NCAA Tournament committee reveals its top 16 teams. Where’s Kentucky, and what’s next?
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Game day: No. 4 Kentucky vs. No. 25 Alabama
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Alabama in Rupp Arena.
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A few minutes before Kentucky and Alabama tipped off at Rupp Arena on Saturday, the NCAA Tournament selection committee offered a sneak peek at its 2022 bracket.
The Wildcats were not on the No. 1 seed line.
Going into the weekend, the selection committee has Kentucky (21-5, 10-3 SEC entering Saturday) as a No. 2 seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament.
The four No. 1 seeds were revealed Saturday as Auburn, Gonzaga, Arizona and Kansas, with Baylor, Purdue and Duke joining the Wildcats on the No. 2 seed line.
The committee also revealed Villanova, Texas Tech, Tennessee and Illinois as its No. 3 seeds, and Wisconsin, UCLA, Providence and Texas as the No. 4 seeds.
Obviously, this is only a snapshot of the 2022 bracket to this point in the season. The actual NCAA Tournament bracket will be revealed March 13 on the annual Selection Sunday show on CBS.
With seemingly no truly elite teams in college basketball this season, there could still be plenty of room for movement among those top seed lines as upsets occur over the next three weeks.
Kentucky might have been a No. 1 seed on Saturday’s made-for-TV early bracket reveal had the Wildcats come away with a victory at Tennessee on Tuesday night, but that loss was ultimately a missed opportunity to bolster their résumé even further.
The four teams on the No. 1 seed line all have fewer losses than UK, and they’re all more accomplished in the category of “Quad 1” victories, which have become a major variable that bracketologists look at when trying to predict what the selection committee will do.
Quad 1 games are defined as home matchups against 1-30 teams in the NCAA’s NET rankings, neutral-court matchups against 1-50 teams on that list, or road games at teams ranked 1-75 in the net.
Kentucky has a 5-5 mark in such games so far. Meanwhile, Auburn is 7-2, Kansas is 9-3, Gonzaga is 5-2 and Arizona is 5-2, meaning those teams have performed better in what are perceived to be the toughest games on their schedules. Baylor (9-4) tied Kansas for the most wins against Quad 1 teams going into the weekend.
UK still has one of the nation’s best tournament résumés — highlighted by a win at Kansas — and the Cats still have plenty of opportunities to bolster their case over the next three weeks. The Alabama game Saturday counted as Quad 1 game, and UK will have more such opportunities at home against Louisiana State on Wednesday and in upcoming road games at Arkansas and Florida.
The Cats could also have three Quad 1 games if they advance to the SEC Tournament title game next month, depending on how that bracket shakes out.
The NCAA committee’s reveal Saturday was not an outlier. Bracketology updates from ESPN and CBS Sports on Friday also had Auburn, Arizona, Gonzaga and Kansas as No. 1 seeds, with Kentucky on the No. 2 line. That’s clearly been the consensus in recent days, with the BracketMatrix.com website showing that nearly all of the most recently updated bracket projections have that same seeding scenario.
The TyTy Washington question
It’s no secret that injury troubles — particularly to star guard TyTy Washington — have had a negative impact on some of Kentucky’s biggest games this season.
Washington has played but missed significant time in each of Kentucky’s last three losses to Tennessee, Louisiana State and Auburn (all Quad 1 road games). It’s fair to speculate that Kentucky could have won the games at Auburn and LSU if Washington had not been injured, and he clearly was not 100 percent for the Tennessee game before re-aggravating an injury there.
Starting point guard Sahvir Wheeler also missed key moments in the losses to Auburn and LSU due to injury, and UK played multiple games earlier this season without Davion Mintz and Jacob Toppin, the team’s top two players off the bench.
Washington and Wheeler were both out for Saturday’s game against Alabama.
It’s often said this time of year that the selection committee will take such factors into consideration when determining a team’s NCAA Tournament seed. Is that true?
Yes, to an extent.
David Worlock, the media coordinator for the NCAA Tournament, has worked closely with the selection committee for nearly two decades. He told the Herald-Leader this week that the committee will evaluate teams as they’re constructed going into the NCAA Tournament.
“Therefore, if there is sufficient data to evaluate a team’s performance at full strength, and that team is in fact at full strength during selection week, that’s what gets considered,” Worlock said. “Similarly, if there is sufficient data to evaluate how a team performed without a key player or coach versus how they performed with him/them, that is taken into account.
“Committee members will take everything into consideration when evaluating a team’s performance without a key player or coach, including won-lost record and relevant data while the team was shorthanded.”
Asked Friday how he thought the committee should assess his team due to the injury setbacks, John Calipari said he wasn’t even aware the CBS bracket show would be happening the following day.
“We’ve established who we are,” the UK coach said. “Everybody knows who we are. We gotta get healthy and be that team. We’ve got time to get everybody right.
“However they do this right now, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, we still have a lot of time left. My concern right now is: we gotta get healthy.”
Clearly, Kentucky has played its best basketball — and has arguably played the best basketball of any team in the country — while at 100 percent. The Cats beat Tennessee by 28 points and Kansas by 18 points with its full roster of players. UK was also leading No. 2 Auburn by nine points at the time of Washington’s injury in that game.
The committee will surely take all of that into account if Washington — and the rest of Kentucky’s key players — are healthy on Selection Sunday.
Worlock cautioned that logic only goes so far, however. Kentucky won’t get credit for victories that never happened just because they were missing a key player.
“It is never assumed that a team would have won a game had a coach or player been available,” he said. “So how much it gets prioritized is up to each individual committee member.”
NCAA early bracket reveal
The top 16 seeds for the NCAA Tournament if the event were to start today, as revealed by the selection committee Saturday. Teams are listed by region, with overall seeding in parentheses:
East Region
1. Kansas (4)
2. Kentucky (6)
3. Villanova (9)
4. Wisconsin (13)
South Region
1. Arizona (3)
2. Baylor (5)
3. Tennessee (11)
4. Providence (15)
Midwest Region
1. Auburn (2)
2. Purdue (7)
3. Texas Tech (10)
4. UCLA (14)
West Region
1. Gonzaga (1)
2. Duke (8)
3. Illinois (12)
4. Texas (16)
This story was originally published February 19, 2022 at 12:48 PM.
