Men’s college basketball projections, best bets for first week of conference tournaments

We’re into March, which means college basketball is revving up. Before we get to the madness, conference tournaments are starting this week and my model has projections for all the tournaments getting started this week.

The Sun Belt, Horizon League and Patriot League started earlier in the week and the ASUN is underway as of publish time. In all, 16 tournaments will start by Saturday.

My college basketball projection model uses advanced metrics, adjusted for opponents, from more than 10 years of data to create a projection for each team. From there, I simulate each college basketball tournament one million times to get projected odds for each team to secure an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

Before getting to the projections, here are my best bets for this first batch of conference tournaments.

2026 conference tournament best bets

ASUN: FGCU +2200 (risk 0.1 units)
Big Sky: Weber State +900 (risk 0.25 units)
MAAC: Marist +550 (risk 0.25 units)
MVC: Northern Iowa +470 (risk 0.25 units)
OVC: Tennessee Martin +350 (risk 0.5 units)
Southern: East Tennessee State +200 (risk 0.5 units)
Southland: McNeese State +115 (risk 1.0 units)
Summit: Denver +950 (risk 0.1 units)
Summit: South Dakota State +1900 (risk 0.1 units)

For the tables below, PROJECTED WIN% is the chance my model gives for each team to win its conference tournament entering March 4. The odds, listed for context and comparison, are from FanDuel.