Tre Johnson gets to dance.
The Texas Longhorns were one of the last teams in the NCAA Tournament field announced on Selection Sunday, landing a First Four matchup in Dayton on Wednesday against the Xavier Musketeers as the No. 11 seeds in the Midwest Region.
The winner will face No. 6 seed Illinois.
Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology at ESPN had Texas on the outside looking in as the second team out behind Boise State with Vanderbilt, San Diego State, Indiana, and Xavier as the last four teams in the field.
At BracketMatrix.com, the Horns were one of six teams listed as a No. 11 seed, appearing in 53 of the 106 brackets tracked by the site with BartTorvik.com putting the team’s tournament odds at 58.2 percent — of the 10 teams with the most similar resumes, five participated in March Madness and five did not.
With the odds of the Longhorns making the tournament somewhere around 50 percent after a 6-12 conference record prior to winning two games in the SEC Tournament, it looked like Texas might miss out when North Carolina and San Diego State were selected as the other First Four teams on the 11 line.
But Texas managed to squeak in as one of the last four teams in with the help of seven Quad 1 wins and an historically strong SEC that Terry called the best conference he’s seen in nearly 30 years of coaching with a record-breaking 14 SEC teams making the tournament.
So although it appeared that the Terry and the Horns were close to wasting the one year of freshman phenom Tre Johnson in college basketball, Johnson will now have his chance to make an impact in March Madness.
The team’s improving health at the end of the season was perhaps a factor in the selection committee’s decision, as well — the three SEC Tournament games represented three of the five games that the Horns were fully healthy all season.
“We’d be a dangerous matchup in the NCAA tournament because we’re finally healthy. We have our full allotment of guys. We’re playing pretty good at the right time of year. We have a guy that can go into the tournament and he can score 30 points in a game. You have a guy that can come into a tournament setting, score 30 points in a game, you’re nervous dealing with that. Tennessee had that last year. At any time they could have a guy that could explode for 30,” Terry said after the loss to Tennessee.
“When you have scoring and star power like that, you’re always a dangerous team. Tramon [Mark] played well down the stretch for us. I thought everybody was playing at the kind of level they would play for us all season, to be honest.”
Xavier enters the First Four with a 21-11 record overall and 13-7 mark in the Big East under third-year head coach Sean Miller. The Musketeers got in with the No. 45 NET ranking and No. 37 ranking in adjusted efficiency, but just one Quad 1 win in 10 opportunities.
