Rest easy, college basketball fans. Selection Sunday has finally arrived meaning the glory of March Madness and the NCAA Tournament is right around the corner.
No. 2 South Carolina (30-3) is now a week removed from winning its ninth SEC Tournament championship. The Gamecocks moved up to No. 2 from No. 5 in The Associated Press Top 25 after knocking off No. 1 Texas in the conference title game.
An SEC championship win should make the Gamecocks all but a lock to be one of the four No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament.
There’s also a solid shot South Carolina is the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament. Dawn Staley believes as much should be true. “We’re going to be the overall number one seed.
It’s really simple,” Staley said Tuesday on the “Carolina Calls” radio show. “It’s not the new math. The new math may have us second, third or fourth or maybe a two seed.
But the old, original math with the body of work, the schedule that we put together, the Quad 1 wins, the strength of schedule, the NET.
If you add all those metrics together, nobody has the body of work we have.”
USC is No. 2 in the latest NET rankings behind UConn. The Gamecocks have 16 Quad 1 wins, two more than anyone else. South Carolina has lost three times this season: by five points to UCLA in November, and by four points to Texas and 29 points to UConn, respectively, last month.
“You can look at the three losses and you can say the Connecticut loss was an embarrassing loss — and it was — but how we responded to each and every loss I think shows the type of team that we are,” Staley said on the radio show.