COLUMBIA — South Carolina women's basketball and Texas are both one win away from their SEC Tournament fate being decided by a coin toss.
The No. 6 Gamecocks (25-3) and the No. 1 Longhorns (27-2) are both 14-1 in conference play with one game left on the schedule Sunday. If both teams finish with a win, the SEC stated that a coin flip would take place at the conference office in Birmingham, Alabama, to decide the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in the 2025 SEC Tournament.
Coach Dawn Staley said Wednesday that she thinks "we should've thought a little bit more ahead of this situation knowing that we were bringing a Texas and a Oklahoma into the SEC."
On Friday, after beating Ole Miss on the road and ahead of playing No. 14 Kentucky on Sunday (2 p.m., ESPN) Staley was asked if she was implying there should be another way to break the tie.
"I will say, imagine if it was football and it was a coin flip," Staley said. "Not for who gets the ball first, who gets the first seeding in the national championship. Imagine, imagine. Now I'm not trying to throw the (SEC) commissioner under the bus by any means. It has been part of the tie-breakers for as long as I've been in the SEC and that's what it is."
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In football, per the SEC, "in the event of a tie between teams competing for a place in the conference championship game, the following procedures will be used in descending order until the tie is broken":
For women's basketball, the coin flip is the third of the tie-breaker scenarios:
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How to watch South Carolina-Texas coin flip
According to the SEC, the coin flip will be televised live from the SEC office at halftime of the Ole Miss vs. LSU game, which will be broadcast on SEC Network. Tipoff for that game is 4 p.m. ET.
One side of the coin has the Gamecocks logo, the other the Longhorns. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey will toss the coin into the air, catch it, flip it over on the back of his hand and whichever logo is face up will be declared the No. 1 seed in the SEC Tournament.
"I look forward to the coin flip at this point because that means we won (Sunday)," Staley said. "It is what it is at this point. We're just going to call up to the coin gods."
Lulu Kesin covers South Carolina athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email her at [email protected] and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @Lulukesin