Sweet Sixteen Trends

The NCAA Tournament offers a ton of betting opportunities.

If you’re not a major college basketball fan with a lot of time on your hands, however, it can be difficult to identify the right spots to bet amongst a litany of games between top teams.

This week we’ll look at betting trends, both from historical Sweet Sixteen games, and early round trends from this year. We’ll also use Juice Reel to see which way money is flowing in order to find some winning angles.

As always, we’ll then use these trends and techniques to make our March Madness bets of the week!

Let’s get after it.

Tournament Trends

As we roll into the Sweet Sixteen, the 2025 NCAA Tournament has been all about chalk — favorites have held strong both in brackets and at the betting window.

Betting underdog money lines every game thus far for $100 each would have lost a bettor over $1700! Yikes.

Let’s dive into the numbers:

• Favorites have been immaculate — Teams favored by 8 points or more are a perfect 18-0 straight up (SU) in this year’s tournament. Only three times in the history of the tourney have so many large favorites survived early rounds without a loss.

• Favorites have been profitable — Favorites that went off at -5.5 or higher are 19-9 against the spread (ATS) this year. Over the last two tournaments, these heavy favorites have gone 38-19 ATS in the first two rounds.

• Seeding matters again — The 2023 NCAA Tournament was the first in history to have an Elite Eight without a single #1 seed, reflecting increased parity in college basketball. This year, by contrast, there’s no 11-seed or higher crashing the Sweet Sixteen party for the first time in 18 years.

In trying to find a cause for these trends, I got curious about the impact of NIL and the transfer portal in relocating talented mid-major players to power conference teams with more resources.

A glaring example comes from the 2023 Final Four squad from Florida Atlantic.

Three of their starters, Johnell Davis, Alijah Martin and Vlad Goldin are in this year’s Sweet Sixteen, but all after transferring to power conference teams. We’ll need a couple more years of data to declare the “end of the mid-major Cinderella” in the tournament.

For now, I won’t shy away from betting favorites to progress, and I’ll skew my underdog betting toward “high-major” teams with commensurate talent.

Betting Data: Heavy Favorite Skews

One of the best Juice Reel assets is the ability to track how much money is being bet on each side of a game, and use their proprietary Sharpmush^TM feature to see if one side seems smarter than the other.

I took a look at tonight’s matchups, and one thing jumped out to me: people are hammering #1 seeds to advance.

For example, Florida is a -255 favorite over Maryland, indicating a 71% likelihood of winning, but they have taken 98% (!!) of the money line betting dollars.

Duke is somehow more extreme, with nearly 99% of the money line betting action!

Texas Tech, a #3 seed favorite, is seeing much more balanced betting despite being nearly as likely as Florida to advance as a -235 favorite.

I’m typically keen to align myself with the sportsbooks when bettors seem to get overzealous. Faith in the top seeds seems extremely high this year, so I’ll be looking for ways to play against that groupthink.

Bets of the Week $$

Last week we went 0-2 and lost 2.4 units.

Both Grand Canyon and Liberty were athletically overmatched by their Big Ten opponents in ways I didn’t anticipate, as they Big Ten went 10-0 straight up in the first round.

Even so, since starting the newsletter, bets given out in this section are ahead 11.6 units, at a positive 18% ROI. We’ll update this regularly.

Based on my research, I am making the following bets tonight:

• Arizona +10 @-113 on BetRivers for 1 unit

• Maryland +7 @-110 on HardRock for 1 unit

Both of these teams have the talent to match up with #1 seeds.

Arizona’s offense is driven by Coach K career-ender Caleb Love and they have a projected top 25 NBA draft pick in Carter Bryant.

Maryland’s “Crab Five” starting lineup had the top scoring margin as a group in the Big Ten, and should be able to go toe-to-toe with a talented Florida squad.

Because of their talent, and the extreme betting skews described above, I’m playing both underdogs. If you have the bankroll, I wouldn’t shy away from making smaller money line bets as well!

Next week we’ll close out our tournament betting coverage by analyzing the Final Four.

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