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College Basketball Odds, Picks & Predictions: Friday (12/1)

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College Basketball followed up a week of thrilling multiple-tournament events with plenty of exciting on-campus non-conference matchups this week.

Opponents from the ACC and SEC played 14 games across two days on Tuesday and Wednesday, culminating in a 7-7 draw, with six AP top 25 teams losing in the process. That challenge has given way to the Big East-Big 12 Battle that commenced with two games yesterday and has four more games on tap for tonight. This includes arguably the most anticipated on-campus non-conference matchup of the season between #4 UConn and #5 Kansas.

We offer our best bet for the mammoth UConn-Kansas tilt and include two other predictions for games involving Power Five conference teams.

Read on for Friday’s College Basketball best bets.

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Friday's College Basketball Best Bets

(Odds courtesy of DraftKings Sportsbook)

Maryland @ Indiana (-3) | O/U 138 (-110/-110) 

Maryland’s offense has been abysmal so far this year and enters its first conference game tied for the second-worst scoring offense in the Big Ten at 70.7 points per game. In the Terrapins’ only true road game against Villanova, they scored 40 points and shot just 20% from the field while committing 12 turnovers and losing the rebounding battle by seven. To say that Maryland is unprepared for offensive success at Assembly Hall against an Indiana defense that ranks in the top 80 in adjusted defensive efficiency is an understatement.

Whatever offensive success Maryland has had is predicated largely on point guard Jahmir Young’s play. Young has averaged 17.5 points and 3.8 assists in the team’s four wins but 13.7 points and five assists in three losses. Hoosiers head coach Mike Woodson made tremendous defensive adjustments against Young in the team’s second meeting at the Big Ten Tournament last year, holding him to 12 points on 20% shooting after he torched them for 20 points (and 27 combined points/rebounds/assists) in an 11-point win in College Park, Md. earlier in the season. We do not expect Young’s first career trip to Assembly Hall to go swimmingly, especially with his team ranking 260th in effective field goal percentage and shooting an abysmal 23.8% (352nd in the country) from beyond the arc.

The Under is 9-12-1 in Big Ten games in Mike Woodson’s tenure as Indiana’s head coach, but we expect the Hoosiers’ defense to do its part in keeping the scoring down in this game.

Pick: Maryland Team Total Under 67.5 (-110)

Iowa State (-13.5) @ DePaul | O/U 139 (-110/-110)

Pessimists will look at Iowa State’s fourth-place finish at the ESPN Events Invitational as a failure, but optimists will look at it as a building block, especially since it had a 21-point lead against a top-12 Texas A&M team in the third-place game.

DePaul is on its way to staking claim as the worst Power Five conference team this year, as it already has three losses at home by an average of 7.3 points per game to teams (Purdue Fort Wayne, Long Beach State and Northern Illinois) that each rank 137th or lower at KenPom.

The most alarming thing from those losses is that DePaul averaged 14 turnovers per game but faced only one defense inside the top 67 in the country in turnover rate forced in that span. That will be a huge issue against an Iowa State team that thrives on turnovers, forcing opponents’ miscues on a Division-1 best 26.5% of possessions. In addition, Iowa State will allow next to nothing in transition or in the paint (it ranks seventh, holding opponents under 40% inside the arc) and is too disciplined of a team for a DePaul team in peril to hang with.

DePaul is 1-5 ATS this year and 6-11 ATS in non-conference games since the start of last season, so we do not mind laying this big number with the Cyclones.

Pick: Iowa State -13.5 (-115)

#4 UConn @ #5 Kansas (-2.5) | O/U 148.5 (-110/-110)

UConn may not have covered the 31.5-point spread in its 84-64 win against New Hampshire on Monday, but it was still a record-setting performance nonetheless. The victory was the Huskies’ 24th consecutive non-conference win by 10-plus points, breaking a tie previously shared with the North Carolina teams of 2008 and 2009. While we are not calling for the Huskies to win by double-digits at Allen Fieldhouse, they have the needed experience (they return 42.5% of the minutes from last year’s national championship squad) not to compete well in their biggest non-conference road test.

The key to a UConn cover is Donovan Clingan’s size and ability to negate Kansas’s Hunter Dickinson. Clingan ranks second among all Division I players in Evan Miyakawa’s BPR metric and has the sixth-highest defensive BPR. Dickinson has an offensive rating (per KenPom) of 104 or better and 17-plus points in all six Jayhawks victories this year but was held to 13 points and an offensive rating of 80 in the team’s 73-59 loss to Marquette.

UConn is one of the most balanced teams in the country, one of four that ranks in the top 10 in both adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency. Only one of Kansas’s three players with 17-plus three-point attempts is shooting better than 30% from beyond the arc, so UConn’s elite interior defense (it ranks ninth in D-I, allowing 40.1% inside the arc) will make the difference.

Kansas has one of the best home courts in the country, as it is 34-2 SU at Allen Fieldhouse since the start of the 2021 season. However, it has also covered the spread in just 47.2% of those games (17-19 ATS), so we will grab the points with the underdogs.

Pick: UConn +2.5 (-108)

Make sure to check out our other best bets for Friday:


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Mike Spector is a featured writer at BettingPros. For more from Mike, check out his archive and follow him @MikeSpector01.

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