Best College Basketball Bets Today – Free (Saturday 3/4)

The 2022-23 college basketball season is winding down as we head into Match, and we get exciting matchups in conference play. Below is my favorite bet for Saturday’s slate. 

Duke vs. UNC

(Line: UNC -3, DraftKings Sportsbook)

I’ll be in attendance for this one as we get one of the best rivalries in sports, with Duke heading to the Dean Center to take on North Carolina to culminate ACC play. These teams haven’t lived up to their lofty expectations this season with the Blue Devils having to deal with a slew of injuries along with a very young core and UNC coming back to earth post their magical March run a season ago. We saw a pretty inefficient matchup the first time these two squads met, with neither team posting over 1 point per possession. But we now enter March with both UNC and Duke playing much better basketball of late, with Duke winners of five straight and UNC winners of three straight, shooting over 45% from three over their last two, and I think we see a much more offense-friendly gameflow in this one.

What any UNC game comes down to is the play of Caleb Love and RJ Davis in the backcourt, and they can certainly be inconsistent at times. UNC will put Duke in a ton of ball screens where they’ve struggled all season to defend and if Love and Davis continue their recent form and are on their A-game, UNC should easily find success scoring the ball. The interesting thing about this recent stretch for UNC is that they’ve gotten very little from their best player, big man Armando Bacot, who should be up for this game on senior day, after Blake Lively had one of his better games of the season defending him in the first matchup. Duke on the other hand has struggled to shoot the ball all season (238^th nationally in 3pt FG%) and a ton of their offense comes off the offensive glass (sixth nationally in offensive rebounding rate) where UNC rebounds the ball extremely well (15^th nationally in defensive rebounding rate). It’s definitely hard to trust UNC after the season that they’ve have, but against Duke in the Dean Center with their NCAA tournament hopes on the brink, I think we see a big game out of Bacot and Co. and UNC rolls. I’ll lay the points.

The Pick

UNC -3