List of Current Sweet 16 Odds to Win The NCAA Tournament Can Be Found Below!

March Madness. That’s why we all watch and love the NCAA Tournament. Because no lead is ever safe and no favorite is every assured anything. It doesn’t matter if you’re favored by a single point or two dozen. Any team can, and quite frequently does beat anyone.

Ask the chalks of this tournament, the #1 Kansas Jayhawks out of the Midwest Bracket. At some sportsbooks, they were as low as +200 to win the entire tourney coming into play on Saturday, and they were sizeable favorites to take out the Missouri Valley champs, the #9 Northern Iowa Panthers.

Nobody told that to G Ali Farokhmanesh, who stood like a warrior at the three point line, stared the mighty Jayhawks in the face, damned the fact that his team had absolutely no business playing with the top team in the land, and let a brown dagger fly through the sky. When that dagger flushed through the twine, Farokhmanesh was immediately placed in lore in tiny Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Forget about the fact that Farokhmanesh’s shot really had no business being taken. It defied all logic. After all, the Panthers were up a point with the ball with less than 30 seconds to play, and any conventionally thinking person would’ve dribbled around and waited to get fouled.

But defying logic is what makes this tournament great. And now, #1 is no more.

The beauty of this tournament this season is that there are 11 conferences represented in the Sweet 16 and only the Big Ten has three representatives. Fans from all across the country will have a relatively local team to latch onto, which could make this a very, very interesting four days of basketball coming up this weekend.

The new favorites of the field are the #1 Kentucky Wildcats (+250 at 5Dimes Sportsbook. The Cats have looked great in two tourney games so far, winning against both #16 East Tennessee State and #9 Wake Forest by 20+ points apiece. Stopping G John Wall, G Eric Bledsoe, F Patrick Patterson, and F DeMarcus Cousins seems like a nearly impossible task, especially for some lowly #12 seed out of the Ivy League… but beating names like Aldrich, Morris, Morris, and Collins didn’t seem likely for a bunch of Missouri Valley guys either.

As for those Valley dwellers, they’re still the second longest shot to win the tournament on the board at +6600 at 5Dimes Sportsbook, and there’s reason to believe that those odds are simply too long. UNI draws #5 Michigan State in the Sweet 16, a team that is going to be playing without G Kalin Lucas for the remainder of the season courtesy of a ruptured Achilles tendon. Without Lucas this year, the Spartans looked like an average team at best, and an extraordinary performance once again by the men clad in purple and gold could lead to yet another upset and a date with either #2 Ohio State or #6 Tennessee in the Elite 8.

Both the #1 Duke Blue Devils (+450 at 5Dimes Sportsbook) and the #1 Syracuse Orange (+475 at 5Dimes Sportsbook) have relatively easy draws to get to the Final Four for top seeds, as the Orange must beat #5 Butler and then either #2 Kansas State or #6 Xavier, while things have opened up particularly nicely for the Dookies, who get #4 Purdue this week and will finish the weekend with either #3 Baylor or #10 St. Mary’s.

Current Sweet 16 Odds @ 5Dimes Sportsbook (as of 3/23/10):
(Get a HUGE 50% Bonus at 5Dimes Sportsbook When Using This Link)

Kentucky +250
Duke +450
Syracuse +475
Ohio State +825
West Virginia +850
Kansas State +950
Baylor +1800
Michigan State +2500
Tennessee +3300
Butler +4000
Xavier +4500
St. Mary’s +5500
Washington +5500
Purdue +6000
Northern Iowa +6600
Cornell +7500