Seedings for NCAA men’s Tournament show wide-open field

When the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament committee members hunkered down in Indianapolis over the weekend, they pored over spreadsheets, stared at a bank of televisions, sharpened their pencils and massaged their temples to figure out how to best seed the 68-team tournament field.
They might have saved themselves all that time – and anguish – by picking names out of a hat.
This year’s tournament, which was announced Sunday night, has an on-any-given-Sunday feel, where blue bloods don’t feel so rich, midmajors don’t feel so middling and every team enters with questions – even at the very top.
At Alabama, those begin off the court.
Alabama, the top overall seed, is in an unprecedented situation: trying to win a national championship while a now-ex-player is in jail on murder charges and two current players, including the team’s star, Brandon Miller, are witnesses in the case.
Alabama coach Nate Oats has come under withering criticism, beginning last month when he characterized Miller’s involvement as being in the “wrong spot at the wrong time” and continuing with persistent questions about whether Miller, who police said transported a gun to the scene of the crime, and Jaden Bradley, who was also at the scene, should even be playing. Neither Miller nor Bradley has been charged with a crime.
On the court, Alabama looked the part of a favorite in rolling to the Southeastern Conference tournament championship with an 82-63 victory over Texas A&M on Sunday.
“This one right here, this one’s very special, considering everything that’s gone on this year,” said Alabama senior guard Jahvon Quinerly.
The Crimson Tide won Sunday behind a hugely supportive crowd in Nashville, Tennessee, and will have more of the same Thursday when they play less than an hour’s drive from their campus against the victor of a play-in game between Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Southeast Missouri State. The next weekend, if they advance, they wouldn’t be much farther away from home, at the South regional in Louisville, Kentucky.
As much as the Crimson Tide are showered with affection by their own fans, the murder case involving one of their now former players, Darius Miles, is all but certain to make them the tournament heel for the vast majority of the audience as long as they remain playing.
Oats was asked what his message would be to his team as it enters the tournament.
“Obviously, we never lose sight of the tragedy that’s kind of marked our season,” he said. “It’s always there. But today with the team, we’re going to celebrate this win without losing sight of that. Moving forward, we’re going to keep the team focused on the task at hand, just like we have without ever losing sight of the fact that it’s an unbelievably sad situation. Our guys have done a pretty good job of that.”
If the sight of Alabama cutting down the nets in Houston is discomfiting for NCAA officials, it was hard to make a case for anyone else to be the top overall seed.
Start with Kansas, the reigning national champion seeded No. 1 in the West region, which has an impressive resume but this weekend was without its coach, Bill Self, who sat out the Big 12 Conference tournament after being hospitalized with chest tightness and balance issues. The Jayhawks were blown out Saturday by Texas in the conference title game but were still given a No. 1 seed.
So was Midwest No. 1 seed Houston, which has a sparkling 31-3 record but lost to Memphis in the American Athletic Conference title game Sunday. Houston’s best win was over Virginia, a No. 4 seed, and the Cougars also lost to Alabama earlier this season. And Purdue, seeded first in the East region, looked like the best team in the country for more than three months with 7-foot-4 center Zach Edey but had a run in February that included four losses in six games. The Boilermakers won the Big Ten tournament Sunday but not before nearly collapsing in the final minute against unranked Penn State.
A week ago, UCLA had a strong case for the top overall seed.
But the Bruins, who won the Pac-12 regular-season title by four games, lost to Arizona in the conference tournament final without their two best defenders, forward Adem Bona and guard Jaylen Clark, the latter seemingly unlikely to return this season. The Bruins, who had a 12-game winning streak snapped Saturday night, were becoming a popular pick as favorite before Clark suffered a lower-body injury in the regular-season finale.
After UCLA rallied to beat Colorado in a Pac-12 quarterfinal Thursday, Bruins senior forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. said when asked what they would look like without Clark, “We’re still trying to figure that out. This is our first game without him. He brings so much to our team. He brings intensity, energy. He’s our X factor when it comes to defensive end as well. On offense, he can do so many things.
“But with that being said, we got a lot of guys that can step up.”
UCLA has not provided any updates on Clark’s condition since its conference tournament began. UCLA coach Mick Cronin, asked if there was no incentive to disclose more information about Clark’s status, said he was prohibited from saying more about Clark’s injury because of privacy rules. Kansas announced Sunday that Self had been released from the hospital and hoped to join his team.
Chris Reynolds, the tournament selection committee chair, said last week that the committee evaluates teams that are missing a player or coach, and reaches out to conferences and schools to gather the most up-to-date information because “that would be something that we would need to consider as we seed teams.”
That might have been particularly easy until this summer when the Pac-12 removed UCLA Athletic Director Martin Jarmond from the selection committee after the school announced it planned to jump to the Big Ten in 2024. The Pac-12 replaced Jarmond with Arizona Athletic Director Dave Heeke as its representative.
The committee also had to consider where to place Tennessee, which recently lost point guard Zakai Zeigler to a season-ending knee injury, and Rutgers, which floundered down the stretch after losing forward Mawot Mag to a season-ending knee injury. Tennessee was seeded fourth, and Rutgers was left out of the tournament despite winning at Purdue earlier this season.
Houston played Sunday without one of its best players, Marcus Sasser, who injured his groin Friday. But he is likely to return soon as Houston is trying to become the first hometown team to play in a Final Four since Butler lost the 2010 title game in Indianapolis to Duke.
The Blue Devils’ captain that night, Jon Scheyer, is now their coach, replacing the retired Mike Krzyzewski after last season’s national semifinal loss. Duke, along with another nationally branded program, Gonzaga, is entering the tournament without the usual Final Four-or-bust expectations – Gonzaga is a No. 3 seed and Duke is a No. 5. But they are playing the type of basketball that often makes them fearsome in March. The Zags blew out St. Mary’s to win the West Coast Conference Tournament and the Blue Devils rolled to the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament title.
A sign of just how wide-open the tournament is shaping up to be is North Carolina’s absence. The Tar Heels, who came agonizingly close to winning the national championship last season, returned four starters and began this season ranked No. 1 by the Associated Press. They are the first top-ranked team at the start of the season to miss the tournament since North Carolina State in 1975.
North Carolina was one of the first four teams left out of the field, behind Oklahoma State and Rutgers and ahead of Clemson.
Also absent is Villanova, which last year might have won its third national title since 2016 if not for Justin Moore’s Achilles tendon injury on the brink of the Final Four.
The committee seemed to not put as much stock in the strength of the Big 12 as many analysts and metrics had – placing Houston ahead of Kansas, which prevented the Jayhawks from playing the second weekend in Kansas City, Missouri, and leaving out Oklahoma State. The Big 12 has produced the last two champions, Kansas and Baylor, and nearly a third, with Texas Tech losing in overtime of the 2019 title game.
There are, though, a number of unlikely participants.
Howard, which won the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament, will be making its first appearance since 1992, as a No. 16 seed against Kansas in the West. (If only the Bison had some help from their golf program’s biggest benefactor, Stephen Curry.) Kennesaw State, seeded 14th in the Midwest, is making its first appearance after knocking off Liberty to earn the ASUN Conference’s berth, completing a remarkable turnaround. In the 2019-20 season, the Owls were 1-28 in coach Amir Abdur-Rahim’s first year. Now they are 26-8.
And then there is Fairleigh Dickinson, which did not have a sterling record, a signature victory or even a conference tournament championship, losing in the final seconds to Merrimack in the Northeast Conference final.
The Knights’ season, however, carries on since Merrimack, which is transitioning to the Division I level, is not yet eligible for the NCAA Tournament. Fairleigh Dickinson has a play-in game Wednesday against Texas Southern, another team seeded No. 16, for the right to face Purdue.
This time, though, the Knights must win to advance.