South Carolina and Texas appear to be two of the most effective groups within the nation in girls’s faculty basketball. Every are within the high 5 of the most recent AP Ballot, every have paths to safe No. 1 seeds within the NCAA Match, and each rank extremely nationally in offensive and defensive metrics.
However the Gamecocks and Longhorns ended the common season with equivalent data, 15-1, in Southeastern Convention play. South Carolina beat Texas in Columbia, then the Longhorns received revenge over the Gamecocks in Austin.
So, there was a tiebreaker protocol to observe in figuring out who would get the No. 1 total seed within the SEC Match, which begins in Greenville, S.C., later this week. Some conferences have a number of steps and metrics to get by earlier than they offer strategy to likelihood and destiny to find out the seeding. The ACC, for instance, has 5 tie-breaking eventualities it makes use of for soccer. The Huge Ten has a number of parameters laid out for its basketball tournaments too.
In the meantime, the SEC has only a two-step course of within the occasion of a two-team tie atop the standings:
- Head-to-head outcomes
- Win-loss report of the 2 groups versus the No. 1 seed (and continuing by the No. 14 seed, if obligatory)
That’s it. And since South Carolina and Texas didn’t lose another SEC video games, the convention instantly moved to its third possibility, which was:
Sure, actually. Right here’s the way it performed out on Sunday:
Predictably, South Carolina celebrated whereas Texas felt robbed. Particularly, Longhorns coach Vic Schaefer was miffed by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey’s declare that he practiced the coin flip for 2 hours.
“So what was he practising? Was he practising for South Carolina to be heads up or Texas to be heads up?” Schaefer informed the AP. “I imply, why do you must follow for 2 hours? What are you making an attempt to get completed?”
Utilizing a coin flip to find out the No. 1 total seed in a Energy 4 convention event in 2025 feels lazy, on the very least. There are lots of qualifiers and statistics that might’ve been used to find out the result.
Right here’s a number of eventualities the SEC might’ve used to determine this factor out as a substitute:
- Total report (Texas wins)
- Margin of victory (South Carolina wins)
- File towards Quad 1 opponents (South Carolina wins)
- Profitable proportion towards the highest 100 groups within the NET (Texas wins)
As a substitute of doing all that math although, Sankey and the SEC did what they do greatest: they made everybody concentrate. They turned a easy coin flip right into a tv spectacle. For a couple of minutes on Sunday, the SEC commanded consideration. Ladies’s basketball followers tweeted concerning the coin flip and discuss radio hosts had rants about it.
Certainly, it simply means extra.
So, mission completed, Mr. Sankey.
However in the event you actually need to drive up the scores subsequent time, don’t simply accept a coin flip. Give us a free throw contest or recreation of HORSE between the coaches of the 2 groups tied on the high. Let on-line sportbooks run betting traces on it.
In fact, the favourite would’ve been Daybreak Staley.
Possibly the coin flip turned out the way it was imagined to in spite of everything.
