Can someone please explain why Arizona is a Dog in this fight... ?

I am a Zona fan and track them closely. What scares me is their utter inability to score at times. When Hill hits the bench, it can take 2 to 20 minutes for them to figure out how to put the orange in the basket. I'd take a closer look at Hill's matchups, because foul trouble with him seems to affect this offense.

I haven't watched Ohio State a ton, but the games I have seen is they appear to have some consistent production, thanks in part to Craft.

Arizona's other red flags include streaks of mind-blowing turnovers when they can't easily drive to the basket. Sometimes, they just do the dumbest garbage. It's inexplicable at times.

And hey, sometimes not being able to figure it out just means you're right. I literally thought Bookmaker had made a mistake when they had NYK at +2, so I took the moneyline with a 4 unit bet, then I learned that was the actual line everyone else was using. Tried reading all the threads on the forum, and most seemed to be for the Celtics. (Yes, I watched the Heat game.) I just couldn't agree with those posters, and it turned out the Knicks won pretty handily.

My early lean is Arizona, but I need to research Ohio State more. I love the home court advantage for Arizona, the Arizona alums have already organized garbage too for the LA folks.

One last thing:

To the posters who say, "They played two easy teams in the first round" don't realize that that statement doesn't mean garbage. So what if the Miami Heat play two garbage teams in the first two rounds? Does that mean they lose to the Knicks? darn no.

That argument also ignores its own contradictory nature - Ohio State played two subpar teams as well. Iona? Iowa State was pretty good, but far from the best team in the tournament.

For all we know, these posters are people who thought the Pac-12 was overrated.

Zona had two easy wins - facing a team like osu after 2 easy will take time some time to adjust.  Going from Harvard to osu - spells early trouble.

Hard to trust zona because they are so inconsistent - I think osu wins a close game.

Great points.

Minor correction that doesn't hurt your argument: Arizona lost to UCLA three times, haha. They just had Arizona psyched out and seemed to hit shots from everywhere.

That USC loss wasn't so bad, when you look at how much better USC was playing during that stretch. They were just so elated to no longer play under Kevin O'Neill, who I used to be a fan of - but he appears to be a horrible, horrible coach whose teams score way better after he leaves.

OSU did have more quality wins, MSU and IND are obviously tough. I'll admit, Arizona's victories against FL and MIA and SDSU aren't quite the same caliber.

The teams that did beat Arizona handily, seemed to know them well. That seems to be the one honest fact I can derive from their results. Ohio State doesn't know them well, so I would think that a teaser w/ Arizona is a good bet.