NCAA Tournament Futures: Why Playing ‘the Field’ Is a Smart Bet … And the Best Teams to Fade
Rob Kinnan-USA TODAY Sports. Pictured: Duke Blue Devils guard Jordan Goldwire
- Oddsmakers are offering prop bets on 16 teams to win the NCAA Tournament while also giving gamblers an option to wager on the field.
- Using The Action Network's simulations, let's determine the best way to fade overvalued teams like Duke and Tennessee.
Selection Sunday is just around the corner and several teams are locks to make the NCAA Tournament.
Virginia (27-2), for example, could lose its regular season finale on Saturday and get bounced in the first game of the ACC tournament and still have fewer losses than Kentucky (25-5), a current 1-seed.
As such, oddsmakers are offering prop bets on 16 of the best teams in the country to cut down the nets during March Madness, while also giving gamblers an option to wager on the field. In proposition bets, “the field” refers to an accumulation of all the teams that are not listed specifically.
The table below displays the current odds, along with the latest probabilities from our simulations, which uses Joe Lunardi’s most recent Bracketology predictions as the bracket.
We can identify bets with positive expected value by converting the team’s odds or field future price into an implied probability and comparing it to our simulations.
Based on our model, these are the field bets offering the most value: