College Basketball Best Bets for Wednesday, March 15, 2023

As far as "bad beats" go I will let you be the judge of if yesterday's loss on the call of Mississippi State over Pittsburgh qualifies. To me, I'd say it wasn't necessarily a bad beat, but it was one of those situations where I had the correct side. Even if I didn't have the outcome I wanted. I read a tweet after the game that basically summed it up by saying Pitt shot terribly from three, poorly from the free throw line, and was outrebounded by 20. They still won, but whatever the contest of the tweet was, the other teams were 0-382 or something like that. So, we got a 1 in 400 loser out of the way to start off the First Four. Now it has to be smooth sailing, right?

Nevada vs. Arizona State, 9:10 ET

I'm heading back to the First Four to put a bet on the other #11 matchup. This is a bit of a rough stretch for Nevada as they've lost their past three games. They lost in overtime to San Jose State University in their conference tournament. Prior to that they also lost to UNLV in their final regular season game, also an overtime game. Now they take on Arizona State which played well until they were crushed by Arizona in their most recent game, which knocked them out of their tournament. Looking at Arizona State's schedule it seems like they had a much tougher stretch during the year than Nevada did. You can't really control who you play, but I feel like the Sun Devils should be more prepared for this game. If Nevada is going to win the game, they will need big games from their guards. Arizona State is a fairly methodical team so if they show patience they might be able to exploit the holes that appear in Nevada's defense. I'm taking Arizona State -2.

UCF vs. Florida, 7:00 ET

We head back to the NIT where I was successful yesterday with a really good call on Wisconsin over Bradley. Now we see the University of Central Florida taking on the Florida Gators. UCF was 18-14 on the year and had a decent showing in their conference tournament as they defeated SMU and then played Memphis better than pretty much anyone else in the tournament. Florida didn't have a great season despite some glimpses of success that they've had this year. I think Florida had a much more challenging schedule, but this should be a fairly competitive game either way. I envision UCF and Florida slowing the pace down a bit closer to the end of the game and I think the line is heading in the wrong direction. To me, this game will be closer to 137 or 138 than 143 so I'm taking the under 143 in this one.

There aren't that many games I like on today's slate - tomorrow we get more than enough basketball for all of us to be happy, but I do have a couple of leans in the rest of the games today. I like under 137.5 in the Morehead State vs. Clemson game. I also think Texas Southern should easily beat Fairleigh Dickinson.

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