The NCAA Tournament and upsets. No greater match in American sports.
Right now, millions of people are poring over their brackets trying to pick the right longshots. Well, we’ve got you covered with the skinny on the always fruitful 5-12 matchups and the most likely double-digit seeds to pull first-round upsets.
So what do you say? You ready to make some money? If you are, a good place to to start would be to take 13th-seeded Vermont to knock off 4th-seeded Purdue in the first round.
Wait, what?
Vermont?
Indeed. The Catamounts, according to our SportsLine data (which, no big deal, predicted eight out of nine tourney upsets last year, including six of seven double-digit upsets), could well be the first underdog to pull an upset in this year’s tourney -- the same Catamounts who haven’t lost since December and are currently riding the nation’s longest winning streak at 21 -- which is about to become 22 after they take out the Boilermakers, who’ve incidentally lost their first-round NCAA game each of the last two years.
This would be a big upset, obviously. But not that big, certainly not relative to the 4-13 seed gap. As of Monday, most books had Vermont at +8.5. More importantly, the Catamounts are getting around +350 on the money line, and when you consider that since 2005 six underdogs of +800 or more -- plus 800! -- have won a first-round game, well, Vermont, a top-50 RPI team with a stud in freshman Anthony Lamb, is starting to sound downright smart at 3.5 to 1.
See SportsLine’s Upset Bracket to get the skinny on Vermont and other upsets
You didn’t click? Remember, last year the Upset Bracket predicted 8 out of 9 First Round upsets correctly, including 6 of 7 double-digit seeds.
