2020 Southwest Basketball Tournament

Not every person from Texas is born with a belief in Texan exceptionalism. Only most such persons are.

As a child growing up in the Metroplex, I believed in it. Though certain other aspects of my life and nascent worldview may have contradicted with that belief — family ties and sports allegiances to Minnesota; a distaste for Texas' largely bland rural areas; and a lifelong disconnect with the state's sizable population of rednecks (in some parts known as Aggies) — I still felt that I lived somewhere special.

From the time I first heard it, I have celebrated the (perhaps mythical) line from Davy Crockett's concession speech after losing an election in Tennessee: "You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas." The president was Texan. I didn't yet like Buddy Holly and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but so were they. Tex-Mex, Whataburger, Dr. Pepper, and the best barbecue are Texan. All of my friends were Texan. Texas Tech University, my parents' school, was in Texas. And Denton, my hometown, was in Texas. What a place this was.

I was Texan, but I was also a sports fan. With time, I discovered the NCAA Tournament and then college basketball video games. When I found the game mode that allowed you to play a 32- or 64-team tournament and pick the competitors, my brain quickly turned to the idea of an all-Texas tournament. However, I ran out of teams quickly. So I begrudgingly granted bids to teams from Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and even Oklahoma to complete the field.

I never played through a whole tournament, as I think the mere concept was always more alluring to me than the real possibility of Tech's run ending after two rounds because I wasn't very good at the game. But that concept stuck with me.

Two years ago, I brought that idea to this space, picking teams based on their RPI ranks. I chose venues in the five-state cluster based on overly ambitious minimum capacities (few arenas in Arkansas or New Mexico hold 9,000 or more people) and held regional finals in NBA arenas, which guaranteed that future editions of the exercise would boringly rotate between the same handful of places. And I went on a bit too long about the selection process when really, all anyone who read the post would have cared about was the bracket.

I changed a few things last year, using KenPom ranks instead and lowering the capacity threshold for the early rounds. And I spent a little less time droning.

This year, our only college basketball tournaments exist in our minds or digitally, whether in the archives of the internet, on the hard drives of gamers, or in hypotheticals about what might have been. Today, the real NCAA Tournament would have started. As a result, I felt compelled to put together this post earlier than normal and help try to fill the content void. I hope it is a noble effort.

Before we get to the bracket: I have again made a couple of tweaks to the process. First, the capacity threshold is no longer a hard rule. If a venue holds nearly 7,000 people for basketball, I accepted it. Within each region, there are two venues in the first two rounds; I tried to assign the games likely to draw more fans to the larger venues.

Second, host schools no longer automatically get assigned to their sites or those sites' regions. When I did this in the past, it created unfair situations for teams who weren't hosts. For example: In 2019, 7-seed Arkansas-Little Rock played their first round game against 2-seed Baylor in Little Rock, essentially getting a home game. Like in the NCAA Tournament, I tried to assign teams to regions that made sense for them geographically, but I did not make ideal geographical placement my priority. That also ensures greater bracket integrity.

With that out of the way: Here are the sites for this year's Southwest Basketball Tournament.

South

Play-in Games and Round of 32

H-E-B Center — Cedar Park, TX (capacity: 7,200)

Host: Texas State

William J. Nicks Building — Prairie View, TX (6,500)

Prairie View A&M

Sweet 16 and Elite Eight

Frank Erwin Center — Austin, TX (16,540)

Texas

West

Play-in Games and Round of 32

Kay Yeager Coliseum — Wichita Falls, TX (7,380)

North Texas

Santa Ana Star Center — Rio Rancho, NM (6,000-7,000)

New Mexico

Sweet 16 and Elite Eight

Don Haskins Center — El Paso, TX (11,892)

UTEP

North

Play-in Games and Round of 32

College Park Center — Arlington, TX (7,000)

UT-Arlington

Cox Convention Center — Tulsa, OK (13,846)

Oral Roberts/Tulsa

Sweet 16 and Elite Eight

Dickies Arena — Fort Worth, TX (13,550)

TCU

East

Play-in Games and Round of 32

River City Arena — Baton Rouge, LA (8,900)

LSU

Sudduth Coliseum — Lake Charles, LA (7,450)

McNeese State

Sweet 16 and Elite Eight

American Bank Center — Corpus Christi, TX (10,000)

Texas A&M-Corpus Christi

Final Four

Simmons Bank Arena — North Little Rock, AR (18,000)

Arkansas-Little Rock

North Little Rock may not be the most obvious city to host the Final Four, but it is home to an NBA-sized arena. Every state in the tournament is meant to host the Final Four every once in a while; since Arkansas had not yet hosted, I decided 2020 would the year it does. Though Fayetteville has a larger arena by capacity, it's on the University of Arkansas campus. I'd prefer not to hold the championship at a neutral site. Therefore, there isn't a more obvious place in Arkansas to put the Final Four than North Little Rock.

Here are your Round of 32 matchups:

South

1. Baylor vs. 8. UL-Lafayette/Southern (Cedar Park, TX)

2. Texas vs. 7. Rice (Cedar Park, TX)

3. TCU vs. 6. Abilene Christian (Prairie View, TX)

4. Texas State vs. 5. Oral Roberts (Prairie View, TX)

West

1. Texas Tech vs. 8. UL-Monroe/Prairie View A&M (Wichita Falls, TX)

2. Oklahoma State vs. 7. Nicholls State (Rio Rancho, NM)

3. Tulsa vs. 6. UTEP (Rio Rancho, NM)

4. SMU vs. 5. UT-Arlington (Wichita Falls, TX)

North

1. Oklahoma vs. 8. Lamar/UTRGV (Tulsa, OK)

2. Arkansas vs. 7. Arkansas-State (Arlington, TX)

3. North Texas vs. 6. New Mexico (Arlington, TX)

4. Stephen F. Austin vs. 5. Arkansas-Little Rock (Tulsa, OK)

East

1. Houston vs. 8. Sam Houston State/Northwestern State (Lake Charles, LA)

2. LSU vs. 7. UTSA (Baton Rouge, LA)

3. Louisiana Tech vs. 6. Tulane (Baton Rouge, LA)

4. New Mexico State vs. 5. Texas A&M (Lake Charles, LA)

Baylor is the No. 1 overall seed, followed by Houston, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma.

Likely the biggest disadvantage any team in the bracket faces compared to their peers is in a 3-vs.-6 matchup. There is a 46-spot rank difference in KenPom between the best 6-seed (New Mexico) and the second-best (Abilene Christian), and a four-spot difference between the second-best and worst 6 seeds. This means that North Texas, relative to other 3-seeds, got a tough draw. The reason that happened, despite TCU being the lowest-ranked 3-seed, is that UNT is in Oklahoma's region. Oklahoma, being the lowest ranked 1-seed, has to face the toughest region (based on the average KenPom rank of the other teams in the region). Because of the rankings gap between 6-seeds, the placement of New Mexico played a major part making this the case.

You can view the bracket below. Additionally, linked here is the spreadsheet in which I did my work.

Click to enlarge.

We won't ever be able to watch this tournament, but it's entertaining to imagine. Hopefully, next year, we get to watch any tournament at all.