March Madness betting continues on Saturday and it’ll get us started with a busy weekend of sport betting action.  We’ll have more college hoops later today and tomorrow, as well as our betting analysis of Sunday’s UFC event.   In this post we’ll take a look at a 12:20 Pacific start game between Murray State and Butler.  Murray State upset Vanderbilt to advance to this game, while #5 seeded Butler took care of UTEP.  And once again we’ve got a cheerleader picture that the cropped version simply doesn’t do justice to–you can click here for the full sized photo.

MURRAY STATE VS. BUTLER:

In a battle between two solid mid-major teams the points look to be the play.  As we discussed in our handicap of Murray State when they played Vanderbilt, they’re a team that goes 10 deep and plays nasty defense.  We also know they can hit big shots, as evidenced by Danero Thomas’ dagger against the Commodores.  As we noted in our previous writeup, Murray State just didn’t lose by any significant margins this year–they lost only once by more than six points all year and that loss was only by 11.  In terms of this pointspread that means that Butler will have to hang their second worst loss of the season on the Racers to cover.

Butler isn’t Vanderbilt, however, and we don’t expect them to be pushed around as easily as the brittle Commodores.  They’ve got a deep squad themselves, shoot the ball well, play good defense and are particularly strong in the backcourt.  Still, they were only 12-16 ATS as a favorite this year and we’re not sure if they’re that much qualitatively superior to Murray State.  Line is probably based as much on the team’s disparate seedings (Racers were a #13 seed) than anything else.  Ultimately, we’re getting a deep, hard working, defensively tenacious Murray State team getting points.  My hunch is that Butler will do enough to win the game outright, but it’ll be a 40 minute war with points at a premium.

PLAY MURRAY STATE +4′ OVER BUTLER