As if March couldn’t get any “Madder,” the Sun Belt Conference announced a new tournament format for the 2025 SBC Men’s Basketball Championship, per the Sun Belt Conference’s website.
The conference will continue to accept all 14 members to its end-of-season tournament, and the tournament will remain a seven-day format. But the conference announced that there will be major changes in how the round byes are distributed.
The release reads: “In an effort to prioritize the value of the 18-game conference regular-season, the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds will now receive byes to the tournament semifinals.”
“The new Sun Belt Basketball Championship brackets will reward our top seeds for their accomplishments during the regular season, ensuring they receive the advantage they’ve earned for their on-court performance,” said SBC Commissioner Keith Gill in a statement.
The bracket (pictured above) now awards byes starting with the 9 and 10-seeds. The bottom four seeds (14, 13, 12, 11) will face off on Tuesday, March 4, with the winners advancing to Wednesday’s matchups with the 9 and 10-seeds. The winners of the second round games will face the 7 and 8-seeds, the next round 5 and 6-seeds, and so on until the final four teams remain. There will also no longer be any off-days during the weeklong tournament.
The top two seeds in the tournament will now play, at most, two games. If a bottom-four-seeded team were to win the tournament, they would need to play (and win) seven games in seven days.
The #SunBelt has announced a new Bracket format for 2025, magnifying the importance of the regular season (and likely tiebreakers). #Pensacola pic.twitter.com/oebIK83vsM
— Rocco Miller (@RoccoMiller8) October 31, 2024
Sun Belt teams will now have to hunker down when conference play begins in December, as every game means that much more when March rolls around.