Kentucky is by far the best team in the world, and they could still lose

There are 68 teams in the NCAA Tournament, and it seems like we’re able to rationally discuss 67 of them. The 68th, of course, is the Kentucky Wildcats.

For some people, it’s not enough to say that the Kentucky Wildcats are the best team in college basketball. There are more important things to discuss: Could Kentucky beat an NBA team? Could Kentucky beat the ‘98 Bulls? If the Greek gods were real and they stopped having sex with each other for two hours to unite and play basketball, how many points would Willie Cauley-Stein drop on Zeus?

Others are convinced that all the people picking Kentucky are SHEEPLE, man. To these people, picking Kentucky is not so much a decision about who you think is going to win the NCAA Tournament so much as it is a sign that you are a lemming who can’t think for yourself.

Let’s take a step back here. Here are three things about the Kentucky Wildcats basketball team that we should all be able to agree upon.

Every college basketball rating system thinks Kentucky was the best team in college basketball this year. If you think there is a team better than Kentucky, you are claiming to be better at analyzing college basketball than every system people have created to analyze college basketball.

A lot of Kentucky critics point to the team’s conference, the relatively weak SEC, as a sign that the Wildcats weren’t tested the way their ACC or Big 12 or Big Ten counterparts were. But most ranking systems take strength-of-schedule into account. And they all still have UK as the best team in college basketball. It’s not just that the Wildcats won the SEC -- they won every game they played, and many of them by a large margin.

And it’s not like Kentucky didn’t prove itself against teams from other conferences: The Wildcats played a series of marquee matchups against elite teams early in the year and won all of them. They played Kansas, who won an incredibly difficult league and earned a No. 2 seed, at a neutral site -- a much better simulation of an NCAA Tournament environment than a conference road game -- and they demolished them by 32.

SB Nation presents: Why Kentucky is going to win it all

Las Vegas gives Kentucky the best odds of winning the NCAA Tournament it has ever given a team. Every year, Vegas produces odds for every team, and they feel this team has the best chance of winning any one team has ever had. That’s incredible.

That shot? Right at 50 percent. Kentucky is even money with the field.

To win the NCAA Tournament, Kentucky will have to win six games. Five of these games will be against opponents better than Kentucky’s average opponent over the course of the season. Even though they have lost zero percent of their games thus far, there is a greater than zero chance that they lose every time they take the court.

Ken Pomeroy -- who, as we noted, ranks Kentucky as the best team in the field, and does so by a decent margin -- ran his annual projection on the field and gave Kentucky a 33.8 percent chance at winning. That’s about three times better than any other team, but still leaves a two-thirds chance Kentucky doesn’t win.

Kentucky is wildly great, but the task ahead of them is very difficult, even for a great team.

The NCAA Tournament is by far the most enjoyable way of crowning a champion of any sport. It’s also the least reliable one by a long shot: It’s a 68-team, single-elimination tournament.

Last year, UConn won the NCAA Tournament. Was UConn the best team in college basketball last year? No. They probably weren’t even the best team in their own conference: They lost to Louisville three times by double digits, once by 23.

But they were the NCAA Champions, and nobody can ever take that away from them. That’s what makes March Madness beautiful: anybody can win. That’s what makes March Madness heartbreaking: one bad game, and a team that could have achieved greatness can fall.

Kentucky just proved over the course of a season they were the best team in the country. One game over the next month won’t change that, even if they won’t have a banner to hang.