Coin Toss Controversy: South Carolina and Texas Face Unconventional Seeding Decision

Generally speaking, when anyone refers to a coin flip, the first thing that comes to mind is the start of a football game. However, in college basketball, a coin flip is occasionally used as a last resort in a tiebreaking event, when all other criteria seem to fail to break the tie. Conferences have a set criterion to break ties, which usually include head-to-head records, performance against opponents, and records against teams in descending order of standings. However, in rare cases, if two teams remain tied after all standard tiebreaking criteria are met, a coin flip conducted by the conference commissioner or a designated official will decide the seeding.

Currently, the SEC is facing this exact potential scenario with the South Carolina and Texas women's basketball teams. Both teams could end their regular season schedules with identical records and split head-to-head results. So what happens now?

Well, each team has been evaluated on the results of games between the tied teams, and the conference officials have compared each team's performance against mutual opponents, starting from the highest-ranked team in the conference standings and so on.

So now, if both South Carolina and Texas win their respective games on Sunday, a coin flip will take place at the SEC Conference office in Birmingham on Sunday. It will be televised at halftime during the Ole Miss v. LSU game. Tipoff for that game is at 4pm EST.

The coin in question is not a quarter out of someone's pocket, but rather a special made coin with a South Carolina logo on one side and the University of Texas logo on the other. The commissioner himself will make the coin flip, catch the coin and flip it over on the backside of his hand. Whichever logo is face up when he moves his hand away, will be declared as the No. 1 seed.

Interestingly enough, if Texas had not been invited to join the Southeastern Conference, we wouldn't even have to anxiously wait on the flip of a coin during haltime. Last night, during the Gamecocks game against Ole Miss, Dawn Staley expressed her thoughts on the coin flip.