Morehead State Eagles vs Kentucky Wildcats Prediction, Odds, Best Bets - Week 1
No. 14 Kentucky opens at Memorial Coliseum against a Morehead State team that returns exactly one player from last season. Kentucky has the best player in the game in Clara Strack and a roster built to contend in the SEC, but 42.5 points is a mountain in a season opener, and mountains are where underdogs live.
The Matchup
Kentucky opens its season at Memorial Coliseum on Monday evening with in-state visitor Morehead State, and the market expects a rout: Kentucky is favored by 42.5 points, the total is 141.5, and no moneyline is posted for either side. Both teams are 0-0.
Last season Kentucky finished 25-11 and reached the Sweet 16, scoring 74.9 points per game and allowing 60.9. Morehead State finished 18-15, scoring 64.9 and allowing 65.2. Those are last season's numbers, and both rosters look different now. In Morehead State's case, different barely covers it.
Only one Eagle is back. Senior Millie Pearson, who averaged 0.9 points per game last season, is the lone returner from that 18-15 team, and a new head coach, Jackie Alexander, in her first head coaching job, brought in 11 new players. The Eagles were picked eighth in the nine-team Ohio Valley Conference preseason poll.
The most proven new scorer is junior college transfer Breayah Jefferson, who averaged 18 points per game at Monroe University last season and earned junior college All-America honorable mention. Jefferson and Pearson carry no injury designations for Monday. Whatever Morehead State becomes this season, it starts becoming it tonight, against a ranked SEC team on the road.
Kentucky's rebuild is of a different kind. The Wildcats lost five seniors, but the center of everything returns. Senior center Clara Strack averaged 16.9 points, 10.1 rebounds and 2.5 blocks per game last season, set the school single-season blocks record, and made the All-SEC First Team. Around her, guard Asia Boone averaged 10.1 points last season, and forward Me'Arah O'Neal arrived from Florida, where she averaged 13.6 points and 6.4 rebounds.
Strack, Boone and O'Neal carry no injury designations for Monday. Kentucky is bigger, deeper and better at every position. Nobody is arguing otherwise. The argument is about the size of the win.
Key Factors
The first factor is the number itself, and what it demands. To cover a spread this big, Kentucky cannot just dominate. The Wildcats have to dominate for forty minutes, with the starters on the floor deep into a decided game, and keep scoring against a team with nothing to lose. Season openers work against that.
Rotations are unsettled, five seniors worth of chemistry left in the spring, and coaches use a game like this one to play the whole bench, because November minutes for the second unit are an investment in February. Every minute Kentucky's reserves play against Morehead State's starters is a minute the margin stops growing.
The second factor is Strack, and she is the honest counterpoint to this pick. Morehead State has nobody who can guard her. She scored inside against SEC frontcourts all last season, shooting 48.2 percent from the field, and her rim protection anchors a Kentucky defense that blocked 6.6 shots per game as a team.
If Strack plays heavy minutes and Kentucky defends the way it did last season, the Wildcats can be up huge by halftime, and from there the cover becomes a formality. A brand-new roster turning the ball over against that length is the nightmare version of this game for the underdog, and it is a plausible one.
What the underdog has going for it is narrower, but real. Jefferson can score, and one hot shooter changes the arithmetic of a huge spread, because the favorite has to keep answering instead of bleeding the clock.
Morehead State's players are also playing for rotation spots in front of a new coach, which usually means a full forty minutes of effort long after the result is settled, and late covers are built out of exactly that. Kentucky should win this game by a lot. The spread asks for a lot and then another basket on top of it, in the first game of the season, with a bench that needs the work. That is where the points become the side.
Kentucky is better than Morehead State at every position, and Clara Strack is the best player who will step on this floor all week. But this number asks the Wildcats to keep pouring it on deep into a decided season opener, with a bench that needs minutes and a new-look roster still learning each other. Morehead State is overmatched and still the side getting a head start this big. Take the points with Morehead State Eagles +42.5 at -115.
Game Information
| Date | Monday (11/2) |
|---|---|
| Start Time | 5:30 PM CT |
| How to Watch | SECN+ |
| Venue | Memorial Coliseum, Lexington |
| Spread | Kentucky Wildcats -42.5 |
| Total | 141.5 |
| Moneyline | OFF |
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