I last left off with the MAC yesterday, but there are plenty of other men’s basketball conference tournaments slated for today. The Conference USA Tournament has already begun play in El Paso, Texas.
The tournament includes 12 teams with four opening round games today. The winners of those advance to the quarterfinals against the top four seeds and the title game is on Saturday.
Texas-El Paso is the tournament favorite, followed by Alabama-Birmingham, Memphis and Tulsa. UAB (22-7, 12-4 C-USA) won the regular season title but has never won the conference tournament. Tulsa (18-12, 11-5) is the No. 2 seed and UTEP (23-8, 11-5) is the third seed. Neither have won the conference tournament before.
So you may be wondering who has all those conference championships. That would be Memphis (22-9, 9-7), a perennial powerhouse that showed vulnerability this year. Memphis is the No. 4 seed and has four tournament championships, the most of any current school in C-USA. Below is the schedule for the next two days:
Wednesday, March 9 – First Round
No. 8 East Carolina vs. No. 9 UCF, 11 a.m.
No. 5 Southern Miss vs. No. 12 Tulane, 1:30 p.m.
No. 6 Marshall vs. No. 11 Houston, 5:30 p.m.
No. 7 SMU vs. No. 10 Rice, 8 p.m.
Thursday, March 10 – Quarterfinals
No. 1 UAB vs. ECU/UCF winner, 11 a.m.
No. 4 Memphis vs. Southern Miss/Tulane winner, 1:30 p.m.
No. 3 UTEP vs. Marshall/Houston winner, 5:30 p.m.
No. 2 Tulsa vs. SMU/Rice winner, 8 p.m.
C-USA First Round Match Odds (provided by Titan Bet)
Tulane vs. Southern Miss
Tulane: 67/20
Southern Miss: 1/5
Point Spread: Southern Miss -8
Over/Under: 133.5
Houston vs. Marshall
Houston: 69/20
Marshall: 1/5
Point Spread: Marshall -8.5
Over/Under: 135.5
Rice vs. SMU
Rice: 23/20
SMU: 7/10
Point Spread: SMU -2.5
Over/Under: 123
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