Duke vs Louisville prediction, odds, pick for College Basketball

12/08/2024 08:33 AM

It’s time to continue our College Basketball odds series with a Duke-Louisville prediction and pick. Find out how to watch Duke-Louisville.

The college basketball season is constantly giving us interesting matchups. On Sunday, there are some big-time games in the late-afternoon and early-evening time slots. One is UConn-Texas. An hour after that game begins, this ACC clash unfolds between Duke and Louisville.

Louisville, as you know, made the final of the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament last week, beating Indiana and West Virginia before losing to Oklahoma in the final. First-year head coach Pat Kelsey has instantly restored confidence in UL basketball after several miserable seasons and a period of deterioration and decline under previous coach Kenny Payne. Kelsey is competent, energetic, and thoughtful, and he has made Louisville look like a good team again. However, a monkey wrench has been thrown into Kelsey’s and UL’s plans. Forward Kasean Pryor was knocked out for the rest of the season with a torn ACL. When Louisville lost at home to Ole Miss this past week in the ACC-SEC Challenge, the Cardinals looked all out of sorts with Pryor not on the floor to help them. It became clear how much Pryor meant to this team, stitching things together at both ends of the floor and providing a combination of energy, effort, and production which took the burden off other players in so many ways and on so many levels. It’s a huge challenge in its own right for Kelsey to work around the loss of a key cog, but it’s a far bigger test to do so with Duke and Cooper Flagg coming to town for a conference game not that long after the Pryor injury.

The fear you have if you are a Louisville fan is that it will take this team weeks, not merely days, to arrive at a plan and a method which successfully deal with the Kasean Pryor absence. This might not be something Kelsey can do in a heartbeat. He might need time to see what works and how Louisville can adapt to a personnel change it could not afford to endure. Duke has elite athletes. They are young, which is why the Blue Devils have gotten tripped up a few times by Kentucky and then Kansas, but there’s no question the Blue Devils have high-end talent. Can this young team learn and grow in a road ACC environment this early in the season?

Here are the Duke-Louisville College Basketball Odds, courtesy of FanDuel 

College Basketball Odds: Duke-Louisville Odds

Duke: -9.5 (-106)

Moneyline: -450

Louisville: +9.5 (-114)

Moneyline: +340

Over: 144.5 (-115)

Under: 144.5 (-105)

How to Watch Duke vs Louisville

Time: 6 p.m. ET / 3 p.m. PT

TV: ACC Network

Stream: fuboTV (Free Trial)

Why Duke Will Cover The Spread/Win

The spread is big, but as we noted above, the Kasean Pryor injury was a loss Louisville simply couldn’t afford. That injury is priced into the line here, and given how bad Louisville looked against Ole Miss — a team not nearly as good as Duke — in a home game a few days ago, Duke minus 9.5 points seems like the obvious play to make here.

Why Louisville Will Cover The Spread/Win

The Cards don’t have Kasean Pryor, but they at least saw what happened without him against Ole Miss. That game should give this coaching staff enough information to make various relevant adjustments. That point aside, Louisville did not play with a lot of energy versus Ole Miss, perhaps because it was deflated by the Pryor injury news. With Duke in the building, Louisville’s players should play with a ton of energy. This is going to be an electric atmosphere and a game which will go down to the wire, enabling UL to cover the large Duke spread.

Final Duke-Louisville Prediction & Pick

The Pryor injury was something we noted when we picked Ole Miss last week. We’re going to roll with that and pick Duke here, despite the large road spread.

Final Duke-Louisville Prediction & Pick: Duke -9.5

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