It’ll be a West Coast trip in the NCAA Tournament for the St. John’s basketball team after landing a No. 5 seed in the East Region on Sunday night during the selection show.
The Red Storm, the regular season and tournament champions of the Big East, will play No. 12 seed Northern Iowa in San Diego on Friday.
The Panthers, which finished as the No. 6 seed in the Missouri Valley Conference, won four games in four days to win the conference tournament and capture the automatic bid. It will be the first time this season Northern Iowa plays a team from a major conference.
“I’m not surprised at the seeding,” Rick Pitino said about his team’s placement after the selection show. “Half the staff thought we were a 4 [seed] and I thought we were a 5 [seed].”
“We didn’t expect to go to San Diego,” he told the crowd assembled at Carnesecca Arena.
It’s the first time the Red Storm have made back-to-back NCAA Tournaments since making three consecutive trips from 1998-2000.
“It’s not ideal traveling to the West Coast, but you deal with it and you just make the best of it.”
It’ll be St. John’s first game in the state of California since beating Arizona in the Basketball Hall of Fame Al Attles Classic in the Chase Center in San Francisco.
“Just by their scores, they play everybody tough,” Pitino added about Northern Iowa. “They have a senior led team; they have four guys in double figures.”
If St. John’s were to advance to the Round of 32, it would face either No. 4 seed Kansas or No. 13 Cal Baptist in the Round of 32.
In the region, Duke is the No. 1 seed while UConn is No. 2 and Michigan State is No. 3.