2011 Big 12 Championship Odds

The Phillips 66 Big 12 Conference Men’s Basketball Tournament gets underway this Wednesday, March 9 from the Sprint Center in Kansas City starting at 12:30 p.m. The top four seeds have pretty much already earned a place in the field of 68 for this year’s NCAA Men’s Tournament, but for the rest of the teams they will most likely need to win it all to secure a spot in the Big Dance.

First round action features the bottom eight seeds with No.8 Nebraska taking on No.9 Oklahoma State, No.5 Colorado against No.12 Iowa State, No. 7 Baylor squaring off with No.10 Oklahoma, and No.6 Missouri tangling with vs. No.11 Texas Tech.

Thursday’s quarterfinals pit No.1 Kansas against the 8/9 winner, No.4 Kansas State against the 5/12 winner, No.2 Texas against the 7/10 winners, and No.3 Texas A&M against the 6/11 winner.

The semifinals are on Friday, March 11 and the championship game is scheduled for Saturday, March 12 starting at 5 p.m. (ET).

Sportsbook.com has opened Kansas as the prohibitive odds-on-favorite to win this week at -200. There is little wonder that the Jayhawks are favored to win this tournament as they will most likely be one of the two or three favorites to win the NCAA Tournament as a No.1 seed. They finished the regular season with five straight wins including a 64-51 victory over Texas A&M last Wednesday as a 13 ½-point home favorite and a 70-66 win over Missouri as a four-point road favorite on Saturday. Kansas is 29-2 straight-up overall (15-13-1 against the spread) and 14-2 SU in conference play.

Led by the Morris twins, Marcus and Markieff, the Jayhawks are ranked fifth in the country in scoring with an average of 83 points a game and first in field goal percentage; hitting 51.8 percent of their shots. Marcus leads the team with 17.3 points a game and Markieff is the second leading scorer with 13.5 points and has a team-high 8.3 rebounds a game.

The second favorite to win this week is Kansas State at +250. The Wildcats rolled off six straight victories to close out the regular season including a 75-70 win over Texas as a nine-point road underdog on Feb.28. They ended-up going 22-9 SU for the year (11-14 ATS) and tied for third-place in the Big 12 at 10-6 SU.