Can Southern Miss basketball return to the Big Dance this year? What to know.
The secret is out. Southern Miss basketball is back.
The Golden Eagles are 20-game winners for the first time since 2019 and on track for their most wins in a season since 2014.
As of right now, USM (21-4, 10-2) is tied for first in the Sun Belt and among the favorites to earn the league’s auto-bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Southern Miss has not reached the Big Dance since 2012, when it received an at-large bid out of a beefy Conference USA that featured the Memphis Tigers at the time. That was 11 seasons and four coaches ago and the odds of capturing another at-large bid are much lower now than before.
But it isn’t impossible. The guaranteed route is always the goal for every mid-major and USM is no different.
Here’s where the Golden Eagles stand less than a month away from the conference tournament.
The easy way in
The “easy” way in isn’t so easy, but it puts USM in control of its own destiny. Until the league tournament begins in Pensacola later this month, every team is in control.
Heading into a monumental game against Louisiana, the Golden Eagles are tied for first place with those visiting Cajuns.
A win would give USM sole possession of the top spot in the SBC, but most importantly it would be Jay Ladner’s team on track to nab one of the coveted top-four seeds in the conference bracket.
The top four teams receive not one, but two byes in the tournament. The Sun Belt has gone through several iterations of its own tournament over the years and its most recently taken the popular Mid-Major approach of giving its best teams the best possible shot at playing extra games against the league’s other top teams.
This is designed to improve the odds of the SBC pumping out a second, at-large bid to the NCAA tournament along with the auto-qualifying conference champion.
The last time the SBC was a two-bid league was in 2013 when both Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky made the tournament. The only other year this century that saw the SBC produce multiple bids was 2007.
The hard way in
The only route into the NCAA Tournament without winning the conference tournament is to impress a select group of people who are in control of which non-conference champions play for a national title and who doesn’t: the selection committee.
There are 32 automatic qualifiers and the committee, via secret ballot, picks the other 36 at-large teams to fill the 68-bid tournament.
The committee uses various means and tools to find those 36 and seed them among the 68 and the biggest is the still-new NET ranking.
NET rankings attempt to rank teams via strength of their resumés by breaking down different games into four quads. A Quad One game would be against a top-30 team at home or a top-75 team on the road.
If a team is just inside the top-75 in NET ranking, it has an outside shot of receiving an at-large bid.
If it’s inside the top-50, those odds begin to increase. Southern Miss is currently No. 59 in NET, an impressively high ranking for an SBC club this late into the season.
Working in USM’s favor is the fact Marshall sits at No. 75, James Madison at No. 84 and Louisiana at No. 85. The more higher-ranked teams in a league, the more likely one will emerge as a serious at-large bid contender.
According to the latest bracketology projections, ESPN has Louisiana earning the SBC’s auto bid while CBS Sports has the Golden Eagles winning the league. Neither expect the SBC to produce an at-large team and neither even include an SBC team as “on the bubble.”
So what needs to happen for USM to get in without a league title? It needs to win. Southern Miss, which ranks No. 89 on KenPom.com, has one game left in the regular season against another KP top-100 team and that is Thursday night’s showdown with Louisiana.
For USM, the game is a Quad Three contest, in which the Golden Eagles are currently 3-1 in. It’s a Quad One game for the Cajuns, who are searching for their first Q1 win of the season.
It’s a rare schedule-booster within the SBC slate that both teams will be looking to take advantage of. The winner will be the projected auto-bid on every bracketology service, while the other will have some work to do to crawl onto the tournament bubble and hope to hear their name called on Selection Sunday.
The most likely outcome is the NIT takes multiple SBC teams and the Big Dance welcomes the lone auto-bid. Until that time, USM has six regular season games to remain in the conversation before a do-or-die tournament down on the beach.
This story was originally published February 8, 2023 at 1:48 PM.
