The NCAA Tournament bubble is very crowded this year, like it is almost every year, but the overall field of teams next to the cut line doesn’t seem as strong heading into the 2025 edition of the Big Dance. One of the teams that will be anxiously awaiting its fate on Selection Sunday is Texas.
The Longhorns have battled through plenty of adversity this season, but the gauntlet that is the SEC this season has gotten the better of them more times than not.
That doesn’t mean that Rodney Terry and company didn’t battle. Entering the SEC Tournament, the consensus was that Texas needed at least one win to keep his hopes of making the 68-team field alive. Terry and company one-upped that, following up a first-round win against Vanderbilt with a second-round victory over No. 5 seed Texas A&M in double overtime.
Even though the Longhorns didn’t have enough in the tank to go toe-to-toe with Tennessee, one of the most physical teams in college basketball, in an 83-72 quarterfinal loss, Terry still believes that this Texas team can make some noise in the NCAA Tournament, via Wes Rucker of 247 Sports.
“I wouldn’t want to play us right now,” Terry said, per Rucker. “We have our full team together for the first time all year. We’ve got a guy [Tre Johnson] who can go off for 30-plus. We’re dangerous.”
Texas is only 19-15 overall, which doesn’t suggest that it has a great chance of being selected in about 48 hours time. However, a little bit of deeper digging into that record helps Texas’ case.
This Texas basketball team doesn’t have a single loss against a Quad 3 or Quad 4 team, going 9-0 in those games. It also has 10 victories in games against the top two quadrants, which is significantly more than most of the other teams that it is competing with on the bubble.
Other teams around the Longhorns, such as North Carolina, don’t have the quality of wins that they have accumulated both recently and throughout the season. With Texas playing some of its best basketball at the end of the season combined with an impressive group of skins during the season, the Longhorns should feel good about their chances of getting into the Big Dance.
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