‘Cats NIT First Round Matchup Announced

Not exactly a banner day in Kentucky Basketball history:

UK’s streak of 17 consecutive NCAA appearances-Over

Bid as a 4 seed to the NIT-Accepted

UK’s biggest rival coached by former coach Rick Pitino-#1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament

As I just mentioned, UK has been announced as a 4 seed in the National Invitational Tournament.  Their opponent will be the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels, a team that actually defeated the aforementioned Louisville Cardinals in Freedom Hall earlier this season.

The game will take place March 17 at 9:30 in Memorial Coliseum on ESPN, which in all honesty will be kind of cool to see, in a very painful kind of way, although I don’t appreciate the extremely late start time too much.

Wink will be posting a full preview of the game in a day or two, but in the mean time, here’s a look at Ken Pomeroy’s scouting report on the Rebs. Wink’s preview will be made even more interesting by the fact that one UNLV’s best players, Wink Adams, shares his name.

The Rebels looked like they were an NCAA caliber team before they started play in the Mountain West Conference. On top of their big win in Louisville, they took down Arizona. In confence, they beat both conference foes that made the NCAA’s: BYU and Utah. The moral of the story is UK is going to have to play and play well to avoid an early start to what it is certain to be a very interesting (and crucial) off season.

Here’s a look at the full bracket