You Can Only Fully Appreciate Big Cat's Legacy 15-0 March By Diving Into The Stats On Saturday's Comeback Over
"15-0 in March".
Take notes, Big Cat's kids. That's your dad's epitaph.
Unless he keeps winning. But for now, like a fine wine, this all deserves to breathe for a moment of reflection to talk about just how absurd 15-0 is. Now I've been on the sideline for this and I think it's too late to tail now. You never want to be the guy that jumped into the blackjack table mid shoe after the players sitting were cleaning house. But for those who did, congrats. You're a part of a career run that never happens twice to the same person. Enjoy it.
32,768:1. Those are your odds of winning 15-bets in a row assuming a 50/50 chance of winning each.
Here are some things more likely to happen than this:
Dying in a flood (lifetime): 1 in 30,000 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
And we're just a couple games away from this being more likely to happen:
Dying from an asteroid impact (lifetime): 1 in 74,817 (NASA)
Saturday's Kentucky/Missouri will go down in the overs club Hall of Fame. 170.5 is a lofty number for any college basketball game. Of the 5,322 D1 games played so far this season, only 477 games totaled 171 points or more. That's just shy of 9% of all games. But with Kentucky averaging 85.6 points per game this season (3rd in the nation) and Missouri not far behind with 84.6 (6th in nation), that adds up to 170.2 which may as well be 170.5. So you get what the market makers were thinking.
The first half was an absolute disaster. Kentucky's 38-29 lead put this game on a 76-58 pace. Deader than dead. To put some perspective on this, 104-points were needed in the second half to clinch the over. Before Saturday, only 64 games this season resulted in 104 second half points. And only four games did this in the first half (Missouri was one of them). Again - this is out of 5,322 games. This left a 1.2% chance of hitting the over.
Then this happened. As if both team's score lines just got hit with a fresh Sydney Sweeney thirst trap.
30 points in the final two minutes is hard to appreciate unless you see it in graph form compared to all the other games. So let's see it in graph form with a red dashed line at 27 which is how many final two-minute points were required for the Kentucky/Missouri over to hit.
There's a total of 79 games represented to the right of that red dashed line. Again, out of these 5,000 plus games this season. Pretty similar ratio to the 64 games we just looked at to score 104 in the second half. That's because until these final two minutes - the over was still deader than dead. All the magic happened after that. It was a perfect situation actually. Missouri being down 8 or 9 or whatever points was just the right amount to keep trying by taking quick threes (and draining them) before quickly fouling to give Kentucky clockless points and over betters drips of hope.
This is why overs are never dead. Even when you skip all the stages of grief and go straight to acceptance:
Yet here we still are. Breathing. For another day at least. Who's the play today? Will the legacy live on?
We'll find out soon.
