 3 of my 4 best bets hit. We would have had all four, but UAB just wouldn't go away against SDSU. I had SDSU covering the -6.5, but they ended up winning by just 4...close but no cigar.
Let's keep the momentum going today, here are my modeled picks (sportsbook numbers again courtesy of ESPN Bet).
I do want to mention that this model does not take into account injuries, it simply accounts for the entire body of work of the teams throughout the season. This is definitely something to keep in mind. So, if a team was missing a key player most of the year and now has him back, the model may not like them as much as they should, as they are a better team now with that player. On the other hand, if a team recently lost one of their stars (looking at you, Kansas), the model may be a bit too high on them, since it doesn't account for the injury and resulting lack of contribution from that player. That being said, the model still only favors Kansas by 1.2 points, without considering that Kevin McCullar Jr is out. So, I am very bullish on Gonzaga in this game.
My Best Bets
Gonzaga over Kansas
NC State -6.5 (this makes me sad; I'll be rooting for the cinderella Oakland regardless)
Dayton +9.5
Enjoy the games today!