Not that I like us losing, by any means, but having a lower seed is a good thing

It's a tricky situation, because if you start playing shitty you could play your way right out of the tourney. But if given the choice between an 8 seed and say a 13...I'd take the 13 and not look back.

Here is Lunardi's bracket from Monday (so it doesn't include our loss to SC and still has us at 8). LINK This is just for reference, disregard most of the teams in it (the 1s and 2s will probably be fairly accurate I would guess though, being this late in the season you pretty much know who the top teams will be).

Without paying too much attentino to the actual teams, just look at the matchups. Were we to remain an 8 seed where we've been projected for about 2 weeks, assuming we get by the 9 seed (which for this basketball team, beating anyone in a big game like that will be tough) our reward is the 1 seed. So either a possibly undefeated Kentucky, a UVA team that would hold us to 30 points, maybe Gonzaga's best team (that we've already lost to) or Duke. No thanks! 9 seed is in the same boat. Even moving up to 7, your next round matchup is against a 2 seed which will clearly overpower us.

To be perfeclty honest, the best thing for UGA is to get a 12/13 seed, followed by a 6/11. I think most would agree that before the season ever started, making the NCAAT was goal #1 and if we did that we'd be happy. So with that in mind I like to look at 2nd round matchups since anything after making it is gravy. I would muuuuuch rather face a 3/4/5/ in round 2 than a 1/2. In that case we're basically guarnateed to go no farther than the 1st round. But if we get one of those 12/13 spots, you're looking at a potentially managable 4/5 matchup in round 1 followed by a 4/5 in round 2. Not that I'm looking for losses of course, but us falling from 8 is actually a good thing when you look big picture.