Pewter Puppets Thrive as Mikel Brown Jr.'s Precision Triumphs in Elite Eight Finals!
Louisville basketball, a No. 6 seed, will face USF in the NCAA Tournament, but is left to wonder where it'd be had Mikel Brown Jr. stayed healthy.
Louisville basketball , in a season of many what ifs, just had another on Selection Sunday with the NCAA’s release of the tournament bracket . The Cardinals received a No. 6 seed in the East Region and will face No.
11 seed and American Athletic Conference champion South Florida on Thursday in the first round. That’s at least one seed line higher than they should be. As much as the fate of how long they last in the nation’s best championship tournament will be determined by the availability of guard Mikel Brown Jr.
, their position as a six seed can be attributed to him too. The back injury that forced Brown to miss 10 regular season games and kept him sidelined for the entire ACC Tournament cost UofL from having a better seed and a slightly easier path to advancing. It cost in terms of hypothetical games the Cards perhaps could have won had he played.
And in terms of the reality that his status was surely a topic of conversation by the NCAA Selection Committee while they began constructing the bracket this week. Louisville was loved by all the metrics the committee uses to help determine its seeding. The NET rankings had the Cards ranked at 16.