Brown: Kentucky basketball playing Illinois in wrong location. But UK keeps eye on road
MILWAUKEE — The NCAA Tournament selection committee got some things wrong, and Kentucky basketball is about to face one of the most egregious mistakes Sunday in its second-round game against Illinois.
While the immediate outrage from broadcasters and those who swear they have a Ph.D. in bracketology was to rail against North Carolina’s admission, they should have shown the same energy to Illinois, as a 6-seed, getting to play in Milwaukee.
This is usually the kind of perk reserved for No. 1 seeds, which is why Duke gets to play 30 minutes from campus in Raleigh, North Carolina.
(The committee also got Louisville wrong, both as an 8-seed and allowing it to play in Lexington. It ended up being a moot point with Creighton’s win over the Cardinals.)
No one, of course, is going to feel sorry for Kentucky.
Not when it comes to men’s basketball.
But a team’s body of work in the regular season is supposed to account for something.
Illinois had a very inconsistent season, complicated by injuries for sure, culminating in a 43-point loss to Duke in Madison Square Garden.
The Cats tied a program record with eight wins against teams ranked in the top 15. One of those wins came against Gonzaga in Seattle in which they rallied from 16 down and won 90-89 in overtime.
That game is why the Cats have a comfort level heading into the game against Illinois.
“We’ve been through it before,” UK center Amari Williams said. “When we played Gonzaga in Seattle, their fans were able to pack that arena at a neutral site, so we’ll be ready for it.”
It’s as if the basketball gods are punishing the Cats for 1984. That was the last time they faced Illinois in the NCAA Tournament, and that Midwest Region final was played at Rupp Arena.
The Illini had the better team, but the Cats earned the Final Four berth after a controversial no-call when UK’s Dicky Beal appeared to get away with a travel in the closing seconds.
It led to an NCAA rule change for the men’s basketball tournament that barred a team from playing on its home court.
Fiserv Forum will be neutral in name only.
UK, as a 3-seed, should have received protection from this. It wasn’t as easy as sliding BYU into Milwaukee and Illinois to Denver, because the Cougars request not to play on Sundays.
In the “scrubbing” process of determining seeds, they could have done something like bumped a 7-seed like Kansas up to a 6 slotted for Milwaukee and sent Illinois as a 7 to Providence, Rhode Island, instead.
It’s absurd that the Illini got sent roughly just a three-hour drive from their Champaign-Urbana campus. Students can make a day trip of coming and going to the game and still be back in time for Monday’s classes.
Considering Chicago has the most Illinois alumni of any city and it’s half that drive from campus, UK will be subjected to the atmosphere Xavier felt in its first-round loss to Illinois.
Kentucky is used to having most neutral-court games take on a Big Blue Hue with the way Cats fans buy up tickets and take over venues like during the SEC Tournament in Nashville or when they played the Champions Classic in Atlanta back in November.
Well, the Orange Krush is about to flip the script on UK.
The expected home-court advantage is likely the reason why Las Vegas oddsmakers have the Illini as 1.5-point favorites in the matchup.
UK guard Otega Oweh said games like these make for “the best victories,” and coach Mark Pope had to stop himself from revealing too much from their locker room after road wins. But he added:
“There is that real joy that you get from being in the gym and the gym getting really, really quiet,” Pope said. “Our guys know that feeling and relish the opportunity to do that. And that will probably be part of what our job is (Sunday).”
A job Kentucky is equipped to handle.
Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com, follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his columns.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky basketball playing Illinois in wrong NCAA Tournament location
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