SOCON Changes Seeding Rules for Conference Championship; What that Means for Samford + WBB Scenarios

On Friday, the Southern Conference announced a number of changes to this year's Southern Conference Basketball Tournament (The corporation that sponsors the tournament has not produced anything that I have used, thus I don't have to bend the knee to another corporate overlord sponsor . . . pretty sure that's how that works . . .) One change is that there will be no general admission tickets available, which, ok, sure. That makes some sense with a pandemic going on and whatnot. The conference also announced that the fan center and other extra events would not occur. Again, makes sense. With the only people that will be allowed to attend the games being the band, cheer, and dance teams, and family members of players and coaches, there's no need for extra people to be in the arena and just stand around with no one enjoying their attractions. The "biggest" item from today's press release was the announcement of an extended tie-breaking procedure. Exciting stuff.

The full press release will be linked at the end of the article, but the TLDR version is as follows:

As long as your team played 12 non-conference games and at least 1 conference game this season, then congratulations, your team can play for the automatic bid to March Madness if the tournament gets canceled. To be eligible for the top seed, your team has to play a set number of conference games (10 for men, 8 for women). After that, it's business as usual when it comes to crunching the numbers to find out who has the easiest matchup on the first day of the tournament. Like I said before, real exciting stuff. So what does this mean for the men's and women's teams?

Men's Basketball

Not a lot changes for the men as they are currently 5.5 games behind league leading UNCG and only 5 games remaining on the Bulldogs' schedule. Best case scenario, I see the Bulldogs winning 3, with it more likely that we only win 2 (@ VMI and @ The Citadel). At this point, however, I think all that really matters is using these next 5 games to shake off the rust curtesy of the nearly 3 week layoff due to quarantine and contact tracing.

Women's Basketball

This is where the tie breaking procedures could really come into play (at least, for us here at the only SOCON Basketball school in Alabama). Currently, the Bulldogs hold a slim 0.5 game advantage over the Mercer Lady Bears (the preseason favorite). The Lady Bears' weekend series was canceled with ETSU over COVID concerns, so Samford got some unexpected wiggle room at the top of the standings, which drastically increased the number of combinations of Samford clinching the regular season title. Mercer and Samford will switch opponents next week, which has a distinct possibility of the winner of the Samford @ Mercer game on Feb 25 to crown the SOCON Regular Season champ. Time for every sports fan's favorite thing: clinching scenarios!

- SAMFORD CONTROLS OWN DESTINY-

Samford needs to sweep ETSU and either beat Mercer in Macon, GA, OR, Samford needs to sweep ETSU and have Mercer lose at least one game to Wofford.

If Samford and Mercer go unbeaten during the week of Feb 15 and Samford wins on the final day of regular season play: 1. Samford 2. Mercer 3. UTC* 4. Wofford**

If Samford sweeps ETSU and Mercer and Wofford split.

Samford win vs Mercer: 1. Samford 2. UTC* 3. Mercer 4. Wofford**

Samford loss vs Mercer: 1. Samford 2. Mercer 3. UTC* 4. Wofford**

-Samford gets 1 seed despite being swept @ Wofford-

Samford sweeps ETSU AND Wofford and Mercer split AND Samford wins vs Mercer: 1. Samford, 2. Wofford** 3. UTC* 4. Mercer

* assuming Chattanooga sweeps WCU, UNCG, and beats ETSU. (3-4 of those games will be home games for the Mocs, so I like those odds)

** assuming Wofford defeats Furman (game will be @ Furman)

While individual games are fun, it's times like these where the season is starting to come to a close where the playoff picture is still pretty fuzzy, but it's a lot clearer than it was as recently as Wednesday. And while a regular season championship means almost nothing if not paired with a tournament championship, at least the t-shirt looks cool.

Tournament changes

EDIT: This article was edited after an error was found in the calculations. As such, the number of combinations that need to happen to allow Samford to clinch the 1 seed have decreased.