UK SEC Seed Scenarios

I love this time of year in both basketball and football season, when I can really put my inner (?) nerd to work.

The SEC tournament could be shaping up as the Cats only chance to make the NCAA tournament. The primary hope this week would be for UK to win both of its games. Aside from that, the thing UK fans should be pulling for is to not finish fourth in the SEC East standings.

Finishing fourth would be bad on a number of levels. First, the timing. That seed is slotted to play at 1pm on Thursday, March 12 versus the fifth seed in the West (Most likely Alabama or Ole Miss). The winner plays at 1pm Friday. A disaster for us working stiffs. To make matters worse, that 1pm game on Friday will be against a rested LSU, by far the class of the West.

The difference between being East 3 and East 4 is huge. East 3 will play disintegrating Arkansas on Thursday at 9:45, and assuming it wins, will have a relatively cushy second round game against the #2 team in the West (most likely Auburn or Mississippi State) late on Friday. East 3 wouldn't face LSU until the finals.

Of course we know that East #2 gets a bye and has the winner of East #6 (UGA) v. West #3 (Miss. St., Ole Miss, Auburn?) in the Friday quarterfinal. That game is played at a more palatable 3:15.

What are UK's seed scenarios?

1. Finishing first in the SEC East is all but impossible at this point. UK would need to win out, have South Carolina lose out (which would mean losing to Georgia Saturday), AND have UT beat USC on Thursday then fall to Alabama at home on Sunday. Not likely.

2. UK will finish second if it it wins out and USC beats UT on Thursday. USC would be locked into the first seed, and UK would be second by virtue of it's season sweep of UT. Most likely, UK will take the second seed if it wins out and UT loses either of its remaining games. (Though if UT were to beat USC, and the three teams nonetheless all ended up 10-6, UK would slide to third.) Two UK wins coupled with two USC losses would also do the trick.

3. UK can finish no worse than third in the conference with any of the above scenarios or any win of its own combined with any Florida loss. In other words, if we beat Georgia this week and Florida loses to Mississippi State, we will finish ahead of them even if they beat us Saturday. Conversely, as long as we beat Florida, it won't matter what happens during the week (in terms of not finishing fourth).

4. Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is also the worst. Each of the four top teams in the conference has a "take care of business" game this week. Florida goes to Mississippi State, we host Georgia, UT is home against Alabama and South Carolina goes to Georgia. Assuming those four games go the way they should (it should be noted that Florida's is the toughest), the loser of the Florida-UK game will finish fourth.

There are a couple of other permutations, but they are pretty remote.

Here is a link to the Tournament Schedule.

The tiebreak procedures are here.

Current SEC standings with some interesting detail are here at the top right.

For your rooting interests, the bottom line is to cheer against Florida and UT in their out of division games, particularly Florida heading to Mississippi State. Secondly, I think you disregard our outside chance to finish first and hope that USC takes it to UT to give us a better shot at getting to #2. And, as always, GO CATS.