After two wins to end the regular season, at home on Senior Night versus LSU and on the road at #15 Missouri, Kentucky wraps up the first year of the Mark Pope era at 21-10 and 10-8 in the SEC heading into the post season.
Kentucky will embark on another round of the SEC Tournament, looking to fight their way through likely the hardest one ever, owning 8 top-25 rankings nationally for the 16 teams participating. With Auburn, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida owning the double-byes, Kentucky has been targeting a bye themselves, expecting to play on Thursday at some time for a while now. For the last week or so it looked like the Wildcats would be playing game one of the Second Round, being tabbed as an 8-seed coming at 1:00 PM ET on Thursday. That’s no longer the case after the way the final Saturday of the regular season finished, with Kentucky defeating Missouri and Florida defeating Ole Miss, Kentucky is now bumped up to a 6-seed and won’t be playing until around 9:30 PM ET on Thursday evening.
Here’s how the bracket shapes up as of now.
At 10-8 in conference play, with wins over Tennessee (twice), Florida, Missouri, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, Oklahoma, LSU, and South Carolina, Kentucky will be the 6th overall seed.
Seed 1: Auburn
Seed 2: Florida
Seed 3: Alabama
Seed 4: Tennessee
Seed 5: Texas A&M
Seed 6: Kentucky
Seed 7: Missouri
Seed 8: Ole Miss
Seed 9: Arkansas
Seed 10: Mississippi State
Seed 11: Georgia
Seed 12: Vanderbilt
Seed 13: Texas
Seed 14: Oklahoma
Seed 15: LSU
Seed 16: South Carolina
Awaiting for the First Round games to play out, Kentucky will play the winner of 11-seed Georgia and 14-seed Oklahoma, who play in the final game on Wednesday night. Kentucky lost to Georgia in Athens, 82-69, back on January 7th. Kentucky notably took out Oklahoma in Norman with a game-winner from former Sooner, Otega Oweh, who went for a career-high 28 points on that February 26th Wednesday night, exiting the premises with a 83-82 win.
The way these tournaments go, fortunately and unfortunately, the ‘Cats won’t know their opponent until right around 20 hours from their matchup start time. The result of Georgia-Oklahoma will come out in the final hours of Wednesday, forcing the Cats to find out then go right to sleep, approaching their morning-of preparation for the opponent.
Kentucky will have a drought of losses over their shoulders in this event, losing their first game of the event in 3 of the last 4 appearances, an event they used to own for many years. Under John Calipari, they made it to the Conference Championship Game winning it 6 times from 2010-2018. Since then, they’ve won their conference tournament opener just twice (in 5 openers), resulting in no further than a second round loss ā or a first round loss ā in every season since that 2018 title. Their last SEC Tournament win comes all the way back on March 11, 2022, with a six point win over Vanderbilt (77-71). They would lose the very next day to Tennessee, 69-62.
Over the last few years it felt like the SEC Tournament meant less and less to the (former) coaching staff, but to the fans it never lost its touch. As always, they have shown up year after year to root on their Wildcats, some making it their only attended game(s) of the season. As someone who spends money to take on the trip as well, I know just how much it can cost, and I gratefully donāt even have to buy a ticket due to my media pass. So after experiencing the price hotels, traveling costs, food, merchandise, Nashville experiences, I could only imagine just how worse that price gets when buying tickets to the sessions. Then when you throw on top of that the pre-game excitement and days of visioning what you want to play out, to find yourself sitting there after a loss with a weekend of an open schedule in Nashville that you previously expected to be spent watching Kentucky play, stinks. Watching other programs excel in a city you have the most fans in, and often the most talented players, that just puts a gut-wrenching and underperforming feeling in your stomach, to say the least.
Thankfully, with this coaching staff I do feel like itās understood just how important this event is for its fanbase and I feel like we have a solid chance to not be a one-and-done as a program in this event this round, creating a feeling I havenāt felt in many years it seems.
Mark Pope joins the fanbaseās yearly expectations of wanting to win in Nashville, and according to him, thatās what theyāre going down there to do.
Without Jaxson Robinson and Kerr Kriisa, Kentucky will have its ānewā roster with no hiccups or unknown pending changes on who will be suiting up for them in their games. The consistency of that will help the staff better plan for whatās to come.
Iāll be headed down on Wednesday myself, so to keep up with all the content posted from inside Bridgestone Arena, shoot me a follow on my personal Twitter!
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