SEC dissed by NCAA

TAMPA, Fla. " Southeastern Conference coaches and players spent all week, and a good part of the season, defending their league.

There's not much they can say now.

The SEC got three teams in the NCAA tournament Sunday, the league's smallest representation since 1990. It was a clear indication how the selection committee felt about a league that ranked sixth in RPI and had few head-to-head wins against teams from the major conferences.

LSU, Tennessee and Mississippi State made the 65-team field, and the Bulldogs might have missed out if they hadn't toppled Tennessee 64-61 in the tournament final on Sunday.

Auburn, South Carolina, Florida and Kentucky " all hoping to improve their NCAA resumes in the SEC tournament " failed to get in.

"Disappointing," Volunteers coach Bruce Pearl said. "We were very disappointed. There's only one thing we can do, and that is win and demonstrate we deserve better as a league."

If the number of SEC teams was a blow to the conference, those seedings might have been the knockout punch.

LSU, the regular-season champion, was a No. 8 seed. Tennessee was a No. 9 seed and Mississippi State was a No. 13 seed.

"I'm surprised at the high seeds, especially Tennessee," Auburn coach Jeff Lebo said. "LSU being that high of a seed, that was surprising to me. When I saw Tennessee come across there as a 9, the kids didn't know it, but I knew it. You kind of knew where the league stood in the eyes of the people making the decisions when I saw that."

Each of the six major conferences has gotten at least three teams into the NCAA tournament in every year since 1988, when the Pac-10 landed just two spots.

The SEC had earned at least five berths in each of the last 12 seasons. The conference had gotten more than three teams in every year since 1990, when Alabama, Georgia and LSU made it. Perennial powerhouse Kentucky was on probation that season.

The Wildcats had made the NCAA field the last 17 years. They ended that streak Sunday, no surprise since coach Billy Gillispie's team lost nine of its final 13 games.

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BACK AT LAST: Morgan State's first trip to the NCAA tournament represented a touch of redemption for third-year coach Todd Bozeman.

The NCAA banned him from coaching for eight years after he admitted paying a recruit while coaching at California. Morgan State gave him a chance, and the results have been worth it.

The 15th-seeded Bears (23-11), who won the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament on Saturday night, will play against No. 2 Oklahoma on Thursday in Kansas City, Mo.

Morgan State won the MEAC regular-season title last year but was upset by cross-town rival Coppin State in the tournament championship game. The Bears went to the NIT.

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CRUEL FOR 'CATS: This isn't the kind of history Billy Gillispie wanted to make at Kentucky.

The Wildcats (20-13) failed to make the 65-team field for the first time in 18 years on Sunday, the latest in a string of setbacks suffered by the program in Gillispie's two years on the job.

Kentucky is just 38-26 since Gillispie took over for Tubby Smith in April 2007. The Wildcats didn't make it out of the first round of the NCAAs last season and stumbled down the stretch this year to snap the nation's third-longest consecutive NCAA tournament appearance streak.

Kentucky lost nine of its final 13 games, including an upset loss at home to woeful Georgia, and bowed out of the SEC tournament in the quarterfinals to LSU.

Now the Wildcats' long, frustrating season will continue in the NIT. Kentucky hosts UNLV (21-10) in a first-round game Tuesday night, the school's first appearance in the NIT since 1979.

Gillispie didn't waste any time getting the Wildcats ready. They were practicing late Sunday night when the 32-team NIT field was announced.

The game will be played at Memorial Coliseum, Kentucky's longtime home before Rupp Arena opened. The team was bumped from Rupp to make room for the Kentucky boys state high school basketball tournament.

Making things even more painful for the fan base that dubs itself Big Blue Nation is the success of a pair of former coaches, Smith and Rick Pitino.

Smith led Minnesota into this year's NCAA tournament as a No. 10 seed while Pitino, now the coach at archrival Louisville, will begin play as the tournament's top overall seed.

"It's a great program and I hate to see them miss out on it because that's why they came to Kentucky " to participate in postseason play," Smith said. "But we wish them the best, wherever they go."

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ELEVENTH HEAVEN: John Beilein finally did what his predecessors couldn't in 11 years " get Michigan back to the NCAA tournament.

A perennial bracket presence up until the mid 1990s, Michigan's program fell apart after the Ed Martin scandal forced coach Steve Fisher out on the eve of the 1997 season.

The Wolverines made just one appearance since then " courtesy of an improbable run through the Big Ten tournament in 1998. It's been 11 lean years since then.

"Of all the challenges I faced when I came in here, this is the one that feels the best to have gotten over and brought this program back," athletic director Bill Martin said. "It was so hard.

"You can imagine when the stigma and cloud was hanging over the program from the Ed Martin episode, that didn't help us in recruiting."

Martin, a now-deceased former booster, told the federal government he lent $616,000 to ex-Wolverines Chris Webber, Maurice Taylor, Robert Traylor and Louis Bullock in what the NCAA said was the largest financial scandal in its history.

Probation, lackluster coaches, outdated facilities and apathy from a fan base and administration focused on football led to an NCAA basketball tournament drought that lasted longer than a decade.

But in Beilein's second season, the Wolverines won 20 times " including against Duke, UCLA and Purdue " to earn an NCAA tournament bid.

Beilein said he planned to savor the accomplishment before watching film of Clemson at his house on Monday night.

"I might go home, pour myself a nice cold beer," Beilein said, "sit back and maybe just glance at Clemson's roster and look at their stats. And relax a little bit."

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HEADS UP: UCLA is going far away to play in the NCAA tournament, with the Bruins getting shipped to the East Region for the first time in seven years.

Not since 2002, when Steve Lavin was still coaching in Westwood, have they traveled so far from home. That year they beat Mississippi and Cincinnati in Pittsburgh before losing to Missouri in the West Region semifinals in San Jose.

"It's a tougher road, obviously, than we've had the last four years," coach Ben Howland said Sunday.

The No. 6-seed Bruins will play a first-round game Thursday against Virginia Commonwealth (24-9) in Philadelphia.

Howland wasn't surprised when UCLA's name appeared on the TV screen because he'd been tipped by a former player an hour earlier as to where the Bruins were going.

"I told the team before it came on that I think we're going to Philadelphia to play VCU," he said. "It was someone within CBS that gave us the information."

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FEELING BETTER: Illinois guard Chester Frazier said Sunday that the only pain he felt was from not being able to play while his team was bounced from the Big Ten tournament over the weekend.

The cure, if the senior gets his way, will come Thursday when the fifth-seeded Illini (24-9) will take on 12-seed Western Kentucky (24-8, 15-3 Sun Belt) in the NCAA Tournament's first round in Portland, Ore.

Whether Frazier, the heart of the team and its defensive backbone, plays, he said Sunday, is up to him after the Illini learned where they're headed.

"Its my career, it's my life, it's my hand," he said, declining to say whether his hand is broken. "Nobody else can tell me what to do with my body. I've been throwing it around my whole 4 years here. ... It's the end of my career, so I've got to make the most of it."

Frazier, a senior, hurt the hand in practice last week, and had it operated on Thursday. The team has been vague about the injury, but said before the Big Ten Tournament that he was unlikely to play, and might miss the NCAAs.

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VALLEY BLUES: For the second straight year, the Missouri Valley Conference is a disgruntled one-bid NCAA tournament league, with only a No. 12 seed as its standard bearer.

Commissioner Doug Elgin expects the conference to be stronger in 2010, given there were only 15 senior starters among the 10 teams this past season. But he's not certain whether it'll make a difference with an NCAA selection committee that has focused on the six power conferences in recent years.

Before last year, the Valley sent multiple schools to the NCAA tournament for nine consecutive years and peaked at four entries in 2006. Southern Illinois had six straight bids from 2002-07.

Now, apparently, the Valley is just another mid-major after getting a single bid in back-to-back years for the first time since 1997-98.

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BOUNCING BUCKEYE STATE: Five teams from Ohio will represent the state " known more for its passion for football than basketball " in the NCAA tournament. No. 4 seed Xavier, No. 8 Ohio State, and No. 11 Dayton all made it in as at-large teams. No. 13 Cleveland State upset Butler to win the Horizon League and No. 13 Akron won the Mid-American Conference tournament.

There's no chance of an all-Ohio Final Four, though " the Buckeyes, Vikings and Flyers are all in the Midwest Region.