Big weekend of college hoops upcoming.  Let’s tip it off with 5 items of interest for those who like to put their money where their opinion is. 

You’ve seen the amount of research we do in this space, which is for the purposes of providing winning pointspread selections to our late telephone service customers.   We’re 17-7 the past couple of weeks and will be working hard on this stuff through the end of the Final Four and NBA regular season.  Call 1-770-649-1078 for rates and details on our late phone service, which is a documented long-term winning proposition.  

Here’s your weekend Starting 5.

1. What do Kansas (17-1 on the season), Texas (17-1), Kentucky (18-0), UAB (16-2), and Michigan State (16-3) have in common?   None of them are any better than .500 against the pointspread heading into the weekend action.   Simply riding the best teams is far from a winning approach in college basketball.

2. What do Northeastern, Drake, Detroit, Oregon State, St. Bonaventure, Southern Miss, Arkansas State, and Arkansas State have in common?   They’re getting the money.  These teams of modest accomplishment are all 63% or better against the pointspread on the season.    This is not to say that these teams will continue to win to the spread, in fact it’s likely they won’t.  The lesson here is that there are plenty of different places you can go in an effort to beat the Vegas and online sportsbooks.  And it isn’t always with the high-profile, spotlight teams.

3. Marquette escapes the wintry gloom of Milwaukee and is rewarded with…..the wintry gloom of Syracuse as they travel to take on the Orangemen.  These clubs enter the game on completely different emotional arcs.  The Orangemen are pretty satisfied with a sweep of their rare three-game road trip. The Warriors Golden Eagles are being rightly condemned for their loss at Depaul.  A double digit favorite at Vegas and online sportsbooks, Marquette became the Big East team to lose a conference game to Depaul in nearly two years.   MU was off a 93-63 steamrolling of Providence in their previous game and clearly had their mind on this visit to the Carrier Dome.  Though SU is the much better team, a good effort by a suddenly-hungry Marquette team (4 conference losses by a total of 6 points) would be no surprise.

4. Off their first loss of the season, Texas visits Gampel Pavilion on Saturday to take on UConn. Surprised that Texas didn’t push for the game to be at the Hartford Civic Center, where UConn has less of a home court edge.   This will be the Huskies second game without coach Jim Calhoun.  After a sluggish start, UConn rolled St. John’s on Wednesday night, with the Johnnies being very compliant visitors.  St. John’s coach Norm Roberts muttered “didn’t guard” over and over again during the post-game press conference.  Texas will likely play a little defense and shoot better than the 2 for 17 that St. John’s converted from outside the arc.  George Blaney is a highly respected coach, but how will UConn react to Calhoun’s absence in the preparation and play of this game against a top-notch opponent?

5. Nobody has been more dominant in any conference than BYU.  It’ll be interesting to see how the Cougars fare against a talented group of San Diego State Aztecs.  SDSU beat Utah 60-58 in Salt Lake City this week but should have won by more.  The Aztecs shot only 5 for 11 from the line in the last two minutes, and 10-23 on their free throws for the game.  You couldn’t ask much more out of BYU thus far.  The Cougars schedule has been modest but wins over Arizona State and UTEP look more impressive now than they did then.  And BYU has been wiping out the weaker teams on their schedule. But this might be a tough spot for them, as home dogs off a dog win are a pretty good play and the Aztecs are an athletic team.  Definitely a Saturday game to keep an eye on.

Hope something here helped you out.  Good luck this weekend, and be careful.