John Calipari, Bill Self and Rick Pitino walk into an arena in Providence …

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Sometimes a March Madness selection committee can seem daft, and sometimes it can seem shadowy, and sometimes, to a certain type of fan prone to foaming at the mouth, it can seem satanic. Yet all the while there remain those times when it seems a bunch of puckish pranksters who shovel certain teams into a certain corner of the draw and then start giggling.

Look what they went and did to one neighborhood of the massive bracket that wound up here in Providence. They took three coaching stars with a collective 73 tournament appearances for an aggregate 13 schools, with three-man sums of 17 Final Four berths, five national titles and 230 tournament games, and they shoehorned them into four rungs near the bottom of the West Region.

So in a sport in which the coaches long have been the most familiar stars, look who’s roaming the halls of Amica Mutual Pavilion on practice Wednesday: 66-year-old John Calipari in Arkansas cardinal (still an unusual sight), 62-year-old Bill Self in a Kansas soft blue jumper and 72-year-old Rick Pitino in another day-before-game sweatsuit, this one the deep blue that tends to serve as the secondary color of the St. John’s Red Storm. It’s so stocked with stardom that two stalwarts, Purdue’s Matt Painter and Clemson’s Brad Brownell, national runner-up and Elite Eight finishers last year, are overshadowed also-heres, not that they mind. Calipari’s No. 10 seed Arkansas (20-13) will play Self’s No. 7 seed Kansas (21-12) on Thursday, matching head coaches who opposed each other in the national championship games of 2008 and 2012. The winner would play Pitino’s No. 2 seed St. John’s (30-4), provided the Red Storm can outlast tournament debutant and No. 15 seed Omaha (22-12), so let’s just think about Omaha, the newbie navigating the redwoods.

“We’re forgetting about Omaha,” Calipari said. “They’ve had a heck of a year. They deserve to be in this conversation.” Even so, their own coach felt they might not tend to appear in the conversation. “It’s definitely a who’s who of college coaching,” Omaha coach Chris Crutchfield said, “and I’m sure a lot of people are asking, ‘Who the hell is that other guy in the bracket?’ ”

(Note: He’s a third-year head coach who once assisted at Oklahoma, including in the 2016 Final Four, and who played basketball and football for Omaha, all some doing for a guy who remains in parentheses.)

In fact, it’s such a loud bunch here that Calipari wondered why the rascally committee didn’t just go ahead and put it elsewhere.

“Where do you think I thought they would put us?” he said Wednesday.

“Lexington” went the obvious answer from the audience, given Rupp Arena has one of the eight sites as well, given Pitino coached at Kentucky from 1991 to 2000 and Calipari from 2009 to 2024, while Pitino coached from 2001 to 2017 at Louisville, all of it making for unusually loud loudness.

“Come on,” Calipari said. “And they didn’t? When I saw we weren’t there, I’m like, ‘Wow, somebody (on the committee) must have been sick and went to the bathroom or something for them not to put us there.’ ”

They’re here where, in further entanglements stretching back across the decades, Pitino coached two seasons from 1985 to 1987, when his 1987 team went to Louisville and rode a No. 6 seed to the Final Four by routing No. 2 seed Alabama and No. 1 seed Georgetown. The history breathes everywhere, what with Calipari also reminding that his Massachusetts Final Four team of 1996 came through Providence. They’re here also as three coaches who, befitting the sport’s history, have had their moments with rules-minded visitors from the NCAA. There’s so much history tucked atop history, even two Calipari-Pitino Final Four games (1996, 2012), that Self hopes to benefit.

“I would think,” the 22-season Kansas coach said, “and I don’t know positively, there will be a little storyline with Kansas and Arkansas, but the potential of a Calipari-Pitino second-round game may put Kansas in a favorable light, to be honest with you. We’ve been talked about enough over the years and over time. I’m kind of looking forward to having people talk about others, and maybe we can kind of sneak up on somebody.”

His No. 7 seed is his first tournament team at Kansas with any number below 4. Once Calipari saw a list of Kansas among the sevens, he figured he would play Kansas. Once Self noted Arkansas among the 10s, he knew he would play Arkansas. Neither really thought all that much about playing Pitino who, oddly, had not faced a Self team until his Iona team did so in November 2021.

Pitino can course back through a horde of Marches nonetheless, and he spoke of telling his team about 2011, the only season any of his teams lost to a lower seed in a first-round game, a 62-61 haunter as a No. 4 seed against No. 13 Morehead State. He can go back, but only fleetingly, to 1983, when a play-in game featured his Boston University Terriers in the Palestra in Philadelphia against La Salle, which won 70-58, but then he veers to rave about Omaha. “I go back so many years in those first rounds,” he said, “and you look – I know I was in Omaha’s shoes right now. … Back then, there was a lot of difference between the upper level and those teams. Today, there’s not a whole lot of difference.”

So here come the Mavericks, with all those fresh observations. Asked to provide a wow from the week, guard Tony Osburn felt wowed at seeing Tyler Ulis on the Arkansas coaching staff a decade after watching on TV when Ulis played for Kentucky: “Saying, ‘What’s up?’ to him was my moment. That was ‘wow’ for me.” Forward Marquel Sutton told of the fans’ welcome at the hotel. Guard JJ White found it hard to choose because “everything” had been a wow.

All around them are these Hall of Fame coaches, including one, Pitino, who has his own set of newcomers to the tournament. “I feel like I’m a hundred,” he said, and also: “A long time ago when I started coaching, college basketball and college football were even. The NBA and NFL were even. Today, a bad Saturday football game, not even a Power Four or Five opponent, will outdraw an NBA playoff game. But this is our month. This is what college basketball lives for: March.

“I told my team this: Do you understand what March can do for you in life? Some of my players in Lexington, I don’t know if they’re working! They’re living a good life. Taliek Brown is a coach right now with us. … If he didn’t win the national championship at UConn (in 2004), I never would have hired him. I wanted someone my players could look at, look up and say he went through it.”

What March can do, three coaches here know as well as anybody ever knew. So the committee booked them all to Providence. Then somebody probably snickered.