Sweet Sixteen Predictions

Here are the Prediction Machines thoughts on the Sweet Sixteen games:

Home	Away	Line	Pred	Delta
Miami (FL)	Marquette	6	3.7	-2.3
Louisville	Oregon	10	11.6	1.6
Ohio State	Arizona	3.5	5.4	1.9
Indiana	Syracuse	5.5	7.7	2.2
Duke	Michigan State	2	4.3	2.3
Kansas	Michigan	2	4.9	2.9
Wichita State	La Salle	4	7.6	3.6
Florida	Florida Gulf Coast	12.5	20.2	7.7

The PM likes mostly home teams, although it thinks Marquette +6 is a good bet.  The PM has Marquette picked as a likely upset in its bracket.  It needs Marquette to win this game and Indiana to win out in order to finish first in the Machine Madness Contest.  (I’ll have a blog post shortly about how the PM picked its bracket.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the PM likes Florida to crush FGCU, even with FGCU's recent victories taken into account.  I'm dubious.  I'm also dubious of the Indiana prediction, given how impressive Syracuse was in San Jose.  And the PM has liked Wichita State all along, and is looking for a fairly routine victory over La Salle.

The PM doesn't usually see this many "bettable" games, where the difference between the Vegas line and the PM’s prediction is greater than 2 points.  It’s likely that – since there are many more regular season games to train upon – the PM doesn't do as good a job accounting for the Tournament conditions as Vegas.  Alternatively, it may be doing a better job, or the lines may be more influenced by betting during the Tournament when there’s more action.