Oh, the irony.
A year after losing to eventual NCAA champion Kentucky in the Final Four, Louisville will open the NCAA Tournament at Rupp Arena.
Rick Pitino and the Cardinals are the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament, and will face N.C. A&T or Liberty on Kentucky’s home floor at 6:50 p.m. Thursday.
After failing to make the Big Dance, Kentucky is the No. 1 seed in the NIT and must travel to play at No. 8 Robert Morris tonight for a first-round game.
After winning their second straight Big East Tournament title Saturday night with a 78-61 beatdown of Syracuse, the Cardinals are considered by many the favorites to cut down the nets in Atlanta.
According to computer simulations by Nate Silver of the New York Times, Louisville has a 53 percent chance to get back to a second straight Final Four, and a 23 percent chance of winning the Big Dance. (Kentucky had 27 percent chance to win last year.)
Indiana is second at 20 percent this year, followed by Florida at 13 percent.
Among those filling out brackets on ESPN.com, 21 percent picked Louisville to win.
As I covered in this column, Pitino purposely left the nets up at the Garden on Saturday because he wanted his team to focus on the nets in Atlanta.
(As we learned in the ESPN 30 for 30 film “Survive and Advance,” the late Jim Valvano had his players at N.C. State practice cutting down the nets in preparation for winning a national championship.)
“We want to cut down some other nets,” Louisville junior guard Russ Smith of Brooklyn told SNY.tv. “That’s the goal. It’s no disrespect to the Big East Tournament, but we have a goal and we want to reach it, so for us to keep the eye on the prize that’s kind of what we felt like we needed to do.”
Assigned to the Midwest Region, Louisville faces arguably the toughest bracket in the tournament. The Midwest also features a Coach K-led Duke team at No. 2 and a Tom Izzo-guided Michigan State team at No. 3, to say nothing of potential spoilers Creighton, St. Louis and Memphis.
Still, as Silver pointed out, the Cardinals open play just 70 miles from campus in Lexington. The Regional semis and final are in Indianapolis, just 100 miles from Louisville, and the Final Four is in Atlanta, about 300 miles from Louisville.
Louisville has all the ingredients of a championship team: an experienced point guard in Peyton Siva; a natural scorer in Smith; a defensive-oriented big man in Gorgui Dieng; a deep bench that features Montrezl Harrell, Kevin Ware and Luke Hancock and outscored the Louisville starters, 41-37, against Syracuse; and an all-time coach in Pitino.
Combine all that with the confidence the Cardinals gained by winning in New York and you have a team poised for big things.
“We feel pretty good and that’s key,” Smith said. “Everybody’s confidence is high and that’s all that matters. When we’re playing like this, it’s pretty good.”
Kentucky and Big Blue Nation, meantime, had to settle for the NIT a year after cutting down the nets in New Orleans.
“I’m really disappointed we didn’t make the NCAA Tournament, but we are going to use this time to make us better,” Calipari said. “We had our chances, but I’m not going to stop. It’s a great lesson for the future of our program and a humbling experience for me as a coach.”
Still, there is certainly more than a little bit of irony in the fact that Kentucky got shipped to Calipari’s hometown because Rupp is hosting Louisville and the NCAAs.
“We did not place a bid to host the first round of the NIT due to limited staff availability to properly host a game at Memorial Coliseum,” said UK Executive Associate AD DeWayne Peevy. “Because the University of Kentucky is hosting the NCAA second- and third-round games at Rupp Arena on March 21 and 23, the facility was not available for a first-round NIT game. We placed a bid to host both the second round and quarterfinal games at Rupp Arena if we advance.”
Kentucky would face the Providence-Charlotte winner in the second round. The semis and finals of the NIT are at Madison Square Garden April 2 and 4.
St. John’s, which opens at St. Joe’s tonight, would love to get to an NIT Final Four and host it on their home floor.
As for Kentucky, they can look ahead to another potential NCAA Final Four run next year, when their team will be loaded with another crop of talent.
The Wildcats already have five McDonald and Jordan Brand All-Americans signed, sealed and delivered in Aaron and Andrew Harrison, Dakari Johnson, Marcus Lee and James Young.
On Wednesday, they will learn whether Julius Randle selects Kentucky or Kansas, and one of these days we will all find out — probably by Twitter — where Andrew Wiggins is headed.
“To the Big Blue Nation, you did your part all season long,” Calipari said. “You showed up in droves and helped us pull through key games. We didn’t do our part. Even now, I’m going to coach these guys, try to make them better and give everything I can to make sure we control our destiny in the future.”
For now, the irony is heavy.
As Kentucky heads to an NIT game in Pittsburgh, Louisville opens as the No. 1 overall seed at Rupp.
