It was a bit rocky, but Arkansas and Kansas did enough during the regular season to punch their tickets to March Madness.
Both teams had much higher expectations entering the year, but now enter the NCAA Tournament as 10 and 7 seeds, respectively, and are set to square off in the first round at 6:10 p.m. CT Thursday in Providence, R.I., and on CBS. The winner gets the winner of St. John’s-Omaha.
Matching up John Calipari and Bill Self in the Round of 64 with a chance to face Rick Pitino in the second round was no accident by the selection committee.