NCAA Basketball Future Odds To Win Championship

While scanning the future odds for what men’s NCAA basketball team is most likely to win the NCAA Championship next year one likely notices a couple of odd things that are worthy of discussion.

Courtesy of Bovada

The above is a screen cap of the ten teams with the best odds of winning the NCAA Championship in the 2013-14 season according to the odds at Bovada.  Kentucky tops the list, which some may find strange considering they weren’t even one of the 64 teams that made it into the NCAA Championship Tournament in the 2012-13 season.

The Reasoning for Kentucky’s spot may have something to do with Wildcats fans expectations more-so than anything else.  Every season Kentucky fans expect nothing less from their team than to raise a Championship banner and this creates a hype machine around Kentucky that is sometimes hard to live up to (like last season).

Kentucky also has two returning starters, the reigning SEC Sixth Man of the Year and on of the greatest recruiting class in the entire NCAA.  Not to mention they are coached by John Calipari, who is just as important as the players on his team in terms of his brain for the sport of basketball.

Curiously absent from the 10 teams with the best odds is the Syracuse Orange.  The fact that the Orange were good enough to make it to the Final Four in 2013 seems strange that they are not considered good enough by the sports books to make it in their teams with the ten best odds.  If we expanded that list a bit, the Orange would appear tied for tenth with 25/1 odds.  Still doesn’t seem to be that great of odds for a team that made it to the Final Four just a few short months ago.

However, the Orange have lost their core offense in Michael Carter-Williams, James Southerland and Brandon Triche.  It is now up to Trevor Cooney, C.J. Fair and top recruit Tyler Ennis to fill the void left my those three phenomenal athletes.

Fair did well last season averaging over 14 points and seven rebounds a game.  Cooney, on the other hand, averaged only 3.4 points on 32.2 percent shooting. Cooney needs to prove this season that he is not a former 3-point specialist.   Ennis is simply a question mark.  Another question mark is whether or not the Orange can got deep in the tournament again this year after taking some big losses.