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Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: Bracket Bitching Edition

News and commentary from around the Big Blue Internet. Kentucky women's basketball gets 3 seed in Notre Dame region, will play in Memorial on Saturday. Softball heads to Bloomington to play IU, baseball hosts Western Kentucky. More.

By Glenn Logan
Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports

There's a lot of bitching going on about where various teams wound up in the NCAA Tournament. I used to be one of the complainers, but frankly, I have learned that it is a meaningless exercise. The Selection Committee and NCAA undoubtedly loves all this second-guessing, it just reinforces their little fiefdom.

Las Vegas is joining in the complaints. I think that's hilarious. If there is anyone the Committee would most enjoy angering, it is the gambling crowd.

Tweet of the Morning

I'm pretty sure we've seen the last of that. Well, maybe not. Some Hoosier fans don't seem to be all that quick on the uptake.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky basketball

  • The Harrison twins have a good friend, Wesley Iwundu, who plays for the Kansas St. Wildcats. Hat tip: Jon Morse.

  • Calipari asks the SEC to look into the Selection Committee's seeding process.

    "Why (in) the world did this happen?" Calipari said on an SEC coaches' teleconference Monday. "Someone's got to find out."

    Calipari accused the committee of changing the criteria year to year to create a basis for decision.

    I love Coach Cal, and I appreciate him standing up for the team and the conference. I frankly think an 8 is a little low, but I think it is defensible. Of course, the way the Selection Committee does it, anything is defensible.

    As I said earlier, the Selection Committee is not trying to be "objective" in any meaningful sense of the word, despite their claims to the contrary. They are trying to make this look like black magic, because the more they can achieve that perception, the easier it is to justify anything they do. The only genuine outrage was leaving SMU out of the tournament. That was an outrage, and Larry Brown should be pissed.

  • Seed aside, Kentucky basketball is feeling it. Are they? Feeling it, I mean? I'm not quite sure, but I want to be convinced.

    Kentucky is playing better, but did what we saw in Atlanta mean they are now a threat to win it all? Possibly, but if so, it is one of the latest epiphanies we have ever seen in college basketball. Doesn't mean it won't happen, and perhaps it's due. We'll see.

  • More Calipari on the NCAA seeding:

    "But as a league, we got to figure out – Tennessee played as well as any team in the country down the stretch. So you're taking how teams are playing at the end or how we were playing at the end? 'Not in your case.' Well, what did you take in our case? And you really got to go down and find out what it was. 'Well, you didn't beat enough people.' Did everybody else? Compared to who? And so that's the kind of stuff that our league – not me, not the ADs – our league needs to find out what in the room, who in that room, what were we basing this on?

    Kenpom's analysis has Louisville as a one seed, Kentucky as a five, Duke as a two, and the top overall seed as Arizona. That doesn't account at all for autobids. The BPI has Kentucky as a three seed, Louisville as a one and Duke as a two. Do you think those make more sense? I don't.

    There are a lot of things that either need to be taken into account or not — injuries, the relative weights of conference vs. non-conference, how the team is playing later in the year, strength of schedule, how many ranked teams you beat — all of that is valid fodder for examination. Which part gets the most weight? They don't want anyone to know, trust me.

    Alok Pattani at ESPN has more on the BPI vs. Selection Committee.

  • Kentucky faces a rough path to the NCAA Tournament title. I don't think it's all that bad, myself. Calipari, of course, is milking the "us against the big, bad NCAA and the rest of the world" thing for all it's worth, and who can blame him? If you can't hate the NCAA, well, who can you hate?

  • Calipari "tweaking" again.

  • UK commit Charles Matthews has the Wildcats winning it all.

Other Kentucky sports
College football
College basketball

  • This is actually pretty cool:

  • Stats guru Nate Silver likes the Cardinals to win the NCAA Tournament. I think they are fairly unlikely to get there, a fortuitous combination of a truly easy schedule with just enough difficulty. Also, to their credit, WFPL puts the arena into the proper context, and points out that Louisville's "value" is largely due to the deal they have with the KFC Yum! Center, and that the deal is now genuinely controversial.

  • How to use stats to win your bracket contest. Consider the source carefully, but the advice doesn't look too bad.

  • Dana O'Neil says the Selection Committee messed up again, as always, but that it really doesn't matter. In the end, I think, she's right. If this were about true fairness, we'd do away with the conference autobids. That's another complication that really makes no objective sense.

  • Wichita St. is not getting a lot of love. No, I guess that's the price of being a mid-major with a #1 seed. It offends the basketball gods.

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