NCAA Tournament by the odds: Las Vegas picks and preview of the Final Four

By Case Keefer (contact)

Saturday, April 4, 2015 | 2 a.m.

The closest relative to this year’s Final Four was the 2008 edition of college basketball’s annual championship event.

The three out of four No. 1 seeds that advanced to Indianapolis for today’s national semifinals is the most since all four top-ranked teams made it seven years ago. The 2008 Final Four in San Antonio was also the last time, and only occasion in at least 15 years, that both of Saturday’s games featured identical betting lines.

Duke and Kentucky currently sit as 5-point favorites over Michigan State and Wisconsin, respectively. It’s not all that unlike 2008 when Memphis gave two points to UCLA, and North Carolina laid the same number against Kansas.

Kansas upset North Carolina outright, 84-66, while Memphis easily covered 78-63 against UCLA. One favorite and one underdog is representative of how the semifinals have typically played out.

Since 2000, favorites are 14-14-2 against the spread and 18-12 straight-up in the Final Four. The average line is minus-4, making this year’s pair of games slightly less competitive than normal on the surface.

Check out Talking Points’ picks for both games below, listed in order of confidence. Picking every game against the spread through the NCAA Tournament, an inherently unprofitable approach, the blog stands with a 32-30-2 record.

No. 1 seed Wisconsin plus-5 vs. No. 1 seed Kentucky The betting action on Saturday’s headliner has surprised bookmakers. Although most of the bets are still to come in the hours leading up to tipoff, Wisconsin has taken all the money over the first five days. And not just from the professional bettors, which was to be expected when Kentucky opened as an inflated 6-point favorite. The recreational gamblers have backed the Badgers, too.

One could easily interpret the love as a foreboding for the underdogs. The last time a similar betting pattern occurred, after all, the Wildcats assaulted West Virginia 78-39 as 13-point favorites. Combine the portentous history of doubting Kentucky with the unsustainable 12-for-18 Wisconsin shot from 3-point range against Arizona last round — including Sam Dekker making five of his six attempts — and a strong argument for laying the points could compound.

But Wisconsin is most certainly not West Virginia. And it was an aberration in itself that likely National Player of the Year Frank Kaminsky started slow and had to salvage a 9-for-20 shooting day against Arizona. Kaminsky is the exact type of player who could threaten Kentucky’s top-ranked defense with his stretch tendencies, though he did only score eight points in last year’s Final Four meeting. Oddsmakers have showed reluctance to push the spread further down, perhaps still bracing for a late rush of Kentucky money. That’s what makes Wisconsin the bet in the end, as analytics and other power ratings point toward the true line falling somewhere around minus-3 or 4.

No. 1 seed Duke minus-5 vs. No. 7 seed Michigan State Anyone picking a side in this game by tarnishing what the other team has done in the tournament is either reaching or clueless. The Blue Devils and the Spartans have played lights-out the last two weeks. They’ve improved on both offense and defense. Michigan State guard Travis Trice is right behind Wisconsin’s duo of Kaminsky and Dekker as the tournament's leading remaining scorer at 20 points per game, while Duke forward Justice Winslow is the top rebounder with 9.5 per game.

While neither Wisconsin nor Kentucky has a winning record against the spread in the tournament, Duke and Michigan State are both a perfect 4-0. Almost everyone would agree Michigan State has exceeded expectations to a higher degree, but point spreads don’t necessarily support the argument. The Blue Devils have covered by seven points per game in the tournament to the Spartans’ 4.5.

The lean to Duke dates back to the beginning of the season when it downed Michigan State 81-71 at a neutral site as part of the Champions Classic in Indianapolis. The Blue Devils were an 8-point favorite that night, and nothing about the two teams’ body of work over the four months since necessitates a three-point move in the Spartans’ favor. Michigan State has gotten much better since the first matchup. But so has Duke.

Case Keefer can be reached at 948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.