Half of college basketball fans think Michigan State will win the Big Ten Tournament

The 2025 Big Ten Men’s Basketball Tournament kicks off today when the Minnesota Golden Gophers take on the Northwestern Wildcats. That game will tip at 3:30 p.m. ET on everybody’s favorite streaming service, Peacock. Roughly 25 minutes after the conclusion of that game, the Ohio State Buckeyes will take on the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Not only will Jake Diebler’s crew be looking to bounce the league’s most loveable head coach Fran McCaffery from the conference tournament for the third year in a row, but the Bucks need to get at least one win — but most likely two or even three wins — to hear their name called on Selection Sunday.

One team that doesn’t have to worry about whether or not they will be going dancing this March, regardless of how they do in Indianapolis, is the Michigan State Spartans. Tom Izzo’s squad wrapped up the regular season with a full three-game lead over the second-place Maryland Terrapins (that balloons to eight games over the lowly Buckeyes).

Michigan State is the No. 6 team in the country and enters the B1G Tournament as the prohibitive favorites to cut down the nets. The FanDuel Sportsbook gives the Fighting Izzos +250 odds, substantially ahead of second-place Maryland’s +370.

This means that if you put $100 down on the Spartans to win the tournament title and they do take it home, you will profit $250; for the Terps, you would get your $100 bet back, plus $370.

I don’t know about you, but at +250, no matter how confident you are in Sparty winning the tournament, the risk-reward just doesn’t feel balanced there. From a pure numbers perspective, MSU has a 1 in 15 chance to win the tournament. Obviously not all teams are created equal, so their odds are much better than that. But, there are 14 other teams all working toward the same prize. With that many other contenders in the race, it makes a $250 payday seem a little to thin to get me excited.

Now, if you are a real degenerate who never takes off their scarlet-and-gray-colored glasses, the Buckeyes are clocking in at +5000. While I wouldn’t put $100 on a line like that, since it has virtually no chance of coming home, it is a much more interesting bet at $10.

So, given all of that information, it should be no surprise that the respondents to this week’s SB Nation Reacts survey picked Sparty to win the B1G Tournament by an incredibly healthy margin. In fact, those ball-knowers picked MSU to win the tournament as many times as they picked every other one of the 14 remaining B1G squads.

The Michigan State Spartans have been the class of the Big Ten all season long, and it would be something of a surprise if they didn’t claim the conference’s automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament. However, that’s the beauty of sports; on any given day, any team can pull a mindblowing upset. So I’m putting $1,000 on Ohio State +5000! Daddy needs a new down payment on a house!

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