College basketball conference tournament projections, best bets: Analytical model predicts mid-majors
Welcome to March Madness! In the last few years at The Athletic, we’ve made projections for every NCAA conference tournament and using my projection model, we’ve made our best bets on those conference tournaments. There’s plenty of college basketball tournament action to pay attention to starting this week with several smaller conference tournaments. Is our next Cinderella of March waiting in these conference tournaments?
My college basketball projection model uses advanced metrics, adjusted for opponents, from more than 10 years of data to create a projection for each team. From there, I simulate each college basketball tournament one million times to get projected odds for each team to secure an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
We’ve been pretty profitable the last two years as we are up more than 12 units. Other tournaments will be updated as their brackets are finalized this week.
2022 conference tournament future bets: 8-16, +7.48 units, +46.5% ROI
2023 conference tournament future bets: 5-6, +5.28 units, +71.8% ROI
2024 Conference Tournament Best Bets
OVC: Little Rock +225 (risk 1.5 unit)
Big South: Radford +5000 (risk 0.1 units)
Patriot: Boston University +1000 (risk 0.1 units)
WCC: Saint Mary’s +105 (risk 1.0 unit)
Southern: Furman +800 (risk 0.25 units)
Southern: Wofford +2000 (risk 0.1 units)
Coastal: College of Charleston +210 (risk 0.5 units)
Coastal: Hofstra +325 (risk 0.5 units)
2024 Conference Tournament Projections
xOdds is how often a team wins the conference tournament in 1,000,000 simulations. Odds is the BetMGM odds as of Monday morning. Implied % is percentage chance team has of winning conference tournament based on BetMGM odds. Edge is the percentage edge a bet has based on the expected win percentage and the implied odds.
Atlantic Sun
March 4-5, 7, 10
Atlantic Sun played two games on Monday night. Will be updated late Tuesday morning.
Horizon
March 5, 7, 11-12
Patriot
March 5, 7, 10, 13
Sun Belt
March 5-7, 9-11
Big South
March 6-10
NEC
March 6, 9, 12
Ohio Valley
March 6-9
Missouri Valley
March 7-10
WCC
March 7-9, 11-12
