BettingPros: Northern Iowa vs. St. John’s Best Bet for 2026 NCAA Tournament First Round

Let’s talk about Northern Iowa and St. John’s.

Only a game a mom could love. This game is going to be ugly.

Here’s a game in which you can bet the Under. These teams play slow. Northern Iowa is 20-14 to the Under during the season. St. John’s is 21-12 to the Under. St. John’s ended the year with nine of their last 10 games going Under.

Northern Iowa, six of the last 10 games went Over, but two of the last five went Over. Three of the last five went Under for Northern Iowa.

BettingPros’ Northern Iowa vs. St. John’s Preview

We’re talking pace of play. We’re talking just grinding the basketball.

St. John’s is going to take the air out of the ball. Same thing when it comes down to Northern Iowa when they have the ball. Northern Iowa is 319th in average possession length. Now, St. John’s actually is pretty fast—they’re 36th in average possession length. However, they make their opponents work. They’re 242nd, and Northern Iowa really makes you work—356th.

This is Ben Jacobson at his most talented. They do not want to get into an up-and-down fight here at all with St. John’s. They want to grind.

Defensively, Northern Iowa is the third-best defensive team behind the three-point line in the country. They are 24th in defensive efficiency. They are 24th in defensive effective field goal percentage.

Equally, St. John’s is 12th in defensive efficiency and they’re 28th in effective field goal percentage defensively. They’re 42nd in three-point defense and 40th in two-point defense.

This is defense, defense, defense.

These are teams that like to walk the ball up the court at times. And these are teams that are not going to look to push tempo. Northern Iowa has no interest in pushing tempo.

BettingPros’ Hard Rock Best Bet

This is one of the games you can look at from an Under perspective, and we’re going to go ahead and bet the Under:

• Northern Iowa and St. John’s Under 132 for the Hard Rock Bet of the day.

So, plays for us here for our college basketball podcast for the week, we are jumping in with:

• St. Louis +2.5 against Georgia
• BYU laying 2.5 against Texas
• Clemson +2.5 against Iowa
• Nova +2 against Utah State
• The Hard Rock Bet of the day is Northern Iowa and St. John’s Under 132 for this week.

Best of luck on your plays.

More bets for the second round of the NCAA tournament will be on the Daily Juice podcast, so go check that out. Then we’ll be back next week as we go ahead and look at the NCAA tournament for Thursday and for Friday.