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NCAA Tournament chair Bubba Cunningham offers insight on 14 SEC teams receiving bids
By Andrew Olson
Published:
The SEC made history with 14 conference teams receiving bids to the 2025 NCAA Tournament.
After the bracket reveal, selection committee chair Bubba Cunningham was asked about the process of seeding 14 teams from the same conference.
Cunningham, also the athletic director at North Carolina, said no team was moved to a different seed, but a lot went into which teams were seeded in which regions to try to minimize early matchups between familiar foes.
“We didn’t move anybody off of a seed line, but we really had to move people around to minimize the conflict early,” Cunningham said. “When you have 4 different regions, we made sure we only had, at most, 4 teams in 1 region so we could spread them out the best we could. … 14 teams, 1 league, in a 68-team bracket is a real challenge to get everyone in there and meet the principles we have to keep the teams apart.”
The previous record belonged to the Big East, with 11 teams making the field in 2011. As you can see on the full NCAA Tournament bracket, there could be some SEC clashes in the second round. But the committee successfully avoided making 2 SEC teams meat in the opening round.
Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaigns of Fred Taylor and Andruw Jones.
