First Four Opener Preview: Alabama State vs. St. Francis (PA)

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00:00the opening game of the Big Dance, the champions of the

00:03SWAC Alabama State three and a half point favorite against the

00:06champions of the NEC St. Francis PA. Vecchio, what's your

00:11approach to the opening game at the first four tonight in

00:14Dayton?

00:15So the approach I'll have tonight will be the approach I

00:17take for a lot of the early games on Thursday and Friday.

00:21First half under some of these teams coming out a little bit of

00:25trepidation. Don't want to be pushing things too much want to

00:28control the variance. So let's go to the first half under under

00:3165 and a half. Again, this is from a team level also from the

00:35environment overall, Alabama State, they're 123rd and pace

00:38St. Francis 227. Neither of these teams hit the three at a

00:41higher rate. We're talking 227 and 149th in the country. And

00:45again, these are not great offensive teams. We look at

00:47their Ken Palm ratings, they're both 270 and below. And looking

00:50at recent results from whether it be their conference tournaments

00:52or what have you, like we're looking at games where it's like

00:54the first team to 6065 ish. That's who wins that game or

00:58regardless of who their opponent might be outside of a one or

01:00random two high scoring game. So I want to take the environment

01:03overall, it's like, hey, they don't want to run up and down

01:05the court, they want to control things as much as possible. And

01:07that means limiting the possessions, playing things

01:09close to the vest. And that's going to lead to first half

01:11unders I wouldn't mind to see was this game 130 and a half

01:14total. If this drops to 125 in game, I wouldn't be shocked if I

01:18jump in on a live in game total and still have a nice way to

01:20find a bit of a middle with a 13 or so point gap.