Kentucky will be seeded first and Vanderbilt will be seeded last in next week’s Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament in Nashville.
That much is known, but the league’s 12 other teams do not have their seeds cemented.
The Wildcats earned their 49th SEC regular-season title with Saturday’s 73-66 win over Auburn in Rupp Arena, dropping Bruce Pearl’s Tigers into a tie for second place with LSU. Kentucky, which experienced a turbulent nonconference schedule that included wins over Michigan State and Louisville but losses to Evansville and Utah, has won eight consecutive games since a 75-66 loss at Auburn on Feb. 1.
“The run that these guys have put together – I come back to the same thing,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said Saturday evening in a news conference. “You’ve got to have five or six guys who can get 25 points in a game, and maybe multiple games. You must do that, because they have to be able to go in that (NCAA) tournament and know, ‘I can do it if I have to.’
“The second thing is that you’ve got to go on a run of games, because to win that thing, you have to win six in a row. If you haven’t won six in a row all year, why would your team believe you can do it? So all the stuff we are going through is good.”