Bad Top Seed Is Plowed Under

Send ‘em home, Alabama.

On the way to “One Shining Moment,” Southern fried rock interrupted the rhythm of the NCAA tournament this weekend, with two afterthoughts from the football-mad state of Alabama taking out one No. 1-seeded team after another, one day after another, in the second round.

First Stanford, then Kentucky.

First the top-seeded team in the Phoenix Regional, then the top-seeded team in the entire tournament.

Stanford, 30-1 before the weekend, lost Saturday to eighth-seeded Alabama, 70-67.

Kentucky, considered the best team in America by the NCAA tournament selection committee, lost Sunday to ninth-seeded Alabama Birmingham, 76-75.

That’s half the Final Four favorites, gone after two rounds. For the first time since 2000, only two No. 1-seeded teams are advancing to the round of 16, and their names are Duke and Saint Joseph’s.

If Billy Packer was right about certain teams not deserving their No. 1 positions, he was certainly wrong about which ones.

Kentucky, the top-seeded team in the tournament? That’s where the selection committee put the Wildcats last Sunday -- on top of the heap, better than Duke, better than Connecticut, better than everybody else in the ACC and the Big East -- which raises another hasty question:

Isn’t the selection committee obligated to watch some basketball before seeding its tournament?

Off evidence from the first weekend, at least half a dozen teams displayed more individual talent than Kentucky. The Wildcats’ strengths this season were teamwork and defense, their weaknesses depth and outside shooting. With 27 victories this season, Coach Tubby Smith acknowledged that his squad “did overachieve in a way.”

But Kentucky’s lack of a game-changing go-to player was telling Sunday when the Wildcats were confronted by a fast, athletic, relentless opponent. Alabama Birmingham Coach Mike Anderson wears his roots on his clipboard, having acquired an affinity for full-court pressure basketball as an assistant under Nolan Richardson at Arkansas.

At Arkansas, they called it “Forty Minutes of Hell.”

At Birmingham, under Anderson, it is known as “The Fastest Forty Minutes In Basketball.”

The difference is mostly semantic. The Blazers dare teams to run with them and then see how the opponent adjusts. Washington tried to keep pace in the first round. The result was a 102-100 Birmingham victory that left everyone watching, in Columbus and on television, dizzy. The Blazers came out with more of the same against Kentucky, scored 21 points off turnovers and led by as many as 10 points in the second half before the Wildcats mounted their last comeback of the season.

Kentucky scrambled back to lead, 75-74, in the final half-minute, but Birmingham got the winner on a 15-foot jump shot by senior guard Mo Finley with 12 seconds remaining.

With that shot, Kentucky’s top seeding was unmasked for what it was: the flawed result of process of elimination. Saint Joseph’s and Stanford couldn’t stay unbeaten, so they couldn’t be No. 1. Duke lost the ACC tournament final to Maryland, so there went the Blue Devils. Connecticut could stake a claim with a fit Emeka Okafor in the lineup, but six losses and Okafor’s back problems made the selection committee skeptical of the Huskies’ resume.

So it was Kentucky, by default. And the Wildcats lasted all of two rounds, done in quickly by their faults.

Consequently, the Southeastern Conference will send two teams to the round of 16, as was expected, only not Kentucky and not Mississippi State. Mississippi State, seeded second in the Atlanta Regional, also lost in the second round Sunday, falling 89-74 to Xavier, the team that spoiled Saint Joseph’s perfect season.

Meanwhile, Vanderbilt, sixth-seeded in the Phoenix Regional, held off third-seeded North Carolina State, 75-73, when the Wolfpack’s Engin Atsur, taking his cue from the North Carolina State Greatest Basketball Moments video, hoisted up a last-second, long-distance prayer that fell short of the rim.

In 1983, North Carolina State won a championship with this strategy.

Unfortunately for the Wolfpack, Lorenzo Charles was not available to catch and dunk this time.

So Kentucky and Mississippi State are out ... and Alabama and Vanderbilt are in. And what else can you say about it except: The SEC met its round-of-16 quota.

By the time the highly seeded and the mighty finished falling this weekend, the third round was left with these matchups:

In Phoenix: Alabama-Syracuse and Vanderbilt-Connecticut.

In St. Louis: Alabama Birmingham-Kansas and Georgia Tech-Nevada.

In Atlanta: Duke-Illinois and Texas-Xavier.

In East Rutherford: Saint Joseph’s-Wake Forest and Pittsburgh-Oklahoma State.

For the neutral observer, there isn’t a must-VCR matchup.

Welcome to the Sweet ‘N Low 16.

This isn’t the way the selection committee figured it would play out, and it’s certainly not the way CBS would have mapped it out -- though look for the network to do all it can to hype the Phil Martelli-Packer connection that the game between Saint Joseph’s and Wake Forest, Packer’s alma mater, offers.

A week ago, we readied for this tournament being told the road to the championship runs through Lexington or Palo Alto or Spokane or possibly Starkville, Miss.

What we learned is that the road out of the tournament runs through Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.