Posted at 11:00 AM EST. Odds subject to change.

Pinnacle +3½ -112 BET365 +3½ -110 Sportsinteraction +3½ -110  888Sport +3½ -110

Tennessee +3½ -105 over Purdue

American Airlines Cente - Dallas, TX

Men's Basketball Championship - South Region - Elite 8

Streaming: CBS

2:20 PM EST. Something has got to give here, as both Purdue head coach Matt Painter and Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes have ghosts of NCAA Tournaments past haunting them in advance of a trip to the Final Four, where one of them is going to get his team over that hump. For Painter and the Boilermakers, it’s been 44 years, and Painter knows just how hard it is to get this far: "We've worked really hard for it. We've had some disappointing losses in the NCAA Tournament. You want to rectify that. You want to use that as motivation.”

Purdue won its first three games in this tournament by double digits, whacking Grambling State (78-50), Utah State (106-67), and Gonzaga (80-68). The two possessions the Boilermakers are spotting today might look like a pittance compared to those final scores, but we’ll note that Purdue is a similar price today versus Tennessee as it was to the Zags on Friday night.

The struggles of Rick Barnes-led teams in the NCAAs are well-documented, and it’s going to be top of mind for the talking heads today, but those past failures are only going to influence an unsuspecting market that is willfully and ignorantly ignoring the perennial failures of Purdue. Further influencing the market is an early-season game between these two teams in which the Volunteers dropped a 71-67 decision to Purdue, but not only did that game take place in November at the Maui Invitational, which is a glorified vacation to start the year, but it was aggressively officiated with the stripes handing out 51 fouls which led to 78 free throws. There is nothing to be gained from a breakdown of a game, so we’ll just let the suits in the studio tell you why that game matters, even though its only purpose is to influence the market.

Only one of these two teams has been tested in this tournament, and that is Tennessee, which after waffling Saint Peter’s (83-49), played a four-point game with Texas in the Round of 32 and then posted a seven-point win over Creighton in the Sweet Sixteen. The pundits aren’t going to salivate over those margins of victory as they will the Boilermakers, but that's just fine. The line here tells us everything we need to know about this game and the chance Tennessee has to make the Final Four, and we are content to take back the points being offered.

Sherwood

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