[Cactus Jack]

Love those mountain grannys! Wish mine was still here to fix me some red eye gravy, something I probably haven’t had now in over 40 years since she’s been gone.

Anyway, my take on UK after basically all of the pre conference schedule is done is this—we’ve hired a very solid basketball coach, and we’ve got a bunch of good, not great, veteran players, meaning there are going to be some nights like this, where we just get our ass kicked. There are also going to be some nights where we play well enough to beat teams the caliber of Duke and Gonzaga. The KSR bunch was debating what they think our SEC record will be this week, and they mostly settled on 12-6. I think that’s crazy. I think 11-7 would be fantastic in this SEC, and something like 10-8 or 9-9 is actually more realistic.

Agree 100% with the bolded. Given our expectations at the beginning of the season and how we've been playing lately, I don't know where they're getting only six losses, but I'd take that in a heartbeat and would think that this would be enough to get one of the top four seeds.

Have to correct one of my earlier posts-- we play Auburn once and can play them three times at most.

I doubt that we'll be favored against Auburn or in both games against Alabama or Tennessee. We could split with Tennessee and Alabama, then drop one at home to Auburn and we're at three losses.

We will lose at least one to Florida, Mississippi State, or Ole Miss. Throw in Texas A&M, Georgia (who is better than most think), Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma into that group and we're losing at least two.

Coming out of the games I just mentioned with only five losses (best case scenario) means we could only afford one larger upset to a Missouri, LSU, South Carolina, or Vanderbilt (who we play twice).

I just don't see it happening. We may beat Auburn or sweep Alabama or Tennessee, or we may sweep the Florida, Ole Miss, and Mississippi State games, but saying that we'll finish with six losses is just overly optimistic. If we are somehow able to come into the tournament with nine losses (2 non-conference, 6 SEC regular season, and 1 SEC Tournament), then we should be a mid-to-low #3 or high #4 going into the tournament.

If we end up with a more realistic seven, eight, or nine losses, I don't know that our seed drops drastically, but how far we fall would be dependent on the wins we did get (an upset of Auburn would cause a huge swing) and how we ended the season & conference tournament.