The 2021 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament will be without some of the college’s elite basketball schools.
Duke, Kentucky and Louisville are among the top schools that did not make the tournament after a disappointing 2020-21 season.
The Blue Devils need to win or at least make the ACC Tournament Championship. The team rode high by beating Boston College Ledge and Louisville, but after a positive coronavirus test in the team they were forced to jump out of the postseason, but could not make it yet.
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Duke finished the season at ACC 13-11 and 9-9 overall.
The NCAA selection committee ruled that the team had not done enough to secure a spot in the 68’s. And neither did Kentucky or Louisville.
Kentucky started the season at No. 10 in the Associated Press Top 25, but finished 9-16 and 8-9 at the SEC. This is not the first time since 2013 that the Wildcats have held a tournament and the school finished the first time with a record of defeats after the 1988-89 season.
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“My teams historically played as if they were losing, they were going to be in the electric chair,” Calipari told Kentucky Sports Radio at the end of his season. “This team didn’t. [At] Times we did. But maybe physically we weren’t capable of that. But you know what I’m going to say here. How they started the game to play, then to play the way they played like the other part, says something about them. They never give up anything. They haven’t missed a single time this year. “
Louisville lost to Duke in the ACC Tourni, which missed the NCAA Tournament.
Chris Mack’s team finished 13-7 with an 8-5 record in the ACC. The Cardinals would have been able to get into it if it hadn’t been for the unsettling conference title win in the Big East and Pack-12.
Mitch Barnhart, chairman of the men’s basketball selection committee, said the selection showed that the school’s COVID-19 break didn’t help.
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“Definitely wait has been a part of the conversation,” he said via WDRB-TV. “From what we saw, they were taking a deeper look at the discussions. The challenge was that you had two teams that made really significant tournaments in Georgetown and Reg Reagan State … and as they took place, some people had to fall. Unfortunately, during the year you have the opportunity to start from where you want to go, and at the end of the day, if you are not where you want to go, you have the opportunity to go to tournaments and safe (automatic qualifiers). In the process, they removed two bids. “
Each team also decided to leave NIT.
