NCAA Tournament selection committee reveals top 16 teams. Here’s who made the list.
Selection Sunday is still a month away, but the committee in charge of seeding the 2021 NCAA Tournament announced its top 16 college basketball teams Saturday.
Kentucky, of course, was not on that list.
The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee — chaired this season by UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart — unveiled its top 16 seeds in a special broadcast Saturday before the Kentucky-Auburn game.
Gonzaga and Baylor — two undefeated teams ranked No. 1 and 2 in the national polls — were joined by Michigan and Ohio State as the No. 1 seeds. Illinois, Villanova, Alabama and Houston were the No. 2 seeds, followed by Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Oklahoma as the No. 3 seeds and Iowa, Texas Tech, Texas and Missouri on the No. 4 seed line.
The committee currently has Gonzaga as the No. 1 overall team in the NCAA Tournament, which will be held entirely in the Indianapolis area this season and will feature 68 teams. The Final Four is set for April 3, with the national championship game April 5.
Obviously, the bracket reveal Saturday is just a snapshot of this year’s NCAA Tournament field at this moment in the season. The NCAA selection committee meets throughout the season to chart teams’ progress to that point and go over bracketing principles, and the actual 68-team field will not be announced until the Selection Show, scheduled for Sunday, March 14 starting at 6 p.m. on CBS.
CBS Sports bracketologist Jerry Palm joined Saturday’s broadcast to show his complete 68-team bracket, using the committee’s top 16 teams as a starting point.
Palm’s bracket included two teams from inside the state — Louisville and Western Kentucky — in the field. He projected Louisville as a No. 7 seed and WKU as a No. 11 seed, both in the region headlined by Baylor.
Western Kentucky (14-4, 7-2 Conference USA) led its league division heading into the weekend and has not played in an NCAA Tournament since 2013.
Three additional Southeastern Conference teams were included in Palm’s bracket, with Florida (a No. 6 seed), Arkansas (a No. 9 seed) and Louisiana State (a No. 11 seed in one of the at-large “play-in” games) joining the committee’s selections of Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri.
Kentucky has missed the NCAA Tournament just once since Coach John Calipari arrived in Lexington in 2009, but the Wildcats are in serious danger of being left out of this year’s field.
UK is 6-13 overall and 5-7 in the Southeastern Conference after Saturday’s win over Auburn. The Cats had lost seven of their last eight entering the game, and an at-large berth for the NCAA Tournament appears impossible at this point.
That would mean Kentucky would need to win the SEC Tournament to get into the NCAA field.
The NCAA announced Friday that individual conferences would have the option this season of giving their automatic tournament bid to the league’s regular-season champion — as opposed to the league’s tournament champion, the practice in years past — as a way to eliminate conference tournaments amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
There is no indication that the power conferences will take that route.
The SEC Tournament — scheduled for March 10-14 in Nashville — is still expected to go on as planned, with the tournament champion receiving the league’s automatic bid.
The tournament will be held over five days, and a winning streak to end the regular season could be a great help to UK as it heads into that event. If the Cats can finish in the top four of the SEC standings, they would get a bye directly into the quarterfinals, meaning they would need only three wins to take the SEC Tournament crown and claim an NCAA bid.
If UK finished anywhere between fifth and 12th in the regular season, it would begin SEC Tournament play March 11 and need four victories to win the tournament. The 12th and 13th teams in the standings will play each other March 10. (Auburn is ineligible for this year’s postseason due to rules violations, leaving the SEC Tournament with 13 teams).
Kentucky went into the weekend with the No. 10 seed, according to the current SEC standings, though the Cats were just three games out of the No. 2 spot.
There was no NCAA Tournament last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to that, UK has not missed the tournament since 2013, and the Cats have missed the NCAA Tournament just twice since 1991.
This story was originally published February 13, 2021 at 12:50 PM.
