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Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

South Dakota +122 over Northern KY 

10:00 PM EST. Northern Kentucky is laying points tonight on the road, a sentence that should embarrass whoever wrote it. The Norse have to fly halfway across the continent to play in a little bandbox on the prairie against a South Dakota program that treats its home floor like a territorial dispute: last season the Coyotes went 12-5 in this building and 3-10 everywhere else, and it wasn't the travel, it was the place. At home they scored 84.8 points a game, nearly 11 more than they managed on the road. Some teams are road teams. South Dakota is a stay-home-and-fight team, and tonight the fight is in their barn, in front of their people, with a plus price hanging on the home team like the market forgot to check the map.

The Coyotes already look like themselves, too. They opened Monday by hanging 95 on Mount Marty, shot 52.8 percent, grabbed 40 rebounds, racked up nine steals and didn't need a single hero to do it. Before anyone gets carried away, Mount Marty is an NAIA program, not a Division I opponent, so we're certainly not going to pretend the Coyotes just dismantled Duke. The level of competition matters, and those numbers deserve a considerable discount. What was encouraging, however, was the distribution of the offense.

Jahni Summers led with 17, Vince Buzelis stuffed the whole sheet with 14 points, seven boards and six assists, Josiah Dotzler added 12, and the ball moved until the defence broke. That's a rotation, not a one-man band. Northern Kentucky's opener was the opposite animal: an 84-76 win over UTEP that required Willie Foster to play 35 minutes and go for 24 points and 10 rebounds while Eric Acker logged 38 minutes of his own. Two nights later, on the road, in altitude-of-the-soul Vermillion, those legs get asked to do it all again.

And here's the part the Norse don't advertise, they don't guard anybody. Northern Kentucky scored it fine last season, 83.1 a night, but they handed back 77.5 a game, which ranked 277th in the country — a defence held together with hope and outbound flights. In their opener they shot 4-of-21 from three, coughed it up 13 times and still needed every one of Foster's heroics to get home. South Dakota at home is precisely the wrong opponent for that profile: a team that pushes the pace in its own gym, shares the ball, feeds off a small loud crowd, and turns a November Wednesday into a bar fight. The Norse will score, because the Norse always score. They just won't stop anybody long enough to cash a road favourite ticket.

So take the home team and the plus money. A 12-5 home program, in rhythm, balanced across the rotation, catching a leaky defence at the end of a long trip — that's not an underdog, that's a mislabel. The Coyotes win this one outright in their own building, and +122 is the market paying you extra for its own geography lesson.

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