SOCON Adds Games for Conference Foes; Only One Way Forward for Samford

With the rest of the conference playing the final game of this weekend's slate, only the top spot is up for grabs after today's results:

UNCG Upsets Chattanooga 58-50

Furman Defeats Western Carolina 56-44

Mercer Defeats Wofford 83-74 (2OT)

With Chattanooga losing today, they are locked into the 3 seed as they hold a possible tie breaker over Wofford in the result of a tie as Chattanooga split their series against Mercer while Wofford was just swept by the Lady Bears. With Wofford's loss, they are guaranteed the 4 seed for the reason just given.

While nothing really changes in the land of bracketology, Mercer learned this afternoon that they would make up one of the previously postponed games against ETSU in Johnson City, TN next Saturday (2/27). However, this new game won't change anything for seeding. Currently, Samford holds a slim 0.5 game advantage over the Lady bears with the teams set to finish their season series on Thursday the 25th in Mercer. This game will decide who gets to cut down the nets... unless the game gets canceled. In that case, a Mercer victory over ETSU two days later would give Samford the 2 seed. Now, while this may just be a Monday Morning QuarterBack Club thing to say, but one might wonder if the game on Saturday might work against a 1 seed Mercer. For the tournament, the 1 seed plays at 11am Eastern while the 2 seed gets to sleep in and has a tip time of (approximately) 3:30pm Eastern. I admit that a 3-ish hour difference between the games being a huge difference is a bit silly, but I have to hit an arbitrary word count somehow.

TLDR: Samford @ Mercer winner takes the 1 seed, loser gets the 2 seed. Chattanooga is locked into the 3 seed and Wofford gets the 4 seed for the Conference tournament in Asheville.

For the rest of the bracket, UNCG and Furman are tied for 5th, but if the season would have ended today, UNCG would face Wofford as UNCG swept Furman earlier in the season. Furman would then take on Chattanooga as the 6 seed. In my spreadsheet I have WCU as behind ETSU, but SOCON and ESPN have WCU as the 7 seed (even though they are 7.5 games behind Samford while ETSU is 7 games behind ... I'm no math major, but that don't make no sense). But sure, let's go with what SOCON has: WCU would face the loser of Samford-Mercer while ETSU would face the winner of Samford-Mercer. Now that we are at the tail end of another great season, all that we need to worry about is how we do, and there's not a better feeling knowing that you don't have to worry about what another team does either that day or a few days later.

Photo by Chase Cochran