Pittsburgh vs. Marquette Basketball Picks

Basketball Betting Game Trends

NCAA Basketball Pick – February 16th

Big East big boys meet up at the Bradley Center on Saturday afternoon for a clash of teams ranked in the Top 20. The Pittsburgh Panthers will face off with the Marquette Golden Eagles in NCAA basketball betting action to start off your weekend.

The Panthers have really found their stride, and they haven’t played a bad game since getting beaten by the Rutgers Scarlet Knights in Piscataway back on January 5th. Since that point, they are 8-2 SU and 6-4 ATS, and their only losses came in overtime against this Marquette outfit and against the Louisville Cardinals by just three. The defense really has made the difference for the Panthers, as they have held nine straight foes to 64 points or fewer. That’s the type of defense that this team didn’t always have last year, and it’s why the Panthers were playing in the CBI and not the NIT or the NCAA Tournament. Rebounding the basketball is always key for U-Pitt, and this year, it is doing it tremendously well. The team limits the number of rebounds that opponents can get better than anyone else in the land, as foes are good for just 24.6 rebounds per game, 11.2 fewer than what Pittsburgh is good for.

We’ve got a lot of glowing things to say about the Panthers, but we just don’t have that to say about the Golden Eagles. They have really faltered in their tough games of late, getting killed by the Georgetown Hoyas and Louisville Cardinals, and they really only have big wins against the worst teams in the conference. The team is only 9-10 ATS this year to show for its work, and we don’t think that a 17-6 record is really indicative of how good this team really is. The team doesn’t shoot the three well, isn’t a remarkable good team from the field, and it really only has a couple of scorers to watch out for. G Vander Blue can catch fire and drop 20 any given night, but only he and F Davante Gardner are averaging double digits in scoring per game. Beyond that, there are four players putting up between 7.2 and 8.8 points per game, and really no other steady contributors. Worse? There isn’t a player on the team averaging more than 5.0 boards per game, and that’s bad, bad news against these Panthers.

Prediction:

It’s not easy to go on the road in the Big East and win, but the way that the Panthers play, they at least have a habit of keeping games really close. This isn’t a team that we would back laying eight or nine on the road against anyone in the land, but this is still a nice spot to be playing U-Pitt. It’s a revenge spot for the overtime loss that was suffered at home a few weeks ago, and it is a really tough game for the Golden Eagles. Run with the Panthers on Saturday. Pittsburgh 61 – Marquette 54