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College basketball picks: Kansas-Missouri, Houston-Alabama and more

This is a fantastic basketball Saturday, one of the best of the nonconference season thus far, and for maximum enjoyment, I would recommend NOT betting your hard-earned money on basketball and instead just sitting back and enjoying the competitive spirit on display.

But, if you do choose to wager, I would also really doubly recommend NOT using any of the below information to help you do so. Yes, sure, I went 3-2 in my first betting picks column of the season, but my allocations were all over the place, and so I ended up not making any tokens despite calling a couple of games pretty spot-on. Frustrating!

You’re better off doing your own thing. Promise.

Anyway, picks were promised, and below they are delivered. I have 100 tokens to allocate as I see fit, with a minimum of 10 per game. Enjoy the hoops — it’s going to be a fantastic day.

All odds from BetMGM. Click here for live odds.

Alabama at Houston (-8 1/2), 3 p.m. ET, ABC: If we know anything about Houston, and the maniac competitive fervor Kelvin Sampson attempts to stoke in his teams, we should confidently assume Houston has had this date circled on the calendar all year. As discussed in this week’s power rankings, Houston’s loss at Alabama last year after a questionable late non-goaltending secured Bama’s 83-82 win thoroughly infuriated Houston to the point of temper tantrum trash can overturning (which Houston’s Jamal Shead later heartwarmingly cleaned up). Now Houston is arguably the best team in the country and hosting its first elite-level nonconference game of the season. Think the Cougars will be fired up? Alabama will be plenty up for it, too; Brandon Miller is a fantastic freshman talent, a 6-foot-9 3-point specialist few players in the country can guard. The Tide play great first-shot defense with their length, take plenty of 3s (obviously), and regenerate their offense with Charles Bediako’s immense interior rebounding. But they’ve also been way too turnover-prone and a bit too freelance-y offensively when things break down, and against Houston — which wins every physical battle and churns through opposing perimeters like a lawnmower through grass — that spells doom. The pick: 20 on Houston.

Arizona (-1 1/2) vs. Indiana in Las Vegas, 7:30 p.m., FOX: Can Arizona keep Indiana out of the paint? It’s sort of that simple. Against North Carolina on Nov. 30, the Hoosiers scored 50 of their 77 points in the painted area, a totally ridiculous number that sustained their offense in a straightforward wire-to-wire win. Then Indiana traveled to Rutgers, where the Scarlet Knights were determined to make literally anyone not named Trayce Jackson-Davis beat them. They imploded the paint, sent triple-teams at TJD, and held Indiana to just 14 interior points (and Jackson-Davis to 13 on 11 shots) en route to a 63-48 win. The blueprint isn’t complicated. Can Arizona execute it? It has the bigs to match up with Indiana well enough, and perhaps exert some real, interior pressure on Jackson-Davis on the other end of the floor; Oumar Ballo is drawing 8.2 fouls per 40 minutes. The guess is Indiana’s depth gives it just enough, but it feels like a coin flip, especially if this ends up being a more open, flowing neutral-court kind of game than the Hoosiers generally prefer. The pick: 10 on Indiana.

Kansas (-3 1/2) at Missouri, 5:15 p.m., ESPN: Now this is a fascinating game. A year ago, the long-lamented Border War rivalry was finally revived, just in time for Missouri to be gawdawful and Kansas to be the best team in the country, and so the result was a 102-65 Allen Fieldhouse thrashing that made you wonder why Mizzou agreed to this in the first place. Here’s your answer: Because, all of a sudden, the Tigers have a very real team going, and a real chance to beat their detested rival. In just the first few weeks of his first season, coach Dennis Gates has remade the way Missouri plays and generates points. To wit:

What College🏀 teams have the Best & Worst Transition Offenses?

– St Marys/VA Tech are fine with a slow pace
– AZ/Miz/UT/etc. winning bc of transition O
– Scouting report on Creighton/Pepperdine: If we lose the ball, full sprint back on def. pic.twitter.com/LtrKPhDXRp

— Ryan Hammer🔨 (@ryanhammer09) December 8, 2022

The Tigers, totally overhauled in the transfer portal after Gates replaced Cuonzo Martin, turn their opponents over at the fourth-highest rate in the country; no defense in Division I generates more steals per possession. The Tigers turn those turnovers into immediate, easily converted points, and they play faster than almost anyone. Throw in a low-turnover half-court offense that shoots from distance often and with respectable accuracy, and it’s no mystery why this team is 9-0 with one of the more impressive average margins of victory in the country.

On the other hand, they haven’t played anyone. A down Wichita State is the closest thing to a quality opponent on this schedule so far, and Mizzou barely survived the Shockers in Wichita. Kansas, on the other hand, is vastly more proven, with national title veterans — particularly Jalen Wilson and Dajuan Harris, who will have the ball in their hands most often against the Mizzou press — and the assurance bred from experience in exactly these kinds of environments. Let’s suppose Kansas will pull it out, but it should be a hell of a game, and a relief to see the Tigers not merely involved but ferociously competitive in this rivalry. The pick: 20 on Kansas.

San Diego State (-1 1/2) vs. Saint Mary’s in Phoenix, 3 p.m., ESPN+: Saint Mary’s feels a little underrated. The Gaels have lost three games, but they’ve exclusively been close, shot-here-or-a-shot-there-at-the-end sorts of affairs, particularly against Houston in Fort Worth, where they held the Cougars to 53 points in a brutal 56-possession affair but were kneecapped by Houston’s even-more-diabolical defense. (Houston held Randy Bennett’s team to 8-of-22 shooting from 2-point range, and turned them over 17 times in 56 trips. Sheesh.) This is nothing against San Diego State, but there feels like a bit of value in Saint Mary’s that isn’t currently captured by the Gaels’ first-glance won-lost record. The pick: 20 on Saint Mary’s.

UAB at West Virginia (-6 1/2), 6 p.m., ESPN+: Speaking of which, you know what team looks really quietly good? West Virginia! If you look purely at performance since the season began (which is to say if you remove the preseason ratings that remain baked into KenPom.com’s rankings for a little while longer still, and filter from the beginning of the season over at Bart Torvik’s site), West Virginia ranks ninth, one spot higher than Illinois. Is this conclusive? No, because it’s still just nine games, two of which WVU lost (to Purdue and at Xavier). But the Mountaineers have absolutely belted everyone that has dared step foot in Morgantown this year: Mount St. Mary’s by 18, Morehead State by same, Penn by 34, Navy by 21. UAB looks much better than any of those teams, obviously, and Andy Kennedy would love to take his retooled program and get one over on his old boss in a hostile building. But West Virginia looks vastly better than most are giving them credit for. The pick: 20 on West Virginia.

Georgetown at Syracuse (-9 1/2), 1 p.m., ABC: You know what’s sad? Once upon a time, this fixture would have occupied the top spot in this column. It would have been a game so big you couldn’t ignore it, one you not only had to include in any sort of betting picks-slash-preview column but often the highest-profile game of any weekend. Now look at it — tossed down here at the bottom in a pathetic attempt to steal some nonexistent tokens on the margins with a half-baked angle conjured up by someone who doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing. Blech. Anyway, the idea is this: Georgetown and Syracuse, even in their grotesquely minimized modern states, tend to play close, hotly contested games. The rivalry doesn’t have the same heat it once did, but nobody, least of all the two coaches, wants to lose. Georgetown was horrible last season but beat Syracuse in an almost-even-kind-of-full Capital One Arena; the Hoyas lost by just five at the Carrier Dome in the fall of 2020; the Hoyas had their last best performance of the season just before the wheels came off in 2019; and a decent Syracuse team won a one-point thriller in 2018 that made you think the Hoyas might even be back (narrator voice: They were not). Both teams play hard. Fans still show up and go through the rivalry routines, the pantomime of past glories. For an afternoon, you get to pretend both of these teams are still good. Whoever wins, Georgetown should keep it close. The pick: 10 on Georgetown.