Louisville Receives Favorable Draw by Mock NCAA Tournament Selection Committee

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - As quickly as the college basketball season started, the postseason is just around the corner. We're just a couple weeks away from conference tournaments across the sport kicking off, and Selection Sunday for the 2026 NCAA Tournament is less than one month away.

While the Louisville men's basketball program recently suffered a loss at SMU to snap a five-game winning streak, they are still a good team who is highly thought of at the national level. Recently, this notion that the Cardinals are an upper tier team was reinforced in a big way.

On Thursday, members of the national media convened in Indianapolis to take part in a mock selection committee exercise at the NCAA headquarters. It's an annual exercise that has taken place every year since 2007, and participants use the same metrics and resumes that will be used by the actual selection committee on Selection Sunday.

As part of the exercise, Louisville was chosen by the mock committee as the No. 20 overall seed, which would give them the final available five seed in the 68-team bracket. Michigan, Duke, Arizona and Houston were chosen as the top four seeds.

Considering where they had been trending over the last few weeks, it's a better draw for the Cardinals than expected. Per BracketMatrix, a website that averages out dozens of bracket projections made by various publications and pundits, Louisville has routinely averaged out to a six-seed, occasionally peaking as high as a five-seed but sometimes dipping as low to a seven-seed.

That being said, while Louisville is 19-7 overall and 8-5 in the ACC, the metrics still really like the Cards. They rank as the No. 14 in the NET, No. 15 by BartTorvik and KenPom, and No. 17 per EvanMiya.

Perhaps most importantly, Louisville ranks No. 24 in Wins Above Bubble - or WAB. It's a metric that was introduced last season, and it "measures the quality of your resume based on the results," and does not take into accord margin of victory or defeat. Essentially, WAB "shows how many more or fewer wins a team has compared to what a bubble team would average against that same schedule."

Louisville will be back in action this weekend when they host Georgia Tech for their penultimate home game of the regular season. Tip-off is scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 21 at 2:15 p.m. EST.

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