Coin Toss Controversy: South Carolina and Texas Face Unconventional Seeding Decision
Generally speaking, when anyone refers to a coin flip, the first thing that comes to mind is the start of a football game. However, in college basketball, a coin flip is occasionally used as a last resort in a tiebreaking event, when all other criteria seem to fail to break the tie. Conferences have a set criterion to break ties, which usually include head-to-head records, performance against opponents, and records against teams in descending order of standings. However, in rare cases, if two teams remain tied after all standard tiebreaking criteria are met, a coin flip conducted by the conference commissioner or a designated official will decide the seeding.
Currently, the SEC is facing this exact potential scenario with the South Carolina and Texas women’s basketball teams. Both teams could end their regular season schedules with identical records and split head-to-head results. So what happens now?
Well, each team has been evaluated on the results of games between the tied teams, and the conference officials have compared each team’s performance against mutual opponents, starting from the highest-ranked team in the conference standings and so on.
So now, if both South Carolina and Texas win their respective games on Sunday, a coin flip will take place at the SEC Conference office in Birmingham on Sunday. It will be televised at halftime during the Ole Miss v. LSU game. Tipoff for that game is at 4pm EST.
The coin in question is not a quarter out of someone’s pocket, but rather a special made coin with a South Carolina logo on one side and the University of Texas logo on the other. The commissioner himself will make the coin flip, catch the coin and flip it over on the backside of his hand. Whichever logo is face up when he moves his hand away, will be declared as the No. 1 seed.
Interestingly enough, if Texas had not been invited to join the Southeastern Conference, we wouldn’t even have to anxiously wait on the flip of a coin during haltime. Last night, during the Gamecocks game against Ole Miss, Dawn Staley expressed her thoughts on the coin flip.
Women’s NCAA Tournament Top 16 seeds revealed: South Carolina drops to No. 2
On Thursday night, the women’s NCAA Tournament selection committee revealed their second and final top 16 seed projections for the season.
There were significant changes at the top of the rankings, however. The USC Trojans topped the chart as the No. 1 seed following an upset over UCLA. On the flip side, South Carolina dropped to a No. 2 seed due to the 87-58 loss to UConn on February 16. It is the first time since the 2018-2019 tournament that head coach Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks are not a No. 1 seed. The good news is, they have the opportunity to rebound. South Carolina will play Kentucky on Sunday to earn the coin toss for the seeding.
The complete top 16 seed projections are as follows:
- UCLA
- Texas
- USC
- Notre Dame
- South Carolina
- UConn
- LSU
- NC State
- TCU
- UNC
- Duke
- Tennessee
- Oklahoma
- Kentucky
- Kansas State
- Ohio State
There is still a lot that can change to shift the seedings before the actual tournament seeds are announced. But these projections from the selection committee set the stage for an intensely competitive NCAA Tournament, with several of these teams aiming for top positions.
