For basketball fans, Selection Sunday is a day of anticipation. For the NCAA men’s basketball committee, it’s a day of stress.
Selection committee members are holed up in a hotel in Carmel, Indiana, watching games, analyzing résumés and choosing between bubble teams. Here’s a look at the biggest decisions they must make before 6 p.m. ET on Sunday when CBS unveils the finished bracket:
Auburn will be the No. 1 overall seed unless the selection committee deviates from its usual approach and weighs late-season results more heavily than the overall body of work. While the Tigers (28-5) enter Selection Sunday having dropped three of their past four games, their season-long résumé is still better than anyone else’s.
Despite playing in one of the strongest leagues in recent memory, Auburn clinched the outright SEC title with a full week remaining in the regular season. The Tigers enter Selection Sunday with 16 Quadrant 1 victories, three more than any other team in college basketball. The list of elite teams they’ve defeated this season includes Houston, Alabama, Tennessee, Iowa State, Kentucky and Purdue.
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To say that Auburn doesn’t have a bad loss doesn’t even do the Tigers justice. All five teams who beat Auburn appear in the top 15 of the current AP poll. Four are likely to receive top-two seeds when the bracket is unveiled Sunday evening.
To its credit, Duke did beat Auburn in the lone meeting between the two teams this season at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Duke also holds the edge over Auburn in predictive metrics that take into account its ridiculous average margin of victory in ACC play. The Blue Devils outscored their 20 league opponents this season by an ACC-record 434 points. That’s the largest scoring differential in league play by a power-conference team since 1953-54 Kentucky, per Stathead Basketball.
Where Duke’s case for the No. 1 overall seed unravels is the comparison between who the Blue Devils beat and who Auburn beat. Even after defeating Louisville to win the ACC tournament on Saturday night, Duke has nine Quadrant 1 wins, just over half as many as Auburn. Because of the weakness of the ACC, the Blue Devils only have five victories against the projected NCAA tournament field.
Houston also has an argument after winning the outright Big 12 title by four games and backing that up Saturday night by capturing the conference tournament championship too. Even so, the Cougars still have three fewer Quadrant 1 wins than Auburn. Houston also has a head-to-head loss to the Tigers at the Toyota Center in Houston. Plus, the Cougars are also the only No. 1 seed contender with a loss outside Quadrant 1.
Johni Broome and the Auburn Tigers still figure to be the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament. (Lance King/Getty Images)
Auburn Tigers (28-5, 15-3 SEC)
NET: 2 | SOR: 1 | KenPom 3 | Q1A: 9-5 | Q1B: 7-0 | Q2: 6-0 | Q3, Q4 losses: 0
Marquee wins: Houston, Tennessee, at Alabama, at Kentucky, Iowa State, Purdue
Losses: at Duke, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, at Texas A&M
Duke Blue Devils (31-3, 19-1 ACC)
NET: 1 | SOR: 3 | KenPom 1 | Q1A: 6-3 | Q1B: 3-0 | Q2: 5-0 | Q3, Q4 losses: 0
Marquee wins: Auburn, at Arizona, Louisville (2), Illinois
Losses: Kentucky, Kansas, at Clemson
Houston Cougars (30-4, 19-1 Big 12)
NET: 3 | SOR: 2 | KenPom 2 | Q1A: 7-3 | Q1B: 6-0 | Q2: 7-1 | Q3, Q4 losses: 0
Marquee wins: at Texas Tech, Arizona (2), Kansas (2), Iowa State, BYU (2)
Losses: Auburn, Alabama, Texas Tech, San Diego State
The major question entering Sunday’s SEC title game is whether the final No. 1 seed is at stake. Is Florida already too far ahead of Tennessee for the outcome to make a difference? Or could the Vols overtake the Gators if they beat them for the second time in three meetings?
What’s indisputable is that Florida enters Sunday’s game with the superior résumé. The Gators finished second to Auburn in the SEC, two full games ahead of Tennessee. The two teams split the head-to-head series in the regular season. Tennessee has one more Quadrant 1 victory, but Florida ranks higher in résumé and predictive metrics, has the better Quadrant 1 winning percentage and four more victories in Quadrant 2.
Florida Gators (29-4, 14-4 SEC)
NET: 4 | SOR: 4 | KenPom 2 | Q1A: 7-3 | Q1B: 3-1 | Q2: 9-0 | Q3, Q4 losses: 0
Marquee wins: at Auburn, Alabama (2), Tennessee, Texas A&M, Missouri, at Mississippi State, Ole Miss
Losses: at Tennessee, at Kentucky, Missouri, at Georgia
Tennessee Volunteers (27-6, 12-6 SEC)
NET: 6 | SOR: 7 | KenPom 5 | Q1A: 7-5 | Q1B: 4-1 | Q2: 5-0 | Q3, Q4 losses: 0
Marquee wins: Auburn, Florida, Alabama, at Texas A&M, at Louisville, at Illinois, Missouri
Losses: at Auburn, at Florida, Kentucky (2), at Ole Miss, at Vanderbilt
So if Florida wins on Sunday, the decision is easy for the committee. The Gators join Auburn, Duke and Houston on the No. 1 seed line. The Vols settle for a No. 2 alongside Michigan State and Alabama.
But if Tennessee wins, the Vols would narrow the margin. They’d have only one more loss than Florida, the 2-1 head-to-head advantage over the Gators and a superior list of marquee wins when you consider non-league victories at Louisville and Illinois.
Committee members have long claimed that the results of the Sunday conference tournament title games matter despite evidence to the contrary. They say that they build multiple brackets to account for different outcomes.
Sunday’s SEC title game could provide an intriguing litmus test. There are going to be a lot of angry Tennessee fans if the Vols beat Florida and still don’t surpass the Gators for the final No. 1 seed.
The SEC will almost certainly surpass the record 11 NCAA tournament bids that the 2011 Big East received. The more pertinent question is by how much.
Nine SEC teams have been locks to make the field of 68 for weeks. Most bracket projections have Georgia, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Vanderbilt also sneaking in, though it wouldn’t be too big of a surprise to see the Commodores or Razorbacks relegated to the First Four in Dayton. That leaves Texas as the SEC bubble team with the most agonizing wait between now and the unveiling of the bracket.
The strength of Texas’ résumé is seven Quadrant 1 wins, tied with Oklahoma for the most among bubble teams. The Longhorns defeated the likes of Kentucky, Texas A&M, Missouri and Mississippi State during the regular season and added a second victory over the Aggies during SEC tournament play.
It will be up to the committee to decide whether that’s enough to offset Texas’ glaring flaws. The Longhorns (19-15) have a lot of losses. They’re 10-15 against the top two quadrants. They have a healthy number of quality wins, but they’ve also needed a ridiculous number of opportunities to attain them.
If Texas makes the field, that would likely give the SEC 14 NCAA bids. That feat is only possible because of the SEC’s non-conference dominance this past November and December. The league won 88.9% of its games against other conferences, amassed a 58-19 record against the other four power conferences and notched victories over the likes of Duke, Houston, Texas Tech and St. John’s.
North Carolina found a particularly brutal way to lose what might have been a must-win ACC tournament semifinal against top-ranked Duke on Friday night. A lane violation on forward Jae’Lyn Withers wiped out a game-tying free throw, halted a hellacious second-half comeback and doomed the Tar Heels to a 74-71 loss.
Where that leaves North Carolina is in a precarious position entering Selection Sunday. The Tar Heels are either one of the last teams in or first teams out in most bracket projections.
A hideous 1-12 record in Quadrant 1 games will be the culprit if North Carolina doesn’t hear its name on Sunday evening. UCLA is the only projected NCAA tournament team that the Tar Heels have beaten all season. They also have a Quadrant 3 home loss to Stanford weighing down their résumé.
Advocates for North Carolina point to the Tar Heels’ 8-0 Quadrant 2 record. And to their top-40 predictive metrics. And to the fact that seven of their Quadrant 1 opportunities came against Duke, Auburn, Florida, Alabama and Michigan State — all teams that are likely to receive top-two seeds on Sunday.
That last point is one the committee should take time to ponder. Would Xavier, Texas, Indiana or other bubble teams have done any better against North Carolina’s schedule than the Tar Heels did?
UNC lost a heartbreaker to No. 1 Duke after a late lane violation on Friday night. Now the Tar Heels have to wait and see if they made the NCAA tournament. (Jacob Kupferman/Getty Images)
For the committee, the challenge seeding Gonzaga is the discrepancy between what the Zags have accomplished and how good predictive metrics say they might be. Gonzaga has a résumé worthy of a No. 8 or 9 seed, yet KenPom, the NCAA’s NET rankings and other predictive metrics rank the Zags (25-8) as a top-10 team in the country.
The disagreement is partially a product of how close Gonzaga’s eight losses have been. Three of the eight were in overtime. The other five came by a combined 24 points. All but two came against NCAA tournament-bound opponents. The Zags’ 24.1-point average margin of victory also makes a difference. Only four of their victories all season have been by fewer than 10 points. They trounced Baylor by 38, clobbered Indiana by 16 and won at San Diego State by 13.
Gonzaga enters this year’s NCAA tournament having made nine straight Sweet 16s, matching North Carolina (1985-1993) and Duke (1998-2006) for the longest streaks since the bracket expanded to 64 teams. The playmaking of point guard Ryan Nembhard, the low-post scoring of center Graham Ike and the streaky explosiveness of wing Khalif Battle give the Zags real hope of extending that streak.
This isn’t one of Gonzaga’s best teams of the past decade, but this isn’t the potential second-round draw that a top-two seed will be pleased about either.
