NCAA Tournament Betting: North Texas Mean Green vs Kansas Wildcats
by Nick Meyer
While Kansas Jayhawks haven't blown teams away like some of the best teams we've seen in the past ten years, there's no doubt that the Big 12 champs are a worthy number one seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The Jayhawks won the top conference in the RPI rankings, the Big 12, with relative ease, and only had a couple slip ups along the way as they rolled to another NCAA Tournament bid and conference tournament title.
The reward for the Jayhawks will be a matchup that most college basketball betting fans think should be easy against the Lehigh Mountain Hawks, the 2009-2010 Patriot League Champions.
With a conference record of 10-4 and an overall record of just 22-10 against a not-so-great schedule, the Mountain Hawks will face an extremely tough step up in competition against Kansas in a game that no one expects them to win.
Now, the big question on every NCAA Tournament betting fan's mind coming into this game is whether or not Lehigh can cover the spread as the underdog against Kansas.
Lehigh Mountain Hawks (22-10 SU, 3-0 ATS) vs. Kansas Jayhawks (32-2 SU, 14-16-1 ATS)
Thursday, March 18, 9:40 ET, Oklahoma City, CBS TV
College Basketball Tournament betting line: Kansas favored at -25 ½
Lehigh is a high-scoring team for such a low-major conference champion at about 75 points a game, but their margin of victory each game is only about 5 points per against inferior competiton.
They also give up 70 points a game which is nothing special.
Against a bigger, deeper, more athletic Kansas team, they will have a hard time keeping pace.
Guard CJ McCollum is the main hope for Lehigh as he averages about 19 points a game and can get hot at any time, but the Jayhawks can focus their defense on him and make others beat them.
Marquis Hall has some good point guard skills and can also score for Lehigh, but he will most likely be shut down by Sherron Collins, one of the best PG's in the entire country.
With no true center on the roster, massive Jayhawk big man Cole Aldrich will be a handful and a half for Lehigh and could get their smallish front line into foul trouble right off the bat.
Kansas will be motivated to put Lehigh away in a hurry considering they just came off a long Big 12 Tournament run, and that's just one of the reasons why the Jayhawks are a good bet to pull off an easy win by a big margin against an overmatched Lehigh team in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Oklahoma City.
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