Selection Sunday is just over two weeks away, and the Louisville men’s basketball team has some work to do as they look to secure an at-large berth for the 2021 NCAA tournament. Since our last update, Louisville took a three week pause, got blown out on the road at North Carolina and then bounced back with a win over Notre Dame. Plenty as changed, including the Cards’ resume and rankings.
Resume Update:
Overall Record: 12-5
Conference Record: 7-4
Quadrant-1 Record: 0-4
Quadrant-2 Record: 8-0
Bad Losses: @ Miami (Quad-3)
AP Poll: unranked
Coaches Poll: unranked
KenPom: 44
Sagarin: 31
Torkvik: 56
NCAA NET: 44
Remaining Quadrant-1 Opportunities:
@ Duke (2/27)
@ Virginia Tech (3/3)
Virginia (3/6)
Louisville looks like an NCAA tournament team when at full strength, but they have not put together the wins to be consider a lock for the tournament. There are two losses (@ Wisconsin, @ UNC) that have significantly affected their computer rankings. The committee has relied on the computers heavily in recent years when seeding teams. This season, no one knows for sure how these things will be evaluated.
Louisville is probably a bit better than where the computers have them ranked. That would be fine if they had some solid wins to make up for it, but that is not the case. The good news is that there are three games left on the schedule and each of them are in the first quadrant. Louisville needs to win one of those to be safe, two should lock them down for not only a seed but a bye as well. Keep in mind that these things change on a daily basis. The Cards’ win over Virginia Tech at home on Jan. 6 had been considered a quad-1 win for a couple weeks before the Hokies dropped out of the top-35 of the NET. As of right now, it looks like a major change would have to take place for one of Louisville’s previous wins to jump into quad-1 territory. The bottom line is that you do not want to go into Selection Sunday without a quad-1 win on the resume.
Louisville Bracket Predictions as of 2/24 (Links Included)
ESPN: 10 seed (Last Four Byes)
CBS: 8 seed
FOX: 9 seed
Sports Illustrated: 11 seed (Last Four Byes)
Heat Check CBB: 11 seed (Last Four Byes)
SB Nation: 9 seed
TeamRankings: 7 seed (27th overall)
BracketMatrix Aggregator: 10 seed (37th overall)
