Here’s how badly that loss to Georgia affected Kentucky’s NCAA Tournament hopes
Kentucky lost a home game to a team it was supposed to beat earlier this week, setting off another round of panic alarms as the college basketball postseason fast approaches.
Are the Wildcats, who lost 86-78 to Georgia in Rupp Arena on Tuesday — and have another tough test at Auburn on Saturday night — really in danger of missing the NCAA Tournament?
No.
Surely that defeat at the hands of the Bulldogs delivered a massive blow to the seeding status of Mark Pope’s team, right?
It didn’t.
The latest wave of bracketology projections released in the wake of UK’s loss to the Dawgs show the Wildcats to be pretty much in the same spot they were before the ball was tipped Tuesday night.
ESPN posted its new Bracketology board Friday morning, and Joe Lunardi’s projections had Kentucky as a 6 seed — the same spot as before the Georgia loss — playing the winner of a First Four game between Santa Clara/UCLA in the first round, with a possible round of 32 matchup against 3-seeded Texas Tech to follow.
(Texas Tech, a team several recent bracket projections have paired with UK in the second round, lost star player JT Toppin to a torn ACL earlier this week, it should be noted.)
That new ESPN projection highlights that fact that — while there is undoubtedly a larger focus on every single game this time of year — no individual result in February will have a huge impact, good or bad, on a high-major team’s overall seed status.
Kentucky’s résumé is still far from “bubble” territory.
Some alarm bells were sounded when an earlier post from ESPN following the Georgia game moved UK out of “lock” status and put the Cats in the next tier down — titled “should be in” — but even that one noted that Pope’s team has a 94% chance to make the tournament field.
“So they’re comfortably above the danger zone for now,” wrote ESPN’s Neil Paine.
The real concern here for the Cats is that they have, as of Friday morning, the second-toughest remaining schedule in all of college basketball, according to ESPN’s BPI ratings. That slate includes the game at Auburn on Saturday night (8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN), then a trip to SEC cellar-dweller South Carolina, a home game against Vanderbilt, a road trip to Texas A&M and the regular-season finale against SEC favorite Florida on March 7.
It’s possible that Kentucky will be favored in just one of those games — at South Carolina on Tuesday night — though the three against Auburn, Vandy and Texas A&M would be considered only mild upsets (if upsets at all) and the rematch with the Gators will take place in Rupp.
A closer look at the wider picture shows that UK might need to win just one of those remaining five games to be safely in the NCAA Tournament field, and a 2-3 record down the stretch would almost certainly make the Wildcats a lock for March Madness.
The NCAA will reveal its top 16 seeds, as of now, Saturday — UK won’t be among those picks — and the organization hosted a “Mock Selection” exercise for national college basketball media members Friday.
That hourslong process ended with Kentucky being slotted as a 6 seed, playing 11-seeded Tulsa in the first round, with the possibility of facing 3-seeded Kansas — and oft-injured star Darryn Peterson — in the round of 32.
While it’s worth noting that the NCAA “autoseeded” every team after the media members manually selected the 1-5 seeds — meaning UK wasn’t actually picked as a 6 seed by the mock committee — the Cats’ positioning that high on the seed list suggests that’s around the spot the human selectors would have put them had they gone all the way through the bracket.
And the humans responsible for prominent bracketology projections elsewhere have come up with similar results.
Bracket updates from CBS Sports and the Bracketville website that have posted since the loss to Georgia both have UK as a 7 seed, with Bracketville founder Dave Ommen ranking the Wildcats as the top 7 seed in the field. A USA Today update posted Friday morning still has Kentucky as a 6 seed.
The aggregate projections at BracketMatrix.com on Friday morning had Kentucky as the final 6 seed in the field, with those picks somewhat evenly split between 6 and 7 seed projections. The lowest-rated at-large teams right now are being projected as 11 seeds, so Kentucky still has lots of wiggle room between its current position and the bubble.
Kentucky’s ‘wins above bubble’
A relatively new metric for fans to pay attention to in the final weeks of the season will be “Wins Above Bubble” — a measure of success introduced by the NCAA last year.
It was noted during the media mock selection process Thursday that the real selection committee will be placing an emphasis on Wins Above Bubble (WAB) this March.
WAB does not take victory margin into consideration — so that 35-point loss to Gonzaga in December is simply a regular defeat for the Cats, according to this metric — and attempts to measure what a team has accomplished against its schedule vs. what an average bubble team would have accomplished against the same schedule.
The NCAA has a dedicated page that tracks the WAB rankings — there’s even an independent site called WABwatch.com with lots more info — and NCAA officials have said that a team’s actual seed will be more reflective of its WAB rating than its NET rating, a measure that gets much more attention this time of year.
Going into the game at Auburn on Saturday night, Kentucky’s WAB rating was 26th nationally, which would correlate to the second 7 seed in the field. Georgia was at No. 39 and Auburn ranked No. 42, for comparison’s sake.
A total of 37 teams will receive at-large bids into the NCAA Tournament field, and Bracket Matrix currently has Kentucky as the 18th team among those in the at-large pool, a ranking that correlates pretty closely to the Cats’ WAB rating.
So, while Kentucky might not be a “lock” for the NCAA Tournament — an 0-7 ending to the regular season could make things interesting — the Wildcats are far from the bubble conversation. And simply getting one more win could be enough to keep them out of danger.
Obviously, Pope and the Cats have their sights set much higher than that.
“We have five games left. Like, it’s winning time,” he said Thursday. “This is the best part of the season. It’s the best part of the year. This last stretch in conference — and then conference tournament and the NCAA Tournament — it’s what you live your whole life for. It’s when all of the other stuff fades away — the distractions of numbers and playing time and stats and money and all the noise, it goes away — and you’re judged and defined on winning.”
