The Kentucky coach was on ESPN Sunday night after the NCAA Tournament brackets were revealed, and he was clearly upset that his Wildcats wound up on the No. 4 seed line. Well, maybe “upset” isn’t the right word. How about “annoyed” or “frustrated” or something more along those lines? 

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Regardless, the sound bites were golden, as expected. Calipari thought his team should have been a No. 3 seed, or possibly even a No. 2 seed, and he let it be known. He even did his own little Dick Vitale impression.  

But instead of a spot on the top three seed lines, the Wildcats were a No. 4 seed. 

Here’s the thing: That’s the right spot for Kentucky. 

The committee did a lot of head-scratching things with the bracket, but slotting the Wildcats on the No. 4 seed line wasn’t one of them. 

Calipari was frustrated because Texas A&M, the team his Wildcats beat in the SEC tournament title game Sunday, was a No. 3 seed. That’s understandable. The teams shared the regular-season title (A&M got the top seed in the tournament because it won the lone head-to-head matchup, in overtime) and Kentucky won the rematch.

But Texas A&M probably shouldn’t have been a No. 3, either. 

Let’s look at the Kentucky resume one more time. The Wildcats had two outstanding non-conference wins (Duke and Louisville) and split with Vanderbilt in the SEC season. They helped end at-large dreams for Florida, South Carolina and Alabama. Those are the good things.

The bad is there, too, and that’s what kept the Wildcats off the No. 3 seed line. Kentucky lost to UCLA and Ohio State, two teams that wound up as at-large afterthoughts. They lost three of their first four SEC road games, against teams that weren’t at-large caliber (Auburn, Tennessee and LSU). Five losses to non at-large teams is more than enough reason to keep Kentucky out of the top three seed lines. 

To get one of those spots, a team needs more wins against at-large caliber teams than losses to teams that weren’t deemed at-large quality. Kentucky didn’t have that. 

That said, Calipari said a ton of things in the rest of that interview that made a lot of sense. Give it a listen. Take the “us against the world” conspiracy stuff with a grain of salt, but the talk about misseeding teams hurting the other teams, and the ever-moving targets of what individual committee members deem most important each year? 

Spot on.