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NCAA Basketball Pick – March 5th

On the eve of the Big East Tournament, two of the teams fighting for spots in the NCAA Tournament will meet in South Bend, where the St. John’s Red Storm battle it out on the college basketball betting lines with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

The case for the Johnnies to get into the dance is starting to really fade. The team has lost four out of five, and the only win in that stretch was a very underwhelming 69-54 victory over the South Florida Bulls. The only truly quality wins all season long came against Connecticut, this Notre Dame outfit, and Cincinnati, and the argument could be made that there are some middling wins as well against teams like Detroit, Charleston, South Carolina, and Florida Gulf Coast as well. The team also suspended G D’Angelo Harrison for the rest of the season, and he was the team’s leading scorer at 17.8 points per game. Now, the only man that is left in the lineup that is good for more than 9.2 points per game is F Jakarr Sampson, and his 15.0 points per game isn’t going to carry this team to the dance. We are impressed with the play of G Sir Dominic Pointer, who has double-doubles in two of his last three games, but he is going to need to do a lot more too, to win on the road against the Irish.

Are the Fighting Irish dancing? We have to think that in spite of the loss to the Marquette Golden Eagles on the road over the weekend that the answer to that question is going to be yes, even if the team finishes up with back-to-back losses to St. John’s and the Louisville Cardinals and then crashes out of the first game of the Big East Tournament. To be sure, getting this win would help. The offense for Notre Dame has all of a sudden fallen off of the face of the earth. The team has averaged just 57.8 points per game in its last four games after averaging 73.6 points per game in its first 25 games. The defense had saved the squad at times, such as when it held the Pittsburgh Panthers and Cincinnati Bearcats down to a total of 83 points in two games. However, it has had its really bad moments as well. Take out those two games in the 40s, and the Fighting Irish have conceded at least 71 points in four straight games.

Prediction:

Still, there’s no reason to think that the Johnnies can hang without Harrison in this one. We wouldn’t be surprised to see St. John’s just totally fall off the face of the earth over the course of the end of the regular season. The Fighting Irish will punch their ticket to the dance once and definitively for all with a victory over the Red Storm in comfortable fashion. Notre Dame 72 – St. John’s 62