One of the blue bloods of college basketball and its rabid fans will be invading Greensboro as part of March Madness. It’s just not the blue bloods that locals are intimately familiar with.
Kentucky (21-11), of the Southeastern Conference, was placed in the East Regional as a sixth seed and will play Big East member and 11th seed Providence on Friday at the Greensboro Coliseum. The Wildcats finished third in the SEC in the regular season, while the Friars (21-11) finished tied with UConn for fourth place in their league.
On the other half of that bracket, Big 12 member Kansas State (23-9) is seeded third in the East after it was predicted to finish last in its conference and closed out in third place. These Wildcats will face Montana State (25-9) of the Big Sky Conference. The Bobcats are making consecutive NCAA tournament appearances for the first time in school history after beating Northern Arizona in the conference tournament.
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The coliseum is also hosting the first and second rounds of the Midwest Regional, and Pitt has a chance to return to town after being pounded by Duke in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament quarterfinals on Thursday.
The Panthers are playing in a First Four game in Dayton, Ohio, against Mississippi State. It’s the first time Pitt (22-11) has been in the NCAA tournament since the 2015-2016 season, and it’s the school’s 27 trip to the tournament. Mississippi State (21-12) is another SEC school, and the Bulldogs beat Florida in overtime before losing, 72-49, to Alabama, which is the No. 1 overall seed in field of 68. The winner goes to Greensboro as an 11 seed, and would face Iowa State (19-13), which lost to Kansas in the Big 12 tournament.
In the other game in that part of the bracket, third-seeded Xavier (25-9), also of the Big East, meets 14th-seeded Kennesaw State (26-8) of the Atlantic Sun Conference. The Musketeers lost their conference title game to Marquette, while the Owls knocked off Liberty to win their tournament.
The winners will meet in the second round on Sunday, which will end three weeks of basketball in the city, a run that started with the ACC women’s tournament and continued with the men’s tournament which concluded on Saturday night with Duke winning the championship.
As for the local blue bloods, Duke (26-8) earned a five seed in the East Regional and faces Oral Roberts (30-4) on Thursday in Orlando. North Carolina failed to make the field, one year after reaching the 2022 national championship game, where it lost to Kansas, and after being ranked as a preseason No. 1 in The Associated Press college basketball poll.
