Now that we’re down to the Final Four at the men’s college basketball Tournament, betting on the futures market has to be handled a little differently – almost like handicapping a single game straight up.

Using this approach, the Memphis Tigers are the easy pick at 27-10. The Tigers are favored by two points over UCLA (63-20) in Saturday’s semifinal; since we’re picking straight up to go to the championship game, a 2-point spread is a fair indicator that Memphis has a better chance of advancing. That’s not always the way it happens, of course, but there is a correlation between the pointspread and who wins straight up.

The Tigers would then either face North Carolina (7-4) or Kansas (31-10) in the final. The Heels are 3-point faves in their semifinal, so let’s project them to advance. In a hypothetical Memphis-UNC matchup, Memphis is the easy pick because of the bigger payout in what looks like a toss-up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under NCAA basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.