There’s pride in being awarded a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

There’s also great pressure — pressure the Kansas University men’s basketball team won’t face this year as a No. 2 seed in the West Regional.

“Those No. 1 seeds get put under the microscope more,” KU’s Nick Collison said of top seeds Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Texas. “Everybody wants to know how they are doing. In our regional, everybody’s talking about Arizona,” Collison said of the Wildcats, the top-seeded team in the wild, wild West. “If people aren’t talking about you and it takes some pressure off, that’s a good thing.”

The NCAA Tournament Committee’s snub of KU, which was passed over Sunday in favor of Big 12 Conference compadres Texas and Oklahoma despite the fact Kansas won the league regular-season title, could provide the 25-7 Jayhawks extra motivation.

It doesn’t figure to hurt if No. 2-seeded KU takes an “us-against-the-world” mentality into Thursday’s 8:40 p.m. first-round battle against 15th-seeded Utah State (24-8) at the Ford Center in Oklahoma City.

“We can definitely use that as motivation,” Collison said. “Nobody is really picking us. We’re in the toughest division (with Duke, Illinois, Notre Dame) and not many people think we have a chance coming out of it.

“But to tell you the truth, a lot of that is for (ESPN’s) ‘SportsCenter,’ people talking about seeds. The fact you are in the NCAA Tournament … this time of year you don’t need a lot of extra

motivation.”

KU coach Roy Williams doesn’t foresee using the No. 2 seed as a rallying cry.

“Hopefully we don’t need that,” Williams said. “At the same time, human nature is our team was really surprised. They were confused when we were sitting there watching the selection show.

“But if that’s the only way we can be successful, then we don’t have very much confidence in our team. I think we’re pretty doggone good. We’ve overcome a lot of adversity this year, and if we can use this as a little more adversity, that’s great. If we can’t, then just go play.”

ESPN speculated Monday the fact Kansas beat Iowa State, Kansas State and Nebraska a combined seven times factored in dooming the Jayhawks to a No. 2 seed.

“I don’t think you can say much about the North-South split,” Williams said of the Big 12, “because nobody wanted to play at Colorado and nobody wanted to play at Missouri. Nobody beat Colorado at Colorado and we were the only team to beat Missouri at Missouri. I don’t buy into that mix.”

What’s more, the Jayhawks actually played more NCAA Tournament teams (12) than any team in the country.

Williams said Monday he really wasn’t all that “ticked” Sunday after learning of the NCAA bracket.

“This morning’s paper said ‘Williams ticked off.’ That was about 5 percent of it; confusing was 95 percent,” Williams said. “The guys (media) last night didn’t pick up on it as much as I hoped that I was saying we’ve just got to go play.

“If we go and play well, people are going to forget it and if we go and don’t play well, they (committee) did the right thing.”

He stressed Monday he has nothing against Texas bagging a No. 1.

“I had more thoughts on it 15 minutes after I even spoke (to media),” Williams said. “Again I think people made it out more of being disappointed or ticked off than they did when I talked about being confused.

“I think that my biggest point in being confused is that if they’d had the selection pairings on Monday, I thought we would have been a No. 1 seed because we won the regular season.

“And the fact that Texas got it over us — and again, gosh, I’m not complaining about Texas. Damn, I love their team and Rick’s (Barnes) done a fantastic job. I really love their team, but they lost the first game and we went one game farther and then yet they were the No. 1 seed.

“You know what you can do? You can turn it around and Texas can say, ‘Well, we beat Oklahoma twice.’ And Oklahoma can turn it around and say, ‘Yeah, well we beat Kansas.’ The bottom line is we got to go play.”