So you people all know that college basketball betting action will dominate life at your favorite sportsbooks over the next few weeks, and the hysteria gets started this weekend with the major conference tournaments.  This has always been one of my favorite weekends in Las Vegas, with a myriad of betting opportunities and before the town gets overrun with douchebags like ESPN writer Bill Simmons and the people who read his “work” for the start of the NCAA hoops tournament.  We’ve got a nice betting opportunity in Thursday SEC tournament action but you’ll have to sneak away from work (or if you’re like most Sports Untapped readers get your mom to wake you before noon) in order to get down on the game which goes at 1 PM Eastern/10 AM Pacific.

The tournament is being held at the Sommett Center in Nashville, TN which is better known as the home ice of the Nashville Predators.  In other words, its a neutral court game for everyone involved including Vanderbilt (they play their games in Memorial Gym on campus).  We’ll take a look at the first game on the docket as South Carolina and Alabama face off for the right to play Kentucky on Friday.

SOUTH CAROLINA VS. ALABAMA–SEC TOURNAMENT (10 AM PACIFIC/1 PM EASTERN)

On paper you’ve got a couple of evenly matched teams facing off in the SEC tournament first round, but our thinking is that each will view the potential of a Friday date against the University of Kentucky a little differently.  Alabama didn’t play badly in their game against the Wildcats this year, covering the spread as a +15 road favorite in a ten point SU loss.  South Carolina, on the other hand, actually beat Kentucky this year winning by 6 at home as a +7 underdog.  They also lost badly to the Wildcats, losing by 21 to Kentucky in the rematch but at least the Gamecocks know they can hang with them in the right set of circumstances.  That was one of only two SU losses the Wildcats suffered this season, so South Carolina views a third game with UK as a realistic challenge as opposed to jumping in front of a speeding semi-truck.

There’s another interesting dynamic at work in the SEC tournament–the conference doesn’t have a representative on the NCAA selection committee this year.  What this means is that a ‘bubble’ team from another conference is more likely to make the cut than a similarly credentialed team from the SEC.  That’s part of the scam that is the NCAA–you won’t see any out and out screwjobs in most years (at least not involving the major conferences) but NCAA tournament bids mean money and exposure for the conferences and to the committee members go the spoils.  There’s three teams that will definitely get a NCAA bid–Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Tennessee each of whom have 23 or more wins.  But there’s three more teams with 20 or more wins and they’re not all going to make it.  Of these teams, 20 win Florida may have a better shot at an at-large bid than 21 win Mississippi or Mississippi State for a number of reasons–not the least of which is their back to back NCAA championship wins in 2006 and 2007.   One thing is for certain, and that’s that at least one very good SEC team will be NIT bound.  Most field projections have the SEC getting only three or four teams in the field including their automatic bid for the conference champion.

This puts the SEC in a position where it will benefit the conference financially and otherwise if anyone *but* Kentucky, Tennessee or Vanderbilt wins their tournament.  Since its going to be hard for the selection committee to deny all three of the 20+ win ‘bubble teams’,  a surprise winner in the SEC is really their best case scenario and probably the only way the conference can get five teams into the field.  There’s been suggestions in the past that situations such as this have influenced the way games are officiated, with ‘underdogs’ getting preferential calls to help facilitate their victory over a team that’s already a shoo-in for an at-large bid.  More often than not, however, the coaches are aware of the scam and while they won’t go out and tank games won’t put a lot of emphasis on a conference tournament title.  A team like Kentucky has their sights on a bigger goal anyway, so there’s always the possibility of a lookahead even without the other disincentives of them winning the conference title.

Which brings us back to South Carolina, who would actually like a rematch with Kentucky and based on the ‘extenuating circumstances’ has a better than average chance of upsetting the Wildcats.  The best case scenario for the SEC is for a middle of the pack team like South Carolina to win the conference tournament in an upset.  There’s definitely precedent in the SEC as recently as two years ago when a 17-16 team from the University of Georgia won the tournament.  In any case, look for South Carolina to win outright here as a small underdog and set up a rematch with Kentucky.

PLAY SOUTH CAROLINA +1′ OVER ALABAMA