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

VCU -2½ -110 over Memphis

3:00 PM EST. November college basketball rewards the team that already knows what it is, and nobody on today's slate knows themselves like VCU. The Rams return most of a 28-8 team that won the Atlantic 10, beat North Carolina in the NCAA Tournament and got picked to win its league again, with a second year head coach running the same system with the same core: Brandon Jennings, Nyk Lewis, Michael Belle, Lazar Djokovic, plus 6-7 Creighton transfer Blake Harper dropped straight into the starting five. Memphis, meanwhile, put ten brand new players on the floor on opening night. Ten. Talented ones, absolutely, and Monday's upset of No. 18 Iowa State was real, but a team in its second game together walking into VCU's pressure is a team still reading the instruction manual while somebody is trying to steal its wallet. That is the whole bet: chemistry and continuity, on the road, against a science project.

The matchup inside the matchup is even better for the Rams, because Memphis is playing this game without its best big man. Serbian centre Nemanja Popovic is stuck in an NCAA withholding period, game two of six today, and the patch job behind him showed its seams against Iowa State: his replacement, Maxim Logue, started and lasted 13 minutes, the Tigers needed small ball centre minutes off the bench, and two Memphis players fouled out. VCU is built to go straight at that wound. Belle and Djokovic are physical, experienced forwards, Harper is a guard with a forward's body, and the Rams attack the rim and the glass in waves for 40 minutes. Every foul Memphis's thin frontcourt picks up is a step toward a layup line in the second half. Add the regression angle: the Tigers beat Iowa State shooting 45 percent from three and living at the free throw line on 33 attempts. Neither of those travels reliably into game two, especially not against a defence whose entire religion is making your guards uncomfortable.

The counters deserve their sentence or two, because they are not nothing. Jayden Reid is no freshman deer in the headlights; he is a veteran senior who just hung 26 on Iowa State, hit the dagger three, and handled a good defense's pressure without blinking, so the havoc script is a plan, not a guarantee. FedExForum for a home opener, with a fanbase that just watched its rebuilt team scalp a ranked opponent, will be loud and hostile, and road favourites in November have a long history of walking into exactly this ambush. If Memphis shoots it like Monday and Reid controls the tempo, the Tigers win this game outright. But betting is about which script needs fewer things to go right. VCU needs its veterans to be themselves and to hunt a frontcourt held together with tape. Memphis needs a second straight shooting night, a second straight whistle in its favour, and a backcourt in its second game together to solve the nastiest pressure in the mid major game. Take the team that has already solved itself.

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