Texas is on the NCAA Tournament bubble on Selection Sunday

The Horns won two games in the SEC Tournament, but it may not be enough after some bad losses in conference play and a poor non-conference schedule.

It’s Selection Sunday with the bracket reveal looming at 5 p.m. Central on CBS and the Texas Longhorns are anxiously awaiting their NCAA Tournament fate after a 19-15 season that included a 6-12 record in SEC play and a three-game run in the SEC Tournament that has head coach Rodney Terry’s team firmly on the bubble.

Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology at ESPN has Texas on the outside looking in as the second team out behind Boise State with Vanderbilt, San Diego State, Indiana, and Xavier as the last four teams in the field.

At BracketMatrix.com, the Horns are one of six teams listed as a No. 11 seed, appearing in 53 of the 106 brackets tracked by the site with BartTorvik.com putting the team’s tournament odds at 58.2 percent — of the 10 teams with the most similar resumes, five participated in March Madness and five did not.

So put the odds at roughly even that the Longhorns hear their name called on Sunday evening, leaving time for debating the merits of the bubble team’s resumes.

Of the five bubble teams compared above — North Carolina, Texas, Boise State, and Xavier — the Longhorns are second in the NET rankings used by the selection committee, but have significantly more Quad 1 victories, especially compared to the Tar Heels, which have a single Quad 1 win over the Bruins.

Texas also has the most difficult overall schedule, but won’t benefit from a non-conference schedule that only included a single Quad 1 opponent, Ohio State, which defeated the Horns in Las Vegas on opening night.

One factor that will work in favor of the Texas resume is conference strength — the SEC is the highest-rated league in the country this season and should break the record for most teams from one conference to make the NCAA Tournament with Lunardi projecting the selection of 13 of the conference’s 16 teams. Terry believes it’s the best conference he’s seen in nearly 30 years of coaching.

But the Longhorns also performed poorly against the conference’s worst teams. Against the five other teams at the bottom of the SEC standings, Texas went 3-4 with blowout losses to Georgia and South Carolina and two losses to Arkansas, one of the last four byes, according to Lunardi.

There’s also the injury factor, as Texas only played five games at full health all season. Three of those games came in the SEC Tournament in which the Horns played well, including the double-overtime win over the Aggies, a projected No. 4 seed.

“We’d be a dangerous matchup in the NCAA tournament because we’re finally healthy. We have our full allotment of guys. We’re playing pretty good at the right time of year. We have a guy that can go into the tournament and he can score 30 points in a game. You have a guy that can come into a tournament setting, score 30 points in a game, you’re nervous dealing with that. Tennessee had that last year. At any time they could have a guy that could explode for 30,” Terry said after the loss to Tennessee.

“When you have scoring and star power like that, you’re always a dangerous team. Tramon [Mark] played well down the stretch for us. I thought everybody was playing at the kind of level they would play for us all season, to be honest.”