Taking over 142 and Providence moneyline +185.
1) Providence has been playing better than their ranking for a month now. The metrics have not caught up. According to Torvik, if you took only the last month, Prov would be a 4.5 point favorite. It's silly to use a smaller sample size and I do think we should be favored, but I'm grabbing that +185.
2) Their home court advantage in a rivalry game is a real factor. Their fans gonna be AMPed.
3) I don't like the matchup of their offensive strengths aligned to our defensive weakness. We always foul too much, they love to draw fouls. We're a good defensive rebounding team, but I worry at home they're going to be the tougher team and beat us on the boards a bit. They've got more strength/BMI than us at almost every position outside of Sanogo. Their best offensive player is matched up against our slightly undersized starting freshman. We will likely see Jackson on him too, but I also worry about him picking up a couple fouls there,
4) One underlying thing I think is a point in our favor is that their strong start in conference play has been in part due to locking down the opposing perimeter. Teams have shot miserably from 3 against them recently, which is likely a reflection of their defense, but also likely has a heavy luck component and is due for some regression. Outside of Hawkins, we really only take open 3s and both our offense and personnel generates them (and defenses have been picking their poison and it has been open 3s lately). They're not going to shut us down completely by feeding us open 3s, so both teams should score, thus the over.
