Kansas, the No. 7 seed in the West Regional, will begin the NCAA Tournament with No. 10 Arkansas (20-13) on Thursday. The game is set for 6:10 p.m. Central Time in Providence, Rhode Island, and will be televised on CBS.
This won’t be the first time these teams see each other this season, but it’s the first one that counts. KU traveled to Fayetteville, Arkansas, for an exhibition game that didn’t include numerous KU contributors — including Hunter Dickinson and Rylan Griffen — on Oct. 25. Arkansas won 85-69.
Arkansas is in its first season under former Kentucky coach John Calipari after five years under current USC coach Eric Musselman. According to KenPom.com, the Razorbacks are 40th in net rating. They have the 20th-best defensive rating but the 73rd-best offensive rating.
When Calipari arrived, he overhauled the Razorbacks’ roster. He brought in three transfers he coached at Kentucky and three freshmen who had committed to him at Kentucky.
Arkansas has had an up-and-down season, which led to a No. 9 seed in the SEC tournament. The Razorbacks lost to Ole Miss 83-80 in the second round after beating South Carolina 72-68 in the first.
Four Razorbacks enter the Big Dance scoring in double digits. Junior forward Adou Thiero led the team with 15.6 points per game and 6.0 rebounds while starting 26 games. Thiero, one of the Kentucky transfers, more than doubled his 7.2 points per game as a sophomore. Sophomore guard D.J. Wagner averaged 11.1 points per game with 3.5 assists while playing the most minutes on the team. Senior guard Johnell Davis averaged 11.2 points per game. He transferred to Arkansas after four years at Florida Atlantic.
Freshman guard Boogie Fland averaged 15.1 points per game and a team-high 5.7 assists before a hand injury on Jan. 11 prevented him from playing. Arkansas announced on Saturday that Fland would begin practicing and likely will make his return in the NCAA Tournament. He shot 36.5% from 3 in his 18 games, which is third on the team, and scored 22 points with six steals in the exhibition game against KU.
The Razorbacks finished their nonconference season 11-2, losing to then-No. 8 Baylor and Illinois. However, their season quickly turned negative once conference season started, and the Razorbacks lost their first five games and six of their first seven.
February was a little kinder to the Razorbacks. They went 5-3 with ranked wins over Kentucky and Mizzou and beat LSU once and Texas twice. The Razorbacks ended the regular season with back-to-back wins over Vanderbilt and Mississippi State, which helped land their spot in the tournament. Calipari had little conviction about his team’s chances of making the tournament in his postgame press conference after the team’s second-round loss in the SEC tournament, but the Razorbacks made it in with 13 other SEC teams, which set an NCAA record for a conference.
The Razorbacks finished sixth of 16 teams in the SEC in points allowed at 71.2 per game. They had the fewest blocks per game in the conference and were 10th in steals. Offensively, they were either middling or placed in the bottom third of the conference in most major statistics. They had one of the lowest quantities fouls per game in the conference but ranked among the worst in the conference in opponent free throws allowed.
The Jayhawks enter the tournament with a 21-12 record as the No. 7 seed for the first time since 1981. A win for KU would mean a match with either No. 2 St. John’s or No. 15 Omaha.
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AP Photo/George Walker IV
