Kentucky basketball is on the bubble. But Cats still projected as NCAA Tournament team.
A 26-point loss to Alabama over the weekend has Big Blue Nation on red alert, but, for now, the Kentucky Wildcats are projected to make the NCAA Tournament.
Just barely.
The latest wave of basketball bracket projections has been posted, and UK is squarely on the bubble as the regular season hits the halfway point. The Cats are 10-5 overall with a 1-2 record in the Southeastern Conference and an 0-4 mark against teams currently ranked in the Top 25.
Those four losses also represent Kentucky’s only games thus far against “Quad 1” opposition — an important barometer for the NCAA selection committee as it sorts out the strength of possible tournament teams. UK has lost all four of those games by double digits.
The Cats are also just 1-1 in “Quad 2” games, their best victory so far a win over Michigan in London. Yale and Louisiana State are their next-best victories, though both have been shuffled into the “Quad 3” category in recent days.
Kentucky went into its Tuesday night matchup with South Carolina — its last remaining “Quad 4” game — at No. 45 in the NET ratings, the NCAA’s in-house ranking.
UK is 25th in the KenPom ratings, but the Cats keep dropping there as more recent results overtake the lofty preseason projections that surrounded this team. In the more recency-focused Torvik rankings, Kentucky is just 56th nationally.
All in all, it’s not much of a tournament résumé.
Yet Kentucky is still holding on to a tournament spot, according to the major prediction sites.
ESPN’s new Bracketology dropped Tuesday morning, showing Kentucky as a No. 9 seed, with Indiana projected as an 8 seed and paired as the Cats’ first-round matchup. That bracket has UK playing top-seeded Houston in the second round.
The Tuesday update from Bracketville has Kentucky as an 11 seed, playing its first game in Denver against 6-seeded Marquette. That site has UK as the No. 42 overall team on the seed list.
This week’s update from BracketWAG.com, which supplies projections for USA Today, pegs Kentucky as an 11 seed and pits the Cats against 6-seeded Duke in the first round.
All three of those sites have UK as one of the “last four byes” in the 2023 tournament field, meaning any further slippage would put the Cats in one of the “First Four” games played in Dayton before the round of 64 begins, or perhaps out of March Madness altogether.
The Bracket Matrix website, which forms a composite from dozens of NCAA Tournament projections, has the Cats as a No. 10 seed in its latest update following the Alabama game.
Kentucky still has seven games against Quad 1 opposition and five games against Quad 2 foes on the remaining schedule, so there’s time for the Cats to make up ground — or lose more of it — in the race for an NCAA Tournament spot.
UK has not won an NCAA Tournament game since 2019. The 2020 event was canceled due to COVID-19. The Cats did not make the 2021 tournament, and they were ousted by 15-seeded Saint Peter’s in the first round of last year’s tourney.
John Calipari won 29 tournament games over his first 10 seasons as UK’s head coach, failing to get past the first week of March Madness only twice in that span.
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