The six power conferences along with the elite mids begin their league tournaments this week, with the Big East and Mountain West tipping off tonight. On Wednesday, the Big 12, Pac-12 and the SEC will get under way, while Thursday will bring us the Atlantic 10, the ACC and the Big Ten. All of us have our own opinions about the favorites to win each conference tournament, but Las Vegas makes its business out of it. Today, we’ll examine the current odds for the leagues that begin Tuesday and Wednesday (excluding the SEC) — tomorrow, we’ll look at the remainder. There are some interesting disparities between general perception and the odds, and we’ll make note of those below (all odds reported from 5dimes.com on Monday night).

The Big East Tournament is especially interesting in how it views top-seeded Georgetown. Not only does it give #2 seed Louisville nearly a three times greater chance of winning this tournament, but #4 seed Pittsburgh and #5 seed Syracuse are both considered better choices. Marquette, the #3 seed that tied for first place at 14-4 with the Hoyas and Cardinals, is not considered a significant threat to win this tournament with a less than 10 percent chance.

Home court advantage dominates here, as #3 seed UNLV is far and away the favorite to win the Mountain West championship this week. The rest of the odds pretty much fall in line with the seeds, as New Mexico, Colorado State, San Diego State and Boise State have a progressively worse chance to win this competitive league before the drop-off hits at #6 seed Air Force.

Clearly Las Vegas likes Bill Self. His Kansas Jayhawks are the team with the highest chance of winning its league tournament at over 40 percent. Of interest here is that wrong-side-of-the-bubble team #6 seed Baylor is tied with #5 seed Iowa State with the fourth best odds to win this tourney, while #4 seed Oklahoma isn’t shown nearly as much love. One other interesting fact is that TCU at 0.2% actually gets better odds to win the Big 12 Tournament than DePaul and South Florida (0.1% each) get to win the Big East Tournament.

Arizona fell to the #4 seed with its rough stretch drive in the Pac-12, but they’re a clear favorite according to Las Vegas. UCLA, California and Oregon fall next into line according to seeds, but it’s somewhat intriguing that #8 seed Stanford has the sixth-best odds in this tournament. Perhaps well-suited for arguably the most wide open power conference league in America, the worst teams (Utah and Oregon State) approach a one percent chance, while most other leagues have teams that are significantly more of a long shot.

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 12th, 2013 at 9:31 am by rtmsf and is filed under 2013 conference tournaments, vegas odds. Tagged: big 12 tournament, big east tournament, mountain west tournament, pac-12 tournament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.