Chattanooga, Illinois, Arizona discussed on Bet The Board
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At the office. You're in one with your family and it's got 8, ten, 12, 14, 17 guys. You're going to want to go with a lower variance bracket and move in Arizona forward. But if you're in a CBS pool or an ESPN pool and there's millions of people entering these things, you're going to want to hire variant pool. So maybe you will extend Houston past in Arizona. Yeah, definitely a little bit of game theory that I think is worth repeating here. If you are in a pool with a thousand plus entries or you're trying to make a splash, go big or go home. Try and zig when everybody else zags, but if you're in a pool that's a little bit friendlier, maybe not so friendly, but smaller amount of entries in volume to pain's point, you may want to stick with some of the higher seeds and mirror the field figuring out where you can make up ground elsewhere in that field to your point talking about Arizona. It'll be interesting to see exactly how healthy chrissa is. The picture that he put out on social media of that ankle, which I would assume is a high ankle spring. I'm not sure he plays this weekend like he was optimistic about or said he wanted to. I'm not sure Chris is available until Arizona potentially gets the elite 8 or even maybe even a final four. If Houston was a pull off that upset, you would need a career performance from a streaky shooter and the likes of Kyler Edwards to get something done who does have a little bit of tournament experience. But before Houston could potentially get to that match up assuming they take care of business of UAB, they would have to go through the winner of the Illinois Chattanooga matchup a four 13 showdown where it's the fighting align IE 7 and a half point favorite total at one 35 and a half at FanDuel sportsbook in a game that you'll be able to see Friday afternoon at 6 50 Eastern Time. UTC, two and zero all time versus the fighting Alana, which includes an NCAA tournament victory way back in the late 90s. Meanwhile, Illinois head coach Brad Underwood three and 5 in the big dance, but no stranger to being in some of these spots. Illinois looking to try and get back to their first final four since 2000, but 2005, excuse me. Surprisingly enough, they haven't been in the sweet 16 since 2005 either, which is a bit of a black eye for a proud program. Meanwhile, Chattanooga, the mocks back in the dance for the first time since 2016, played arguably one of the more entertaining and exciting title games in dispatching Furman and overtime with a couple of last second shots. They ran through their league, dominating the silicon by an average points per game margin greater than ten. They're 12 true road game victories with the most division one this season and they have a couple players to watch highlighted by malachi Smith. Chattanooga is really interesting to me because if you watch him play, they kind of remind you of Wisconsin and that's not completely surprising because Lamont Paris, their head coach, a former badger assistant. And I think at its core, when you look at Chattanooga, it's the kind of underdog you want attempting to slay the dragon. They have some size to deal with Kofi, really good guards, nougat can hit the three, and they slow the game down to an absolute crawl. They are a half court offense. 319th in possession length. They do rebound it well enough to not give up second chances as well. And that's kind of the pedigree you want from an 8 point dog. In saying that, after we had this embarrassing exit for Illinois in the tournament last season, we've heard Brad Underwood, we've heard some of his guys saying all the right things this week about focusing in like never before. We know the talents there. Illinois is clearly rested. We've kind of been waiting for them to peak and it just hasn't happened. Maybe it never does. Match up wise when I look at this, Illinois forces you to take bad shots. Underwood does a really good job kind of having his guards blitz the three point line. And then with Kofi on the back line, most teams end up settling for mid range shots. Chattanooga's tenth in mid range efficiency. So if they are hitting their mid range shots, they have a chance, it's just, as we know, the least efficient way to play basketball is taking contested mid range shots. Offensively, if you're facing Illinois, you want to put Kofi in conflict, right? Make him defend ball screens, make them defend pick and roll. Chattanooga's outside the top 300 and pick and roll frequency. Chattanooga also likes to run its offense through the post. You have Josh and I, you have the Kansas transfer there and de Sousa and the post. Chattanooga's 18th and post up frequency. The problem is that's not really the way you want to attack Illinois in Kofi defensively. Illinois is 9th in allowing near proximity shots 45th and defending them. This one's tough for me because on the surface, Chattanooga is everything you want from the kind of tempo to the guards to the shop making, the rebounding, but how they actually attack offensively isn't the most conducive way to beating Illinois. But if you can hit enough shots, 8 is a big number. And I don't know. I'm hearing all of the Talking Heads. How Chattanooga's the side here, Chattanooga's the best dog to be backing here. And I don't really like to get caught up in that kind of stuff. But Chris is now the highest in the market. They're at 8. This open 6, again, typically 7 has a lot more relevance in terms of key numbers in college basketball. During the regular season than now, but it's still a relevant number that's worth more than 5 cents. And we've just kind of blown through that number. And so market indicators are kind of saying something drastically different than a lot of the Talking Heads, which makes me a little nervous here. I definitely it costs for concern and I think you raise some interesting points. I mean, when you talk about having size in the middle to contend with Kofi kober, arguably the most important player for Chattanooga in this matchup will be Kansas transfer Silvio de Sousa if he gets in a fall trouble and they can feed the big fella at the rim. It's game over and when you look at some of the numbers, Kofi put forth this season. They're somewhat staggering. 21 and ten on 60% shooting. He's only the 5th player in league history to average those type of numbers..