The NCAA Tournament selection committee had make tough decisions with the SEC.
The SEC set a new record with 14 bids in the 2025 March Madness bracket. Never before has a single conference sent so many teams to the NCAA Tournament. It was a historic season for the deepest and most competitive league in college basketball, and the volume of postseason-caliber squads in the expanded conference created what selection committee chair Bubba Cunningham called “a real challenge” in building the bracket.
The selection committee upholds a handful of principles with regard to placing teams from one conference into the bracket. Limiting head-to-head matchups and spreading those teams evenly across the field is of the utmost importance, but doing so with 14 participants is no straightforward task.
“We spent a lot of time on that today,” Cunningham said on CBS. “We didn’t move anybody off of a seed line, but we really had to move people around to minimize the conflict early. When you have four different regions, we made sure we only had, at most, four teams in one region so that we could spread them out the best we could.”
The previous record for most teams from one conference to make the NCAA Tournament was 11. The Big East was responsible for that accomplishment in 2011. Both this year’s SEC and the 2011 Big East had 16 members, so the former sent a larger percentage of its footprint to the tournament.
“We had a couple of contingency brackets,” said Cunningham. “We actually had five. So we had to go back and try to rework the bracket a little bit, again, keeping everyone on the same seed line to move them apart the best that we could. 14 teams, one league, in a 68-team bracket is a real challenge to get everybody in there and meet all the principles that we have about trying to keep the teams apart.”
Auburn secured the No. 1 overall seed despite its losses in three of its last four games, and Florida joined the Tigers on the top seed line. Those two headline their respective regions, both of which include other conference foes.
South Carolina and LSU are the only two teams from the SEC to miss the Big Dance. Texas, meanwhile, scooted into the field as one of the last four in. The Longhorns were part of a heated battle on the bubble, which took center stage as the committee unveiled the bracket.
The SEC accounts for four of the top 10 teams in the latest AP Top 25 rankings, and that is reflected in the bracket with Auburn, Florida, Alabama and Tennessee standing on the top two seed lines. The Gators are the hottest squad of that bunch, and they defeated the Volunteers in the conference tournament championship game just hours prior to the bracket unveil.