College Basketball Best Bets Today:

It’s Friday and that means the calm before the college basketball storm. There are 14 games on the final card of January. There will be 146 games on February 1, so tomorrow is going to be a long one. For now, we can focus on something more manageable and see if there are some good bets to be made.

One thing I want to mention before getting started with today’s card is that six of the 14 games are from the MAAC. Steve Makinen’s Home-Court Advantage Study posted yesterday listed the MAAC as having the second-lowest home-court value out of the 32 conferences. A great read chock full of great information. Give it a look!

 

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Tracking sheet is here. 2023-24 for reference is here.

This article will run Monday-Saturday (not next week, see exception above). Lines will be from DraftKings, as they are widely available to readers. Shop around for the best prices.

Shout-outs to Bart Torvik, Erik Haslam, and Ken Pomeroy, as those are my three primary resources for information when handicapping.

Check the latest college basketball odds for legal U.S. sportsbooks across the country and our Vegas odds if you share a state with us here at VSiN. Also, give the college basketball betting splits a look for these or any other college basketball games today have your interest.

Odds from DraftKings Sportsbook at time of publish.

Akron Zips at Kent State Golden Flashes (-2.5, 144.5)

7 p.m. ET

Maybe the top game of the night is the lone game in the MAC. Akron and Kent State despise each other and this year’s game has a little bit of extra juice. These two teams met in the MAC Championship Game and Kent State took a one-point lead with eight seconds left, only for Julius Rollins to not realize the score and foul Greg Tribble in the backcourt. Akron would hit both free throws and get a defensive stop for the win.

Nearly all of the production from that Zips team and that night are gone, but Kent State has a lot of the same people back, so this game means a little bit more to them.

Maybe that’s why the line has moved. I’m not sure why it has moved. To me, Akron is objectively the better team. The Zips rank in the top 100 in eFG% offense and defense. The other projected one-bid league teams with that distinction? Liberty, Bradley, High Point, UC Santa Barbara, Lipscomb, Louisiana Tech, and Saint Joseph’s.

Kent State is a really good defensive team. They haven’t played a very tough slate of opposing offenses, as KenPom’s ORtg Strength of Schedule metrics have Kent State 272nd in the nation. More notably, they have faced the 320th-ranked slate of opposing defenses and rank 357th in the nation in 3P% at 27.2% and 243rd in 2P% at 49.2%.


Akron, meanwhile, is a top-40 3-point shooting team at 36.5% and they’re also above the national average on 2-point shots. Akron has played a pretty poor schedule themselves, including a weaker slate of opposing offenses, but their stat sheet looks a lot more impressive to me.

Both teams make it tough at the rim for the opposition to score, but that’s where Akron’s superior 3-point shooting makes the difference for me.

Pick: Akron +2.5

Brown Bears at Penn Quakers (-1.5, 144)

7 p.m. ET

The Ivy League is back on schedule, playing games on Friday and Saturday nights the rest of the regular season. Brown heads from Rhode Island to the Commonwealth for this one and then they’ll head over to Princeton tomorrow. The Quakers host Yale tomorrow and will be a big underdog in that one.

So I would think that Steve Donahue will really stress this one to his team, as they ride in on a nice two-game winning streak after scoring 175 combined points against Harvard and Columbia. Per Haslametrics’ “Momentum” metric, Penn is 21st in the nation right now based on their last several performances vs. overall season performance. This is a Quakers crew down 88 spots from Erik’s preseason rank, but they’ve gained back 47 spots in the last 30 days and 24 in the last week thanks to what they did against Columbia.

Penn should catch a break tonight with a key injury for Brown, as the Bears’ top rebounder and second-leading scorer Landon Lewis is “very doubtful” for the weekend. Lewis is also the key rim protector for the Bears and the team’s leader in steals. He does a lot for Mike Martin’s team.

We’ve seen the line flip here, likely with the Lewis injury and Penn’s recent returns as factors. I agree with the line move and like the home team in a game where we’re likely to see a lot of jump shots.

Pick: Penn -1.5

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