Bobcats still in title race with one game remaining

One final regular season game and Texas State women’s basketball has a shot at its first conference title in 15 years.

Texas State, which beat Louisiana 58-51 on Wednesday, is sitting one game back of JMU for first place in the Sun Belt standings going into Friday’s regular season finale at Arkansas State (7 pm, ESPN+).

The Bobcats will need a win and a Dukes loss – they host Marshall on Friday at 4 p.m. CT – to claim a share of the regular season conference championship. The last time the Bobcats won a regular season conference title was in 2007-08 in the Southland Conference.

And while Texas State is chasing a conference championship, it is also fighting for a top-four seed in the Sun Belt Conference Championship tournament next week in Pensacola, Fla. The top-four seeds in the postseason tournament earn a double-bye and do not play their first game until Friday, March 3. The opening round games take place on Tuesday, February 28 while the championship game is on Monday, March 6.

The Bobcats are currently tied with Southern Miss, Old Dominion and Troy for second place in the Sun Belt standings. The trio is one game up on Georgia Southern (11-6 Sun Belt) and none of those five teams play each other on the final day in the regular season.

That means it is possible that four teams come out of Friday tied for second – and one of those four second-place teams misses out on a double-bye.

It is also possible, with a JMU loss and wins by Texas State, Southern Miss, Old Dominion and Troy, that five teams share a claim to the Sun Belt regular season title. In other words, a “regular season champion” could miss out on a double-bye in the tournament. In this scenario, and based on the Sun Belt tiebreaker, Old Dominion would lose out on a top-four seed and Texas State would be the No. 2 seed.

In the Sun Belt, the tie breaking formula for situations of three or more teams tied is first considered by the highest win-loss percentage against each other. Therefore, entering Friday, Texas State leads in the tiebreaker with the three other teams in second place, thanks to two wins over Southern Miss and one against Old Dominion.

If Texas State wins and Troy loses on Friday, it secures a No. 2 seed in the Sun Belt tournament (it loses the tiebreaker to JMU for the No. 1 seed if there is a tie between the two for the top spot).

If it loses, Texas State needs a loss by any one of Southern Miss, ODU or Troy to keep a top-four seed. If all three of those teams win and Texas State loses, it would be the No. 5 seed in the Sun Belt tournament and play its first game on Wednesday, March 1 at 2 p.m. The other scenarios in which Texas State would miss out on a top-four seed is if Troy and Georgia Southern lose while Southern Miss and ODU win OR Texas State and Troy lose while Southern Miss, ODU and Georgia Southern all win. Texas State lost both games to Troy this year, which hurts it in a head-to-head with the Trojans or a pool tiebreaker when Southern Miss and ODU are not involved due to possible Friday wins.