NCAA Basketball’s Final Four starts this evening with Auburn and Florida squaring off and Duke taking on Houston in the late game. Winners will play for the championship Monday night.
Odds makers heavily favor Duke and as much as it pains me to do so, I am in complete agreement with them.
Having seen them and everyone else play, I agree that Duke by far is the more impressive team of the four remaining. Everyone is talking about Player of the Year Cooper Flagg and how great he is and I agree with that assessment too. However, Duke’s other big white boy Knueppel, along with their 7 foot Sudanese dude whose name I can’t even pronounce much less spell, are also pretty awesome players. Duke looks and plays like a very good NBA team. (Note that I said “a very good” NBA team as there is no doubt in my mind that Duke would crush the likes of the NBA Wizards and the Jazz.)
The only stat where Duke seems to be at a disadvantage is their starters’ average age @ 19.2 years. By comparison, the other FF teams’ average ages are – Auburn 23.2, Florida 22.2 and Houston @ 20.8 (click here for related article.)
As noted however, the odds makers still have Duke as a rather strong favorite to win it all and obviously don’t appear to be concerned in the least about any age differential among the players.
But (and a big but it is!) having said all that, I still just can not bring myself to actually bet any real coin on the Dukies. Old habits die hard you know. I got Houston’s Cougars getting 5.5 tonight. (I’ll spare you any jokes about liking Cougars!)
Mick from the updated movie version of Alfie. That is Dave Stewart you see in the video on lead guitar. He and Mick co-wrote several songs for the movie. Seems kinda funny hearing/seeing the song writing team listed as Jagger/Stewart vs. Jagger/Richards doesn’t it?)
We’ll have the first game Florida vs. Auburn on the Buzzy Big Screen starting at 6 o’clock. That one should be a fast paced, fun game to watch whereas the Duke-Houston game will be more deliberate. The over/under is 159 in the Auburn/Florida game and yet only 136 for Duke/Houston. Reflective of how tough Houston’s defense is. As my Mom used to say “We’ll see.”
