Selection Sunday: 5 toughest decisions facing NCAA tournament selection committee

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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:

1. Is Auburn still the No. 1 overall seed?

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…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/college-basketball/article/selection-sunday-5-toughest-decisions-facing-ncaa-tournament-selection-committee-233731175.html

Author : Jeff Eisenberg

Publish date : 2025-03-15 23:37:00

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