Up is down. Down is up. White is black. Black is white.So on and so forth.The basic idea here is, “everything has changed.”I was just getting used to having reasonable expectations for LSU’s basketball teams, and then this season came along and the men and women flip-flopped, and it’s going to affect their tournament fortunes. The women’s team has been traditionally the more successful of the two teams the last five seasons. The ladies have been to five-straight Final Fours, had four-straight 30-win seasons, three Southeastern Conference Championships and two players selected to be State Farm All-Americans.The men’s team, on the other hand, has been pretty mediocre in the same span. They’ve been to two NCAA tournaments, one National Invitational Tournament and missed out on postseason basketball in two of those seasons. Granted, one of those NCAA tournament appearances was the Final Four run in 2006, but one season doesn’t make a program good. During the span the team was 95-63, only won the SEC West twice and fired their coach.But that was then, and this is now. More than halfway through the season, the men’s team is showing week after week why they’ll probably make it to the big dance, and the women’s team is showing why they’ll have to settle for dancing in Tigerland come tournament time. The Tigers (21-4, 9-1), under first-year coach Trent “All I care about is boxing out and getting rebounds” Johnson, have come out like men on a mission.They’re on a six-game winning streak, and are outscoring their opponents by nearly 10 points a game in the span. They’ve also opened up a wide lead between themselves and the next best team in the West with a 14-point win against Alabama at home, a double-overtime win in Starkville against Mississippi State and a home victory against Ole Miss in the past 10 days. They’re essentially a lock for the tournament based on this. Joe Lunardi has them as a No. 7 seed playing in Minneapolis in March in his latest Bracketology listings. I don’t think they’ll be this high of a seed, but I dont make those decisions. They haven’t beaten anyone who I would consider a great basketball team this year, and for my money’s worth I’d list them as more of a tournament “pretender” than a “contender.”This team isn’t one that’s likely to make a lot of noise in the tournament. They’re good enough to potentially make the Sweet 16 but also bad enough to lose in the first round. The women are a lot less like themselves this season. For most of this season, the LSU Lady Tigers (13-9, 6-4) have been playing like the men’s teams of old.They started the season at No. 22 and proceeded to lose three of their first four games. It really hasn’t gotten any better. In total, the women lost five nonconference games before they got into SEC play and haven’t been that great within the conference either. They’re above .500, but it’s a deceiving record. The Lady Tigers have beaten Alabama (0-11), South Carolina (2-9), and Mississippi (4-7) and Kentucky (4-7). The only good team they’ve beaten within the conference is No. 9 Florida.This is really going to hurt them when tournament time rolls around. They don’t have any signature wins, and they aren’t very good.It could be all of the young faces on the team — LSU only has three upperclassmen on the roster, and it has shown in many of their games. The next four games will be vital if they want to make the tournament. Lucky for the Lady Tigers, three of them are against teams with worse records than LSU. If for some reason the women choke, they still have a shot at the tournament because they’re hosting a regional. That’s probably going to go a long way in people’s minds on Selection Sunday. We’re still a month away from the tournament, and a lot can happen in March Madness. But right now, the men are going to “pull an LSU Lady Tigers” and go to the tournament while the ladies could be sitting at home. ——Contact Johanathan Brooks at [email protected]