Heading into Kentucky’s home game against South Carolina on Saturday, a palpable sense of unease was hanging over those who root for the Wildcats’ basketball program.

After dropping four of their last five games including the past two in pretty ugly fashion the narrative on the outside of the team has turned from a promising season in Mark Pope’s first year as head coach to a campaign heading off the rails at the halfway point of SEC play.

At 4-5 in the league entering the South Carolina game, the Wildcats are in need of a turnaround, and alarm bells are ringing throughout the fan base.

From the standpoint of UK’s NCAA Tournament résumé, however, the big picture says Big Blue Nation has nothing much to worry about.

A series of prominent bracketology updates posted after Kentucky’s ugly loss at Ole Miss on Tuesday night — a defeat that came in the wake of an equally demoralizing loss to John Calipari’s Arkansas Razorbacks in Rupp Arena — said the Cats are still one of college basketball’s most well-regarded teams when it comes to March.

Joe Lunardi’s updated bracket for ESPN on Friday morning had Kentucky as a 4 seed, not that far removed from where the Cats were at the beginning of this slump.

Lunardi projected UK as a 3 seed before a win over Texas A&M on Jan. 14 briefly moved them up to the 2-seed range. They were knocked back down to a 3 after losing to Alabama later that week, and — despite additional losses to Vanderbilt, Arkansas and Ole Miss during this recent skid — Kentucky is still a 4 seed in the latest bracket.

Heading into the Arkansas game last weekend, Lunardi had UK as one of only 13 teams in the country that had already achieved “lock” status for the NCAA Tournament field.

That’s due to the Wildcats’ nearly unmatched number of wins over elite teams in college basketball this season. UK has already defeated four teams currently ranked in the AP top 10 — No. 2 Duke, No. 4 Tennessee, No. 6 Florida and No. 10 Texas A&M — and only No. 1 Auburn has that many wins over that same number of AP top-10 foes.

Other prominent brackets have UK in the same range.

Kentucky basketball in bracketology

Dave Ommen, a longtime bracketologist who has provided tournament updates for national outlets over the years, had Kentucky as the No. 15 overall team on his seed list — also putting the Cats as a 4 seed — in his Friday morning update.

Another longtime, well-regarded NCAA Tournament site, BracketWag.com, actually placed UK as the final 3 seed in its Friday morning update, making the Cats the No. 12 overall team in the field.

And the 1-3-1 Sports’ bracket — which has been graded by BracketMatrix.com as the most accurate prognosticator over the past five NCAA tournaments — had Kentucky as the top 5 seed in its Thursday update, which came after the lopsided loss to Ole Miss.

Not bad at all, considering the circumstances.

In addition to the high-profile wins already on Kentucky’s résumé, it’s clear that those who best know how the NCAA Tournament selection committee will put together the 2025 bracket feel that the Wildcats — and everyone else in the SEC — won’t be judged too harshly on losses within the league. One bad game is not going to impact a team’s March seeding in a league where any underdog is realistically capable of an upset on any given night.

And, halfway through the league schedule, fears that the SEC would eat itself alive and prevent some of its mid-tier teams from making the 2025 field have, so far, been unfounded.

The ESPN, BracketWag and 1-3-1 projections had 13 teams from the league in the field of 68, with Lunardi placing Calipari’s Arkansas squad as the “first team out” of the bracket.

Ommen’s projections on his Bracketville website go even further. He has Arkansas among the last teams in the field — the Hogs dominated Texas, another tourney team, Wednesday night — giving the SEC a total of 14 teams in the field. Only LSU and South Carolina are left out of that bracket.

Obviously, the Wildcats will need injured point guard Lamont Butler to make a return and stay on the court to have its best chance of advancing in March — a Kerr Kriisa comeback would help, too — but their actual place in the Selection Sunday discussion hasn’t changed much in recent weeks.

Another stat to consider: according to the Torvik ratings, Kentucky had played the second-toughest SEC schedule so far this season heading into Saturday’s game. Only South Carolina (0-9 in the league entering Rupp this weekend) has played a more difficult series of conference opponents.

And while the Cats still have games against No. 1 Auburn, No. 3 Alabama, No. 4 Tennessee and No 15 Missouri remaining, those Torvik numbers say they’ll have the 14th-toughest remaining schedule within the league.

Selection Sunday is five weeks away. And, for now, the Cats are still in a very good spot.