By Dan Rivera
Welcome ladies, gentlemen and fellow NCAA men's college basketball degenerates, to my weekly Summit League review and recap! I take a lot of pride in both breaking down and handicapping these CBB plays, simply because you can find some real edges in the market (along with other small conferences), and that's why you hear me constantly covering them in the podcast and on Twitter as well. This will be the intro in every article, and I will also be recapping/reviewing the Horizon League as well. Both of these conferences play on back-to-back nights vs. the same opponent to cut down on travel for COVID purposes.
Don’t be confused about the schedule when you go to bet these games, as each of these conferences mainly play Friday/Saturday or Saturday/Sunday. Both articles will be out by Wednesday night (Thursday at the latest) every week through March Madness. Personally, I handicap every conference game and keep a lot of my work private. I do this because it forces me to look at every conference game and it helps me find real holes, since we are somewhat limited on our weekly choices. If you have any questions, thoughts or insights for now and/or going forward, feel free to contact me on Twitter any time @DanRivera228.
Author's Note: I went 2-1 on Friday and didn’t post anything for Saturday because I didn’t want to force anything. I am hoping to fire off more plays with regularity now, as I was waiting for a larger sample size on both of these conferences, particularly because some of these teams don’t have many road games.
South Dakota State, Omaha, UMKC, Western Illinois, and South Dakota were all off this past weekend because of either COVID-19 related issues or just being off on the normal schedule for the week. Every Summit League Conference team will have a weekend off during the course of the 2020 regular season.
RECAP: North Dakota State (NDSU) @ North Dakota (UND)
- Game 1: NDSU 62-45 (NDSU -5.5, under 130.5)
- Game 2: UND 82-78 in OT (UND +6, over 126)
- Last year: NDSU 2-1 SU/ATS, 2-1 O/U
This was one of the games that I gave out over the weekend, picking NDSU to cover the -4.5/-5 spread as well as the game total going over the 130.5 - NDSU got the easy cover for us here, but UND killed our over bet in this Game 1 matchup. UND put up a miserable 16 points in the first half. No, that’s not a typo. Sixteen (!) points total. UND also didn’t shoot a single free throw in this entire game. NDSU had a bad shooting night overall, going 20-49 (40.8%) from the field and 4-15 (26.7%) from three. This is well below NDSU's season average of 33.7% from three and closer to its average shooting percentage from the field.
Game 2 was a different story, one that screamed over to me. You all can make fun of me for not playing this, by the way. The under was dead before overtime, and NDSU shot much better from three in this one, going 9-23 (39.1%) from downtown. The key for UND winning here was getting to the free throw line and shooting 17-22 on foul shots overall. UND also shot 29-60 (48.3%) from the field. NDSU won the rebound battle 44-28 and still lost the game outright. This was a good win for UND, but this team still isn’t very good and is a team that I will likely be fading throughout the remainder of Summit League Conference play.
RECAP: Oral Roberts (ORU) @ Denver
- Game 1: ORU 88-84 (Denver +11.5, over 155.5)
- Game 2: ORU 91-82 (Denver +9.5, over 156)
- Last year: Denver 1-1 SU/ATS, 2-0 O/U
Points, points, and more points in this matchup. On the Betting Predators College Basketball free play podcast with Sleepy last week, I decided to stay away from this game because I was projecting it to open up ORU -6.5. ORU wound up opening -11.5, however, and I didn’t play Denver simply because this team is notorious for getting blown out. ORU, on the other hand, can put up points in a hurry and get margin.
ORU is a liability on defense, but for some odd reason this is the fourth game in the row that Denver has been able to put up points on this team despite struggling against other bad defenses. Something to keep in mind going forward is that ORU will simply have bad nights on defense. Don’t be surprised when this team drops 100 at some point though. ORU's offense is getting very close to doing just that. Denver still stinks and just played against a bad defense in this matchup en route to covering at both +11.5 and +9.5.