The main course of March Madness is the NCAA Tournament, but to get you ready for that feast every conference in Division I men’s college basketball (with the exception of the Ivy League) will stage a season-ending tournament that will help to fill the 68-team field for the Big Dance with automatic bids on the line for the winners.

Most of the conference tournaments do not get underway until next week, but in Part 1 of this two-part Sports Betting Insights’ series, I will take a closer look at a couple of high-value teams to bet on in their conference tournament that does tip off this week.

The team at the top of my list is the BYU Cougars, who finished second to Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference regular-season standings. As expected, Sportsbook.ag has opened the Bulldogs as -125 favorites to add a conference tournament title to their resume as well, but there is some tremendous value in BYU as the second favorite at +200.

The WCC Tournament gets underway this Thursday in Las Vegas, and the bracket is set up so the top two favorites should meet in the championship game on Tuesday, March 11, as long as they win their first two games. As one prominent Las Vegas handicapper pointed out to me the other day, BYU fans are extremely supportive of their sports teams by following them when they roll into town. Playing this tournament in Las Vegas should actually translate to a home-court advantage for the Cougars that may not be fully reflected in the current odds. It also helps that they are coming off a 73-65 victory over the Zags as three-point home favorites the last time these two met on Feb. 20.

The other team that offers some solid value in its odds to win its conference tournament is the Ohio Valley’s Murray State Racers. They have been opened as +450 second-favorites, with Belmont listed as a -110 favorite. The only other odds listed for this tournament would be a bet on the field at +160. All the action from Nashville is set to get underway this Wednesday night, but things will not heat up until the top two seeds take to the court this Friday.

The bracket is set in a way that all the Racers and the Bruins have to do is win one game to meet in the finals. These two met once in the regular season, and Belmont came out on top in a 99-96 shootout on Feb. 6 as an eight-point home favorite. In all likelihood they will meet again, and, given how close that first game was, it is well worth a play on Murray State’s current odds to come out on top this time around.

Betting Road Favorites in the NBA

The oddsmakers’ primary job when it comes to setting betting lines for any sport is to have the actual results come in as close as possible to 50-50 on either side of the coin. When you take a look as the current league trends for the NBA over the course of the regular season, you find that the road favorites have carved-out a slight edge by covering 55.9 percent of the time.

When you begin to narrow this trend down a bit, the winning percentage of road favorites jumps to 57.3 over the past 60 days, and it holds steady at 57.5 percent over the past 30 days. If you would have wagered $100 on every road favorite in the past seven days (through Tuesday night’s results) you could have pocketed a quick $460 with a 9-4 record ATS. I would not advocate just blindly wagering on road favorites from here on in as these trends can change in a heartbeat, but the opportunities do exist. At this time of the season there are two types of teams in the NBA; the ones jockeying for a better position in the playoff and the ones jockeying for more ping pong balls in the draft lottery. Matchups between these two types of teams are the ones you want to focus on in relation to this trend.

Read more articles by Dave Schwab