The Duke Blue Devils find themselves in a bit of an unfamiliar place as Jon Scheyer’s team enters March Madness, with the Devils securing the fourth seed in the South region of the Big Dance, playing America East champion Vermont in Brooklyn on Friday evening. The reason Duke is in unfamiliar territory is because the Devils have only been a fourth seed once since the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament field expanded to 64 teams in 1985 once, doing so in 2016, when they beat UNC Wilmington and Yale before falling to the Oregon Ducks in the Sweet 16.
Now, Scheyer and the Blue Devils must try to put their ACC Tournament loss to NC State in the rearview, with a red-hot Catamounts team on the horizon and a potential second round showdown against either No. 5 Wisconsin or 12th seed JMU awaiting them.
Luckily for the Blue Devils, oddsmakers at ESPN BET North Carolina list Duke as an 11.5-point favorite over Vermont, with a -800 moneyline in favor of Scheyer and company, to +550 for the underdogs from Burlington.
All year long, BetCarolina.com has tracked Duke’s 2024 NCAA Men’s Tournament seeding odds, with this week’s update putting a bow on the Blue Devils’ season and setting the stage for this week’s opening round of the Big Dance
As we prepare for a huge week of North Carolina sports betting on college basketball, stick with BetCarolina.com.
A year after falling in the second round to fourth seed Tennessee in the tournament, Scheyer and the Blue Devils are tasked with flipping the script and getting past the opening weekend of the event as a fourth seed themselves.
Their biggest hurdle might be the Dukes from JMU, who have a win over Michigan State on their résumé and a 31-3 record under their collective belts entering the Dance as they prep for the Badgers this week.
Don’t sell the Catamounts of Vermont short, either, as they enter the tournament with the 104th spot on KenPom.com and with six losses all year long, coming to Liberty (71-61), Bradley (79-70), Colgate (77-71), Virginia Tech (73-51), Miami (OH) (70-69) and NJIT (63-61), with wins over tournament teams like Charleston (73-64) and Yale (66-65).
The Catamounts are 2-9 all time in the tournament, having famously upset fourth seeded Syracuse, 60-57, in 2005, while also notching a “First Four” win as a 16th seed over Lamar (71-59) in 2012, meaning they’ll be up to the test come Friday evening.
Keep tabs on the best NC sportsbook promos all through March Madness here at BetCarolina.com.
Author
Christopher Boan is a lead writer at BetCarolina.com specializing in covering state issues. He has covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.
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