March Madness has already arrived in the form of wild low-major tournaments across the country.
Regular-season champs have been getting picked off left and right from Belmont and Navy to Central Arkansas and UNC Wilmington.
Will this upset fever spread to the power conferences this week? As a bettor, I sure hope so.
Arkansas to Win SEC Tournament (+600)
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Darius Acuff Jr. missed the Hogs’ regular-season finale against Missouri with a lingering ankle injury. Head coach John Calipari said sidelining his point guard was purely precautionary, noting Acuff has been managing the ankle issue for some time.
The Hogs’ go-to scorer has even resorted to a walking boot to relieve pain between games. All indications out of Fayetteville point to Acuff receiving a green light in Nashville this week.
If he’s truly a full-go, he’s the kind of superstar capable of carrying a team to a tournament title — whether in the SEC or the NCAA Tournament. Evan Miya rates him as an A+ playmaker in the 99th percentile of all guards.
He’s the only player in Division I to average over 20 points and six assists per game.
And he’s taken games over in a variety of ways down the stretch. He made 13 triples in back-to-back games against Auburn and Alabama. He’s hit double-digit foul shot attempts in three of his last five games. Plus, he’s dished out 10 or more assists on five occasions.
Texas’s Sean Miller recently said that he was the greatest point guard he’s ever seen. Keep in mind, Miller has coached for 34 years.
Since SEC play began, Arkansas has graded out as the sixth-best offense in the country. With Acuff as steady a primary ball handler as there is in the sport, the Hogs never seem to beat themselves, evidenced by their extremely low turnover rate (9.0 TPG, 7th).
This helps them in the “extra possessions” battle, an element of their game that's vital given how poor they are on the defensive glass.
From a path perspective, Arkansas has drawn the three-seed in the SEC Tournament, which means a double-bye to the quarterfinals, while avoiding Florida until a possible title game matchup.
That’s as sweet a setup as Coach Cal could ask for because he has an inside track to the championship game with Texas A&M and Alabama standing in his way.
The Razorbacks scored at will in their meeting with A&M (99-84) and held leads in both overtime sessions with Alabama before falling 117-115 in Tuscaloosa.
Acuff was truly unstoppable against the Crimson Tide (49 points, five assists). They had no answers that night for Acuff, and I don’t anticipate anyone slowing him down in the Music City.
To see this get to the window, we’ll likely need Florida to be upset on the other side of the bracket. Now the Gators look invincible at present, but their path is considerably rockier than Arkansas’.
Florida will open with either Missouri or Kentucky in the quarters, followed by Vandy or Tennessee. Missouri handed Florida one of its two conference losses, Kentucky pulled within five of Florida in the final minute of its last meeting and Vanderbilt led it with 1:15 remaining in their lone meeting back in January.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Florida trips up because that’s become the norm in Nashville. The one-seed has only made the SEC championship game twice since 2018.
At +600, I’ll bank on more bad luck for the SEC’s top seed while hitching my wagon to the Hogs’ superstar point guard.
