NCAA Tournament by the odds: L.V. picks and preview of Sunday’s Elite 8

By Case Keefer (contact)

Sunday, March 27, 2016 | 2 a.m.

The ACC Tournament was supposed to have ended more than two weeks ago in Washington, D.C.

Instead, it went on a brief hiatus. The league will hold another glorified conference tournament over the next week beginning this afternoon and spread out among Philadelphia, Chicago and Houston.

The survivor of the four conference mates receives an automatic bid into the national championship game. The success of the ACC has become the talk of the NCAA Tournament, and it’s no different in Las Vegas.

The ACC is now favored to win the championship at minus-115 (risking $1.15 to win $1) over every other conference with its tournament record at 16-3 straight-up, 12-7 against the spread.

But there’s no more beating up on the outsiders. Now it’s back to each other.

Check below to find Talking Points’ analysis and picks on the two Elite 8/ACC games, listed as always in order of confidence. The blog’s record picking every game in the tournament stands at 34-27-1 against the spread.

No. 6 seed Notre Dame plus-10 vs. No. 1 seed North Carolina The Irish have done the equivalent of hitting a six-team parlay just to make it this far. They’ve had a win probability of less than 25 percent in the final minute of each of their last two NCAA Tournament games before experiencing divine intervention-like turns in their favor. And that’s without even factoring in their comeback from a 12-point halftime deficit in a first-round game against Michigan.

Oddsmakers favored Notre Dame by only one possession or less in each of the three games to begin with after it came into the tournament on a low. That was mostly North Carolina’s doing. The Tar Heels pummeled the Irish 78-47 in Washington, handing them a fourth loss in seven games. Notre Dame, which had led the nation in offensive efficiency for a stretch earlier in the year, mustered only .68 points per possession in going 15-for-50 from the field.

It was after the blowout that pundits began blowing up the narrative that these Tar Heels were the best defensive team Roy Williams has ever coached. They might want to stop short of equating them to basketball’s version of the Steel Curtain, though. While North Carolina has continued to play well defensively, it hasn’t been a shutdown unit ever since — and rarely was before. Notre Dame quite possibly had an extreme off-night, something that’s unlikely to repeat with scorers as gifted as Demetrius Jackson and V.J. Beachem.

It’s almost as if a memory of Notre Dame pouring in 1.19 points per possession in an 80-76 win over North Carolina the month before is wiped clean from everyone’s minds. The Irish were 2.5-point home underdogs in that game before coming in plus-7 in the neutral-site rematch. Throwing in a small adjustment to those numbers still doesn’t get the line to where it rests now at double-digits. Teams taking 10 points or more in the Elite 8 over the last decade are 3-0 against the spread.

No. 1 seed Virginia minus-8 vs. No. 10 seed Syracuse Virginia looks far and away the best-coached team remaining in the tournament. The Hoos have won and covered in every game by virtue of Tony Bennett concocting a plan to take away each opponent’s foremost strength while getting his team to run offense with machine-like efficiency.

This is precisely what they’ve done against Syracuse since the Orange became a fixture on the schedule with their move to the ACC three years ago. Virginia is 3-0 straight-up against Syracuse with the only non-cover coming in a 73-65 win earlier this year as 10-point favorites.

The Orange hit a baker’s dozen worth of 3-pointers to keep the game tight throughout, despite their usually disruptive zone defense failing to fluster the Cavaliers. Virginia shot 56 percent from the field, led by Malcolm Brogdon’s 21 points. Brogdon is the second-most valuable player in the nation, according to kenpom.com’s Player of the Year metric, with classmate Anthony Gill — the team’s leading scorer in the tournament with 20.3 points per game — close behind at sixth. No other team has two players in the top 10. Even with Syracuse guards Michael Gbinije and Trevor Cooney emerging to play near their peak during the postseason, the Orange don’t have playmakers on the same level. The asking price is almost too much, but it’s difficult to fathom Virginia not winning this game.

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.