NCAA March Madness Championship Game Betting Trends - Memphis vs ... - BetUs.com
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It all comes down to this: in San Antonio's Alamodome on Monday night, the Memphis Tigers (38-1 SU, 20-19 ATS) will square off against the Kansas Jayhawks (36-3 SU, 20-15-2 ATS) for the national championship of college basketball. Tipoff time is set for 9:15 PM ET.

At BetUS Sportsbook, Memphis is listed as a three-point favorite, with a total of 147.5 points.

Kansas could win this thing, without question. The Jayhawks bring superior balance to the table, with any of six or seven players capable of busting out for 20 points or more. And there is enough bulk on the inside, in the persons of Darrell Arthur and Darnell Jackson, to keep a defense honest. Kansas is used to playing at a high speed, which means that Memphis isn't going to run the Jayhawks out of the arena. And the guy who everybody thought might be the real wildcard, Brandon Rush, had 25 points in the semifinal game against North Carolina. Rush had surgery in the off-season and got off slowly during the regular season, never seeming to capture the form that saw him garner recognition on a lot of pres-season All-America teams, but he appears to have showed up when it counted most.

The Jayhawks showed exactly how dominant they can be when they got off to a 40-12 lead on North Carolina, but it has to be a real concern that they came very close to blowing that lead when the Tar Heels made their big run at the end of the first half and through the first 10 minutes or so in the second. There was panic going on within the Kansas ranks, and only the fact that North Carolina seemed to run out of gas came between Kansas and the biggest collapse ever.

We think Memphis has some of the components that make it a tougher out than North Carolina was. For one thing, while Tyler Hansbrough, a tenacious offensive player, was something of a liability on defense, Joey Dorsey, the former defensive player of the year in Conference USA, is strong enough, nasty enough, and aggressive enough not to allow Arthur & Co. a clear path to the basket. Rush may be dogged for much of the game by Memphis' 6'6" defensive specialist, Antonio Anderson.

And though we have resisted it thus far in the tournament (with negative results, I might add), it is certainly time to acknowledge strongly that the Memphis guards use their height advantage to shut down their smaller counterparts. They did it to Drew Neitzel of Michigan State, D.J. Augustin and A.J., Abrams of Texas, Darren Collison and Russell Westbrook of UCLA, In this regard, the Kansas backcourt, with 6'1" Russell Robinson, 6'1" Mario Chalmers and reserve 5'11" Sharron Collins, would seem made to order.

As I think I mentioned in an analysis of the Memphis-Texas game, this team continued to blow Michigan State off the floor even while Derrick Rose, the point guard who may go as high as #1 in the draft, was sitting on the bench. That's rare, and that's scary.

Free throws are a subject that have to be addressed, and it deserves mention that having shot just 59.7% from the line during the season, it's the kind of thing that always has a chance of coming up and biting Memphis. But I am starting to believe John Calipari when he says his team will make the shots when it needs to, as its 76-of-94 showing in the last three games (good for 81%) would seem to indicate.

It also might be useful to look at the competition these teams have faced in the tournament. Memphis has scored consecutive double-digit wins over a team in Michigan State coached by a man (Tom Izzo) who is known for making a run in the NCAA tournament, then Texas and UCLA squads that were among the top six or seven in the country toward the end of the year. Total margin of victory in those games was 51 points.

Kansas had beaten Portland State, UNLV, Villanova and Davidson before its 18-point win over North Carolina. That is not as impressive a roster of foes. And more importantly, they have yet to encounter any effective defensive size down low with any one of those teams.

On Monday night that will change, courtesy of Dorsey (and to a certain extent, Robert Dozier too).

We like the Tigers, laying the three points in the BetUS March Madness betting odds.

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About the Author

Jene Duffer is a prolific author who specializes on alternative views on a variety of topics.