St. John's Is Going To Mop The Floor With Marquette

Marquette vs. St. John's, 6:30 ET

I continued to roll in College Basketball last night with another win. This has been an very good stretch with losses few and far between. If only I could replicate that success in the NBA right now, I'd be very happy. I suppose that's the difference between betting on teams that actually care and don't mess around with injury reports. Enough complaining, let's be happy that I'm cashing these plays for you as we take on the game between Marquette and St. John's in a Big East showdown.

Marquette entered the season with a reasonably high ranking and has shot up and down the board this year. They are currently ranked 11th in the country and they are 18-4 for the season. Their losses have come against Iowa State, Dayton, Xavier, and UConn. The first two losses were on the road and now the next two were at home. They fell against the Cyclones by 11, at the time they were playing like one of the best teams in the country. The loss to Dayton was justifiable as well because the Flyers, although unranked, looked amazing at the time. Most Big East battles are tough, so the losses to Xavier and UConn were understandable as well. Xavier isn't ranked, and probably is a team that Marquette should've defeated. Even that game wasn't a blowout, they lost by just two points. Saturday they hosted UConn and dropped that game by eight points. Maybe it was UConn's defense, but Marquette shot really poorly overall. They hit just 40% from the field, and they only hit 54.5% of their free throws. The other part of it was the UConn shot extremely well, hitting almost 60% of their shots and 63.2% of threes from beyond the arc. The game has a wild box score - Marquette had 21 more field goal attempts and 17 fewer turnovers than UConn and still lost by eight.

St. John's has been climbing the rankings all year and is slightly behind Marquette in the ranks today with a 12 next to their name. At 19-3 there haven't been too many challenges this season that St. John's hasn't been able to conquer. For their Thanksgiving tournament they lost two of three games, dropping a game to Baylor in double overtime. They ended up falling by just one point. The other game was a loss to Georgia by three points. They ran off six straight wins and then dropped a game at Creighton. Even the Creighton loss was a close one. They dropped that game by one point. That brings a total of three losses by a combined five points. Since that loss against Creighton, St. John's has run off eight straight wins. They did have a close call against Providence in their last game, and it could be a matter of them looking forward a bit, but a win is a win. It also could be that Providence plays them well. Both games were decided by two points with St. John's winning both. They've only had a handful of games that have been within 10 points, everything else has been big wins.

This should be a nice matchup between two of the better teams in the nation, and two Big East clubs. Normally I would like to take the team that is coming off of a loss, but I think Marquette isn't playing great right now, and is likely to struggle against a good defensive club in St. John's. I'm going to take St. John's in this one to cover the short spread, I actually think they win by seven or more points as well. 

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