Florida Gators still sportsbooks favorite to win March Madness Tournament

The Florida Gators got the respect a champion deserves. The Gators will aim to become the first team in the 21st century to repeat as NCAA basketball champions and they’ll do it as the top-ranked team in the March Madness tournament.

The 9/2 favorite to win it all, Florida opens its title defense as the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region and will play No. 16 Jackson State on Friday in New Orleans.

Led by their outstanding junior class, the Gators (29-5) will seek to bring another title to Gainesville just months after the school’s football team won the BCS championship over Ohio State.

The Buckeyes-Gators rivalry will be in the spotlight on the hardwood, too. Ohio State (30-3) is the top seed in the South Region. Other No. 1 seeds include North Carolina (28-6) in the East and Kansas (30-4) in the West.

As happens every year, there were shocks and surprises about where teams were seeded and who was left out of the Big Dance altogether when the tournament field was announced on Sunday.

The biggest snub was Syracuse (22-10), which won seven of its final nine games, including an upset of Georgetown on Feb. 26. The Orange were hurt by a weak non-conference schedule and a low RPI rating (51). Also snubbed was Drexel (22-8), which had a RPI rank of 43.

Surprise entrants included Stanford (18-11), Illinois (23-11) and Arkansas (21-13). The ACC got seven teams in the tournament while the Big East and Big Ten each placed six in the NCAA bracket.

Teams that were ranked lower than expected included UNLV (28-6), the seventh seed in the Midwest. The Rebels won the Mountain West tournament and had an RPI rank of 10. Big East runnerup Notre Dame (24-7) is the sixth seed in the West.

The Madness begins Tuesday with the play-in game between Florida A&M and Niagara in Dayton, Ohio. The winner advances to the field of 64, which tips off Thursday with 16 games on CBS. The national championship game is Monday, April 2 in Atlanta.

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NCAA Basketball Prediction: Look for Florida Gators to be strong again and dominate NCAA Basketball this season.

Tags: Florida Gators Basketball, Gators Basketball, Florida Basketball

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Basketball, March Madness, NCAA Basketball, NCAA Final Four, Sports, Sports Betting, Sportsbooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.