Sport: College HoopsPick Selection: Brown Bears -13.5 -110
Princeton Tigers at Brown Bears 7:00 PM ET
Brown Bears -13.5 -110
***Ivy League Game of the Month*** While unlikely, Brown still has a slim shot at winning the Ivy League Title. The Bears are coming off a difficult loss at Cornell last weekend. The loss leaves the Bears at 7-3 in the Ivy League standings, three full games behind 10-0 Cornell with four games left on their conference schedule. Mathematically, Brown can still win the Ivy League title, but Cornell would have to lose all four of its remaining games and Brown would have to win out. Stranger things have happened.
Even though the Ivy League championship dreams may be 99 percent over, postseason hopes are not. Brown is likely going to the NIT or the inaugural College Basketball Invitational so all has not been lost. The Bears are a solid 15-9 on the season and with the remaining schedule, a four-game winning streak to end the season is quite a possibility. Wins over Eastern Michigan and Northwestern may not look solid for most teams, but those were on the road and are still pretty impressive for an Ivy League squad.
Princeton is enduring one of its worst seasons ever as the Tigers are a woeful 5-19 on the season including a 2-7 mark in the Ancient Eight. After starting the conference season with home wins over Harvard and Dartmouth, Princeton has dropped seven straight and while four of those were by seven points or fewer, the last defeat has secures the fact that the Tigers have packed it in. They lost by 19 points at Dartmouth last Saturday, snapping a Big Green seven-game losing streak.
Brown has depended on its offense to win this season, sometimes too much but defense has become the decisive factor for the Bears in recent weeks. When they?ve played well, as they have for most of the past six and a half games, they?ve won. Brown is allowing 61.1 ppg on 41.1 percent shooting at home and those numbers are even better during the aforementioned six-game run as it has allowed 58.7 ppg on 40.2 percent shooting. Princeton has scored fewer than 60 points 12 times and is averaging 52.5 ppg on the road.
Everything sets up a Brown blowout and that Cornell game should leave no hangovers with postseason play almost a guarantee. Princeton is 1-12 ATS off a road loss scoring less than 60 points over the last two seasons and it is now 0-9 ATS off two or more consecutive road losses over the last two seasons. The Tigers are 1-11 ATS on Friday nights over the last two seasons as well. Brown meanwhile is 9-1 ATS after having won two of their last three games over the last two seasons and 7-0 ATS in its last seven home games against a team winning fewer than 40 percent of its road games. Play Brown Bears 3 Units
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