If you want to be an optimist, the Big Ten had twice as many teams advance to the Sweet 16 as last year.
You might not find too many people celebrating the Big Ten going from one to two after getting the most bids, again, to March Madness.
Last year the Big Ten got nine NCAA tournament bids and had one team get to the second weekend. This year, the Big Ten got nine bids again. No other conference had more than six. And only Michigan, of all teams after a disappointing regular season, and Purdue are still alive.
If your strategy for bets and brackets in the first weekend was to fade the Big Ten at BetMGM, well done. After a decent 4-4 start against the spread in the first round, the Big Ten went 2-4 against the number in the second round. That’s 6-8 with everyone but Michigan and Purdue going 2-8.
It can be a fallacy to equate tournament success with whether a conference or a team deserved a bid or not. For example it can be true that Notre Dame didn’t deserve to be in the field based on its résumé, yet still played well once it got in. The Big Ten deserved as many bids as it got (if you want to say Rutgers shouldn’t have gotten one, that’s fine, but it would have been tough to deny anyone else on selection Sunday). It just didn’t play well in the tournament for a second straight season, with some ugly losses from Iowa not getting out of the first round to Wisconsin missing just about every shot in a loss to Iowa State.
It’s a problem and maybe not one that turns around easily. The Big Ten hasn’t won a men’s basketball championship since 2000. There are no McDonald’s All-Americans in the class of 2022 committed to a Big Ten school. Michigan had three last year and Michigan State had one, and while those four 2021 blue-chip recruits had their moments, there wasn’t an elite freshman in that group.
There are problems with building a betting strategy around a conference’s recent history in the tournament. One-and-done tournaments don’t give great sample sizes. Teams and matchups change year to year. But if you come into next March looking to fade the Big Ten, nobody would think you’re crazy.
Here are the winners and losers, from a betting angle, from the first weekend of the NCAA tournament:
WINNERS
Underdogs, finally: Favorites covered in the first five games of the first round in the NCAA tournament. The same thing happened Friday, with favorites covering the first five games.
Underdogs usually do just fine in the tournament and they rallied. By the end of the first round, the count was 16-16 against the spread for underdogs and favorites. Then underdogs went 10-6 against the spread in the second round.
Overs went 28-24 overall for the first two rounds.
March Madness is an enormous betting holiday and casual bettors usually lean on favorites. The rally of the underdogs was bad for bettors.
Sportsbooks: This was set to be the biggest March Madness ever for sports betting, and that meant a huge profit for sportsbooks.
“The house had a big weekend,” BetMGM director of trading Jeff Stoneback told Yahoo Sportsbook’s Minty Bets. “It was a rough weekend for bettors.”
Stoneback said the two big wins on Thursday were St. Peter’s over Kentucky and St. Mary’s over Indiana. On Friday, covers by Notre Dame, Akron, Wright State, Texas and Cal State Fullerton (more on CSUF in a bit) were big wins for the sportsbook. Then the underdogs having a big weekend was significant for the book.
Bettors will be back for March Madness next year. But it’ll take a while to get over this one.
LOSERS
Sportsbooks and their futures liability: Sportsbooks did well on the games in the first weekend, but it could have been even better.
Two teams stood out as potential liabilities in the NCAA tournament futures market for the sportsbooks: Gonzaga and Arizona. John Ewing, a data analyst at BetMGM, said St. Peter’s is the biggest liability after the first weekend, but that’s due to their enormous odds that started at 200-to-1. Presumably BetMGM isn’t sweating the possibility of a No. 15 seed winning the NCAA tournament quite yet.
The books had to be excited when both Arizona and Gonzaga were on the ropes. Memphis had a shot to beat Gonzaga. The Tigers led by 10 and were in it until late before Gonzaga pulled it out. Arizona had a serious scare against TCU. A non-call near mid-court at the end of regulation will be debated for a long time. But the Wildcats won in overtime.
Maybe those games showed the two betting favorites are vulnerable. But they’re still alive.
Bad beats: Given all the action of the first two rounds, there weren’t too many bad beats. Michigan State +6.5 bettors had to feel wronged when the Spartans went from leading with a little more than two minutes left against Duke and didn’t even cover. Gonzaga had an odd bad beat in the first round, looking like they might lose outright as 22.5-point favorites, then having a huge run to take a lead of 26 points late before allowing Georgia State a couple baskets late. Gonzaga won by 21. There are many bad beats on live betting or first-half overs or “first to 15” prop bets, but you’ll probably be mourning those in a small group.
The two worst beats came on meaningless shots before the buzzer. Duke, an 18.5-point favorite, had Cal State Fullerton down by 19 in the final seconds. Then Fullerton came down court and got one of the easier dunks of the tournament to cover. Fullerton covering was a huge win for sportsbooks.
Wisconsin first-round bettors had a similar tale. Colgate was a 7.5-point underdog and was down nine, but Wisconsin wasn’t playing defense on the final possession and Colgate got a cheap layup to cover.
Those things happen. They usually happen more often during March Madness, so look at it this way: It could have been worse.