Who Are the Potential Top Seeds in This Year's NCAA Basketball Tournament?

Kentucky Wildcats

Surprise, surprise -- the Kentucky Wildcats are the clear top overall seed in this year's NCAA tournament. Why wouldn't they be?

The Wildcats are 25-0 and ranked number one in both the AP poll and our very own power rankings, and no team is really close. In the most recent AP poll, Kentucky received all 65 first place votes, and in our power rankings, the Wildcats are over 3.5 points better than the next closest team in terms of nERD.

For those of you unfamiliar with that term, nERD is our in-house metric that measures overall team efficiency and acts as an estimate of a team's score differential against a league-average team on a neutral court.

So, Kentucky, with its nERD of 23.08, is likely to beat an average team on a neutral court by 23 points, which is definitely fitting considering the Wildcat's average margin of victory of 21.6 points per game. Kentucky does it with a very efficient offense and the single-best defense in all of the country.

Absent a gigantic fallout or numerous injuries, the Wildcats will be the favorites going into the tournament (at 4-5 odds, according to Vegas Insider) and are a lock for the number one overall seed in the Midwest region. Our numbers can't help but agree with Mr. Lunardi.