What is Kentucky’s ceiling for an NCAA Tournament seed? A top bracketologist weighs in.
The past two weeks have brought a remarkable change in perception for Kentucky basketball.
Before the Wildcats embarked on this four-game winning streak, many bracketology websites had UK out of the NCAA Tournament altogether. Bracketville was one of the outliers at that time, projecting the Cats as one of the last four teams in the 68-team field despite back-to-back losses to Arkansas and Georgia, thanks largely to defeats suffered by other bubble teams.
Kentucky is on the bubble no more.
As wins over Mississippi State, Tennessee, Florida and Auburn — that final victory coming by 32 points Saturday — stacked up, UK’s national stature has soared.
On Monday morning, Bracketville had the Wildcats as a 6 seed. On Tuesday morning, ESPN updated its board to make Kentucky a 6 seed, as well. Other prominent NCAA Tournament projection sites have the Cats as a 7 or 8 seed. That’s a far cry from the expectations of a 1 seed in the preseason, but it’s also a huge difference from missing March Madness completely, which seemed possible — if not probable — not that long ago.
With the final week of the regular season now here, just how much further can Kentucky climb?
There’s still room for improvement.
Dave Ommen has run the Bracketville site for the past 15 seasons and is often rated among the most-accurate predictors of the NCAA field. Ommen has Kentucky as the No. 22 team on his seed list to start this week, and he sees a window for the Cats to jump up another seed line — perhaps two — before Selection Sunday on March 12.
UK hosts Vanderbilt (16-13, 9-7 SEC) on Wednesday night before ending the regular season at Arkansas (19-10, 8-8 SEC and No. 14 in the NET ratings) on Saturday. The Cats are likely to be underdogs in Fayetteville — Arkansas won the first matchup 88-73 in Rupp — but a dose of revenge against the Razorbacks would make for another marquee victory on Kentucky’s résumé.
“If Kentucky goes 1-1 this week, I think they’re very likely to be somewhere along that 6 line,” Ommen told the Herald-Leader. “If they sweep — and they go and beat Arkansas on the road — I do think there’s the possibility for that 5 seed to come into play for them.”
Ommen referred to the Vandy matchup as a “hold” game. As in, it won’t do much to move the needle either way. With 7-footer Liam Robbins back from injury, the Commodores have won six of their last seven games. A loss Wednesday wouldn’t be a résumé-killer for the Cats, but a victory is expected, so that result wouldn’t raise many eyebrows either.
Similarly, a loss in Fayetteville shouldn’t hurt the Cats too badly. A win, however, would be big. Predicting how big is difficult, even at this late stage in the season.
“The caveat, number one, is that no team ever plays in a vacuum,” Ommen said. “So every team is a little bit dependent on what else happens around them. And, let’s be honest, a little bit of that has helped Kentucky climb as quickly as they have. Other teams have fallen off a little bit.”
To Ommen’s point, UK’s relatively meteoric rise over the past two weeks has been aided by slip-ups from other programs around the country. He referenced the two teams directly behind the Cats on the Bracketville seed list — Creighton and Northwestern — as examples. Creighton has lost three of its last four. Northwestern has dropped two in a row. Their losses have been UK’s gain.
The Cats have now reached a point in the mock bracket where such rapid movement won’t be as easy.
“The higher you climb, the harder it gets,” Ommen said. “Right now, climbing from a 9 to a 7 or a 9 to a 6 with a little winning streak is not nearly as difficult as going from a 6 to a 4. Because the qualities of the résumés in front of you get exponentially better.”
In other words, the teams currently ahead of the Cats on Ommen’s board are, for the most part, more entrenched in their standing, thanks to better overall résumés based on more consistent results throughout the season. The four 5 seeds in Ommen’s bracket: Texas Christian, Miami, Saint Mary’s and San Diego State (with projected 6 seed Iowa State also ranked ahead of Kentucky). The 4 seeds: Gonzaga, UConn, Xavier and Virginia.
Looking at that projected bracket, a 5 seed does seem to be Kentucky’s realistic ceiling at this point. Unless two things happen. One, the Cats win out. Two, the NCAA selection committee tweaks its stance on conference tournaments.
“Maybe this committee will be different, but the past few years the committee has not placed a lot of emphasis on what happens in conference tournaments,” Ommen said. “Outside of automatic qualifiers and maybe some bubble teams. … I don’t know if it’s because they kind of figure that by the time you get there, your résumé is fairly complete, and so it’s, ‘We’re not going to overreact.’ Which makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to overreact to one game in a neutral-site tournament after you’ve played 30-32 games.”
From Ommen’s experience — as well as his discussions with others in the bracketology community — the appearance is that the selection committee might use league tournament results in a debate over two conference rivals with very similar résumés or to sort bubble teams at the bottom of the at-large pool. For example, if two teams go into their respective league tournaments basically tied, then one loses its first game and the other wins a couple, that could be a deciding factor.
Those scenarios no longer apply to this Kentucky team. But …
“I say that, and if they were to beat Tennessee a third time or Alabama …” that could be different, Ommen acknowledged.
Going into this week’s games, the most likely scenario has Alabama — the nation’s No. 2-ranked team — as the 1 seed and Kentucky as the 3 seed in the SEC Tournament. If that happens, it would mean UK couldn’t face Bama until the title game, which wouldn’t end until two-plus hours before the Selection Sunday show begins.
If Kentucky wins both this week, wins its first two in the SEC tourney, and then beats Bama in the title game, would that be enough to move the Wildcats up to a 4 seed?
“It’s certainly possible,” Ommen said. “Kentucky could be in a situation where they can be right on the cutline of a 4-5, and the committee could make a decision that, ‘If they win this game at 1 o’clock …’ Or they might predetermine, ‘No, this game isn’t going to change the outcome one way or the other.’ I mean, they’re not going to tell people that. But there have just been too many times we’ve seen it and then a team basically was where we thought they were going to be, and their two big wins in the conference tournament didn’t really matter.”
Wednesday
Vanderbilt at No. 23 Kentucky
When: 7 p.m.
TV: SEC Network
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Vanderbilt 16-13 (9-7 SEC); Kentucky 20-9 (11-5)
Series: Kentucky leads 155-47
Last meeting: Kentucky won 69-53 on Jan. 24, 2023, in Nashville
This story was originally published February 28, 2023 at 6:30 AM.
