March Madness Odds: Some Soft First Round Numbers
by Nicholas Tolomeo - 3/17/2010

Seeing lesser-ranked teams being favored is nothing new to people who follow college basketball point spreads. During the regular season the hostile environment of a college basketball arena is usually enough to warrant a home standing unranked team being favored over a ranked team.

March Madness Handicapping: Predicting the No. 12 Over No. 5 Upset
by Matt Severance - 3/17/2010

You hear it every year: Take at least one No. 12 seed over a No. 5 in the first round of your NCAA Tournament bracket. So how often does it happen? Since the tournament expanded to 48 teams in 1980, which first created No. 12 seeds, those teams are 41-79 in first-round games against No. 5s. Since the 2001 tournament, No. 12 seeds have taken 18 of 36 matchups from No. 5 seeds. Last year, three of four No. 12s pulled off the trick.

March Madness Prop Bets: No. 1 Seed Props
by Matt Severance - 3/17/2010

With the Big Dance less than 24 hours away, it’s speed writing time to get as many of the best possible prop bets for the NCAA Tournament covered here at Doc’s Sports. Today let’s look at a few WagerWeb offerings on the four No. 1 seeds, Kansas, Kentucky, Syracuse and Duke.

March Madness Free Picks: Most Outstanding Player Prop
by Alan Matthews - 3/17/2010

That’s Most Outstanding Player in case you were wondering what MOP was when it comes to the Big Dance, which tips off tonight with the play-in game. Bodog has posted several different prop bets for the NCAA Tournament, and today I will look at who your best value bets are for the most outstanding player and offer a free pick for March Madness betting.

March Madness Betting: Ranking the Conferences
by T.O. Whenham - 3/17/2010

Conferences are crucial throughout the regular season, but they really don't mean much once the tournament starts. Still, there are a couple of days for us to kill between now and the start of tournament play, so we have to find ways to kill that time without going crazy - and ranking the six major conferences based on their tournament strength and likelihood of tournament success. Without further ado:

March Madness Betting: Possible ‘Cinderella’ Teams
by Aaron Smith - 3/17/2010

It happens every year during March Madness: there is always that Cinderella squad that steals the spotlight and very few people see it coming. Part of the reason the March Madness is so great is that upsets occur quite often.

March Madness Bracket Predictions: South Region
by Robert Ferringo - 3/16/2010

A story that’s bouncing around the bobblehead media discusses how Duke was given the easiest bracket and the easiest road to the Final Four as some sort of conspiracy by CBS to juice up their ratings for March Madness and the NCAA Tournament. Notorious scumbag Jason Whitlock was one of the first to put that thought out into the ether and Colin Cowherd then took it and ran with it on his ESPN radio show. So now apparently this is a story.

March Madness Bracket Predictions: East Region
by Robert Ferringo - 3/16/2010

My March Madness bracket prediction for the East Region: a whole lot of people with their face buried squarely in the lap of John Wall, John Calipari and the rest of the Kentucky Nation. But what they don’t realize (and I’ll come back to this with another story tomorrow) is that Kentucky doesn’t have a chance in hell in cutting down the nets and winning the NCAA Tournament.

March Madness Betting Strategies: Reseeding the Brackets
by Nicholas Tolomeo - 3/16/2010

Before every NCAA Tournament I like to reseed the regions and then go about making my picks and filling out my brackets and as part of my March Madness betting strategy. Sometimes the seeds match up, but usually they are drastically different. Here are new seeds, region by region with a brief description of why teams rose or fell. These seeds to do not account for a team’s “body of work” this season but rather how you would rank them based on their overall talent taking into account momentum, coaching, experience and health. My adjusted seed is listed first with their actual seed after the team in parentheses.

Free March Madness Picks: Potential First-Round Upsets
by T.O. Whenham - 3/16/2010

My favorite part of the NCAA Tournament is the same as everyone else - trying to decode the March Madness bracket to try to win a pool or two. My second favorite part, though, is betting underdogs on the money line. We know that upsets are a big part of the tournament - there are an average of 16 every year. The money line is a great way to take maximum advantage of those upsets to (hopefully) turn a profit. Here's a look at eight games at even money or better that seem attractive in my eyes – these are free March Madness picks to play on the money line:

March Madness Brackets Help: Easiest Paths to Final Four
by T.O. Whenham - 3/16/2010

There is no such thing as an easy path through the NCAA Tournament. To cut down the nets in Indianapolis this year a team will have to win six straight games against increasingly difficult competition that have been aiming for this tournament since before the season began. That being said, the road is a lot easier on paper for some teams than others. Here's a look at four teams with comparatively easy paths to glory:

March Madness Brackets Advice: Hardest Paths to Final Four
by T.O. Whenham - 3/16/2010

The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee has one of the hardest jobs on the planet. No matter what they do every year they are going to face endless amounts of criticism. Trying to fit 65 teams in to a bracket and making sure that they are all where they belong is almost an impossible job. Still, some years they do a better job than others, and this year wasn't one of their best.

March Madness Betting Trends – NIT Predictions
by T.O. Whenham - 3/16/2010

In all the excitement and anticipation surrounding the NCAA Tournament, it's easy to forget that there is another tournament that actually starts a couple of days before the big dance - one that actually used to be the most prestigious one. The NIT may now be just the place where teams that aren't good enough to make the real tournament play, but it's still provide plenty of betting opportunities, and anything that you can bet on can't be all bad.

March Madness Betting: CBI Tournament Predictions
by Nicholas Tolomeo - 3/16/2010

There is another lesser-known tournament out there that gets to pick teams from what is left of the field after the NCAA Tournament and NIT tournament get their teams. The College Basketball Invitational is now in its third year. It is smaller than the 65-team NCAA Tournament and the 32-team NIT.

Odds of a Perfect March Madness Bracket
by Matt Severance - 3/16/2010

Chances are you have come across a promotion on some Web site that promises an awesome grand prize for anyone who can simply not miss a game in their March Madness bracket. So what are the chances of achieving that? Try one-in-9,223,372,036,854,775,808 -- this doesn’t include the play-in game but the 63 games following. That’s nine-plus quintillion (according to one story, some entomologists claim that’s about the number of insects on Earth).

Free March Madness Contests - $5 Million for Perfect Bracket
by Doc's Sports - 3/16/2010

Three brackets, three ways to win. That’s what BetUS is offering site visitors in their new March Madness contest. In one of the most lucrative of all free March Madness contests, BetUS is offering up $5 million to anyone that can fill out a perfect bracket. This may seem like easy money to some, but the odds are actually 18.5 quintillion/1. We have never heard of quintillion, but we imagine this indicates it is a pretty big longshot.

2010 Final Four Predictions
by T.O. Whenham - 3/15/2010

The March Madness bracket is out, the games are around the corner, and speculation is running high. The Final Four is the most perfect format in sports, and trying to pick the winners correctly is the most haunting challenge there is. Every year at this time I set out to boldly make my Final Four predictions. Sometimes my predictions turn out to look pretty good. Other times, like last year, they are pretty much disastrous. I have a short memory, though, so I won't let those setbacks bother me. Here. then, are this year's version of my Final Four predictions:

College Basketball Handicapping: ACC Tournament Preview
by Robert Ferringo - 3/11/2010

The Duke Invitational Tournament begins today in Greensboro, N.C. Also known as the “ACC Tournament”, the Duke Invitational is generally held as a coronation for the Blue Devils en route to an inflated seed in the NCAA Tournament. Duke has won eight of the last 11 ACC titles and have appeared in 10 of the last 13 conference championship games. And scoping a relatively weak ACC field I don’t see how this weekend will be much different for the top-seeded Devils.

College Basketball Handicapping: SEC Tournament Preview
by Robert Ferringo - 3/10/2010

To suggest that the SEC East is just a little bit better than the SEC West this year might be a bit of an understatement. The top four teams in the East – Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Florida – went a perfect 24-0 this season against the six teams in the West. Overall the East sported a ridiculous 27-9 mark against its brethren out West. That is domination, pure and simple.

College Basketball Handicapping: WAC Tournament Preview
by Robert Ferringo - 3/10/2010

Looking around the college basketball landscape I can say that the WAC is one of the few conferences in the country that is actually better this year than it was last year. This league brought back 33 of 45 starters from last year and eight of 10 all-league performers, all along with 14 of their top 15 scorers and 13 of their top 15 rebounders.