Woodling: Play well, and seed forgotten

Each March since 1981, when the NCAA first seeded its men’s basketball tournament, people called bracketologists have cranked out predictions of what the field will look like.

Using insight based on history and territorial imperatives, bracket gurus have a pretty good idea of which teams will be selected and where they will be placed.

Of course, they are never 100-percent correct. Nobody ever predicts the tournament bracket exactly. Nobody. It simply cannot be done.

For instance, up until minutes before the field was announced, at least one pundit had Kansas as a No. 1 seed. No, it wasn’t Pollyanna. She wasn’t a basketball fan.

Conventional wisdom — in other words the consensus of the soothsayers — had Kansas as a No. 2 seed headed to a pod in Oklahoma City and then eventually to the Chicago Regional where, if all went according to plan, KU coach Bill Self would have to play against Illinois, his former school, for the right to go to the Final Four.

One out of three isn’t bad if you’re a baseball player, but this is college basketball and we can only speculate about why KU trickled down to a No. 3 seed and was plunked into the Syracuse Regional.

Perhaps the good NCAA fathers were more inclined to give KU’s players a crack at North Carolina, the No. 1 seed at the Syracuse Regional, and the coach who abandoned some of them rather than give the Fighting Illini a shot at their former coach.

At the same time, you could speculate the NCAA wanted to send the Jayhawks against UConn, the No. 2 seed, so KU athletic director Lew Perkins would have an opportunity to face his former school for the first time since leaving for Mount Oread in July of 2003.

Kansas appeared solid for a No. 2 seed mostly because of its nation-leading Ratings Percentage Index numbers. Nobody in the country played a tougher schedule than the Jayhawks.

Kansas University point guard Aaron Miles answers questions during a news conference. The Jayhawks met the media Sunday at the Memorial Stadium press box after they learned their NCAA Tournament fate.

Check out the 65 teams in the field and you’ll see 13 schools on KU’s 2004-2005 schedule — five from the Big 12 and eight nonconference foes. Only three of KU’s non-league opponents — TCU, South Carolina and St. Joseph’s — failed to make the NCAA field, and none was chopped liver.

Kansas posted a 10-5 record against those 13 teams, playing Iowa State and Oklahoma State twice. Thus all five KU losses were inflicted by tourney-bound teams.

Although the KU players never would say it, they must have been privately galled to see Kentucky, a team they mauled, 65-59, in Rupp Arena without Wayne Simien, earn a No. 2 seed.

Curiously, the two teams that tied for the Big 12 regular-season championship, Kansas and Oklahoma, drew No. 3 seeds while Oklahoma State, the third-place team, was anointed a No. 2 — a ranking earned, no doubt, by the Cowboys capturing the conference tournament Sunday.

The NCAA always has placed a heavy emphasis on strength of schedule, but the bracket revealed Sunday night proved the selection committee places just as much of a priority on what you’ve done lately.

And that, in the final analysis, is what cost the Jayhawks a No. 2 or perhaps even a No. 1 seed. Kansas is hardly going into the tournament on a wave of momentum. KU has only six defeats, but five have come in the last eight games.

Sure, two of them were overtime defeats. Another was a four-point loss at Missouri with Keith Langford, the team’s second-leading scorer, missing the last 37 minutes. Still another was that three-point loss to O-State in the Big 12 Tournament with Langford in street clothes.

But those are excuses, and there are no excuses in the NCAA Tournament. If the Jayhawks don’t rediscover the moxie that made them one of the nation’s elite teams in December and January, they’ll leave a legacy as a team of unfulfilled expectations.

What does it mean that the Jayhawks are a No. 3 seed?

This is the third time KU has been a three. The last time was in 1991, and the Jayhawks went all the way to the NCAA championship game, bowing to Duke in Indianapolis. But the other time the Jayhawks were one and done. That was in 1985 when they stumbled against Auburn in the second round in South Bend, Ind.

In other words, seeds mean nothing. It’s performance that counts.