It’s been a little less than a calendar week since we had college basketball, and today we have it back with what may be the most dominant four teams to every make it out of each region. This is arguably the most talented and deepest Final Flour that college basketball has seen. You can make the case that if you pluck any one of these four teams out and drop them in a bracket in years past, they would make it to the championship.
You have Florida and Auburn who have semi-controlled the SEC throughout the season, a conference that was far and away the most competitive in college basketball. And it wasn’t close either. Then there’s Houston who is led by a guy in Kelvin Sampson who is just a wizard when it comes to basketball. The guy is a mastermind when drawing up plays and his team just plays hard for him, plain and simple. Take their inbound play against Purdue. If you didn’t see this play, you can watch it here. Sampson knew how Purdue’s defense operates, the player guarding the ball tries to add an extra body into the mix by coming off the inbounder, Sampson knew the defender would “leave his post” leaving Milos Uzan all alone to score the game winning bucket. Plus, Houston is just wildly physical, they’re a gritty team who makes you work hard to find pay dirt. However, they have to go up against maybe the greatest college basketball team to ever take the floor. Up there with the nearly undefeated Kentucky team led by Calipari years ago. Duke is just so tall, they play the game the way it’s meant to be played, and they have the best player in the country in Cooper Flagg.
Picks:
In this Final Four, like I said earlier, it’s easily the best four teams that we have in the tournament. There is no question that each of these teams belong. However, now that we’re in the crème de la crème, Florida and Duke are in the upper echelon of that category. I think Florida and Duke both win in close games, but one theme that we’ve had all tournament is the better teams have won. That’s not always the case in the NCAA Tournament, often we get upsets where lesser teams just have a better day than the higher seed. But not this year, the better teams have beat their inferiors basically all the way through the bracket. I think the size, strength and length of Florida and Duke are just too much for Auburn and Houston. Here are tip times below:
Florida vs. Auburn (FLA -2.5) 5:09 CT on CBS
Houston vs. Duke (DUKE -5.5) 7:49 CT on CBS
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