Gonzaga, Arizona nab No. 1 seeds after leaving Las Vegas

Arizona and Gonzaga hit the jackpot in Las Vegas.

The elite West Coast programs won their conference tournaments last week and were rewarded with No. 1 seeds when the field of 68 was revealed Sunday.

Kansas and defending national champion Baylor of the Big 12 are the other top seeds in a bracket that featured little controversy at the top.

The Bulldogs, West Coast Conference champions in the regular season and tournament, will stay in the West Region as the tournament’s top overall seed, while the Wildcats are the headliners of the South Region after winning the Pac-12 regular-season and tournament titles. Kansas will stay in the Midwest, with Baylor headed to the East.

Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd is a longtime Bulldogs assistant in his first year as a head coach and another branch of a growing Gonzaga coaching tree.

Those roots could potentially cross, as Gonzaga could have a second-round matchup with Boise State and coach Leon Rice, another longtime assistant with the Bulldogs.

Rice’s Broncos were one of four Mountain West teams to make the field, the first time since 2013 that the league received more than three bids.

Boise State might have a gripe about the seeding, however. The Broncos drew a No. 8 seed after winning the regular-season and tournament titles. Their opponent in Saturday’s championship game, San Diego State, is also an 8-seed.

But Colorado State, which finished second in the league and was eliminated by the Aztecs in the tournament semifinals, is seeded No. 6 and will play Michigan in the first round.

The fourth Mountain West team, Wyoming, was one of the last four teams included in the field. The Cowboys will play Indiana on Tuesday in a First Four game, with the winner drawing into a 12-seed and playing Saint Mary’s on Thursday.

Notre Dame and Rutgers also sneaked into the field as two of the last four in. They will meet Wednesday in Dayton, Ohio, with the winner getting an 11-seed and playing Alabama.

The Scarlet Knights were one of nine Big Ten teams to make the field, by far the most of any conference.

“The Big Ten has had a fantastic year and certainly is very deserving of their nine teams,” selection committee chairman Tom Burnett said.

None of the nine teams was seeded No. 1 or No. 2, with Purdue and Wisconsin each seeded No. 3.

It’s possible the Boilermakers could have been seeded second had they defeated Iowa in the Big Ten championship game Sunday, but that didn’t help Tennessee. The Volunteers remaining on the three-line despite winning Sunday’s Southeastern Conference title game against Texas A&M was among the most puzzling of the committee’s decisions.

“By the time we got into bracketing today, we had to look at about 10 different contingencies,” Burnett said. “So that’s essentially 10 different seed lists, 10 different brackets that the committee had to go through. And obviously we had to go through all of the results of today to get the final data points to complete the process and eventually whittle that down to a couple of brackets and then, of course, the one we released.”

The Aggies were left out of the field despite their deep run, one of the biggest snubs, with Burnett attributing it to an entire body of work over the hot streak of the final weekend.

“The rough stretch (in late January and early February) was tough to ignore,” he said of an eight-game losing streak.

Other teams that could complain about being left out of the field were Southern Methodist, Oklahoma and Dayton.

Former UNLV coach T.J. Otzelberger’s Iowa State team made the field in his first season at the school. The Cyclones are an 11-seed and will play a Louisiana State team that fired coach Will Wade this past week after the school received notice of more major violations.

LSU’s situation might not even be the most unique in the Midwest Region.

Jacksonville State is in the field as a No. 15 seed as an automatic qualifier from the Atlantic Sun despite losing early in the league tournament. The Gamecocks won the regular-season crown and were awarded the bid because Bellarmine captured the title but is ineligible for the NCAA Tournament because it is still in the Division 1 transition process.

The most hyped team will be Duke, the No. 2 seed in the West. Coach Mike Krzyzewski will retire after the season.

Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on Twitter.