We’re less than two months away from one of the most popular sports betting events in the world: the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, also known as March Madness. Each year, billions of dollars are wagered on this event, whether through tournament bracket pools, individual game action, and a wealth of side props.
With our tips, you can handicap your bracket so that you can maximize your winnings.
NCAA News: 5 Handicapping Tips for March Madness
Pick balanced Teams to Advance
The teams that end up winning the whole thing have generally had elite offenses as well as shutdown defenses. You can get to the Sweet 16 riding a pair of hot scorers, but it is just too hard to win six consecutive games against opponents of increasing difficulty if you do not have that sort of balance. Using KenPom’s rankings for offensive and defensive efficiency, just one of the last 18 national champions has finished outside the top 20 in offensive efficiency, and none ranked outside the top 20 in defensive efficiency. While a team in the top rankings might go down to an early upset, and teams outside the top rankings might fare well in the early rounds, the sheer quality of the opposition will keep pretenders from cutting down the nets at the end of the Final Four.
Take “Expert” Brackets with a Grain of Salt
Starting back in October, we started to see “Bracketology” posts that promised to tell us who would make the tournament of 68 – and who would advance through each round. Every major sports website has its own set of predictions, and as the games get closer, it can be tempting to roll with the experts instead of doing your own research. However, you have to be careful here. There are some real basketball experts here, and there are others who have earned their writer status by creating clickbait. There are still others who may have played or coached college basketball at a high level but haven’t done the research. So instead of the sports “experts,” you’ll want to look at the online betting experts. They have done the research.
Metrics are Always Worth a Look
The Sagarin and KenPom rating systems have both amalgamated a variety of statistical metrics in putting together their picks. KenPom tends to be more reliable in terms of picking against the spread than Sagarin. NET Rankings is another metrics-based system that will give you valuable insight into the comparative strength of teams who are meeting in the Big Dance but may have never met before, let alone in the last season or two.
Yes, there is “Home Court Advantage” in the Big Dance
Ostensibly, all of these games are played at “neutral sites.” Then you will see the University of Kansas playing, rather than on campus, in Kansas City. Or you will see Temple playing at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, instead of playing in their home arena just a few miles away. So it’s important to understand where teams are playing, and whether their crowds will travel with them. In the NCAA, Boyd’s Bets has calculated that 31 teams have a home-court advantage of more than five points per game. The reason for this is that most of these players have little experience in playing in huge arenas away from home. Travel and crowd noise play a larger role here than they would if you were betting on the NBA. An example happened in 2017, when second-seeded Duke ended up facing seventh-seeded South Carolina in Greenville, South Carolina, 103 miles from the Gamecocks’ campus. Duke went in as a 6 ½-point favorite and ended up leaving the tournament early.
NCAA Tournament Champions Cover the Spread Reliably all Year Long
Between 2010 and 2018, eight of the nine tournament champions covered more than 55% of the games during their championship seasons. The exception came in 2012, when Kentucky put up a 38-2 record but covered just a minority of their games because of ridiculous betting expectations. So you’ll want to look at cover rates when you are picking from among a group of potential contenders. When Virginia won their title in 2019, they had covered in 68.4% of their games, for example.
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