Welcome to Selection Sunday — the one day of the year where months of basketball get reduced to a one-hour show and a bracket graphic. You know what that means. Grab the remote, find CBS and find out where the Longhorns are headed — whether it’s somewhere across the country or nowhere at all.

Texas has done everything in its power for the second year in a row to leave both fans and bracketologists across the nation wondering and predicting if they will get to watch the Longhorns play in the field of 68. And with its recently updated resume, Texas doesn’t necessarily deserve a berth more or less than the other teams in the same boat.

How did we get here?

Texas has been on the bubble for the majority of the season, but lifted itself into the 8-9 seed conversations after going 6–1 from Jan. 24 to Feb. 17. But since then, the Longhorns closed out the season 1–5 for an 18–14 record. Now, Texas is widely considered the last team into the field, with bracketmatrix.com, an accumulation of all credible bracketologists in the world, having them in 89 of the 111 total brackets to be listed — the least amount out of any of the other bubble teams.

Joe Lunardi, founder of bracket predictions, said he was adamant that the Longhorns will make the field.

“I just think they have too many good wins to miss at this point,” Lunardi said.

But that was before the loss to Ole Miss in the first round of the Southeastern Conference tournament. Before Oklahoma made a run to the quarterfinals. Before an undefeated Miami (Ohio) got knocked out in the first round of its tournament by a 17-16 UMass.

Lunardi calls it a “bid thief” when a school not in the field beats a school locked into the tournament to get the automatic qualifier into the tournament. Texas, already on the edge of the bubble, can’t exactly afford to have its tournament pocket picked.

“A whole bunch of things have to go sideways,” Lunardi said. “On the order of almost what we had a couple of years ago, when there were five bid stealers all the way up through Sunday, and the at-large board just crumbled.”

So here’s the deal: Texas will either be playing in the first four in Dayton, Ohio, come either Tuesday or Wednesday as an 11-seed, or will not be playing at all.

And this is the situation: There are seven schools gunning for four spots, according to Lunardi. Other than Texas, those include Miami (Ohio), Missouri, SMU, Oklahoma and Auburn.

Texas head coach Sean Miller kept it real when asked about whether his squad deserves to be in the field.

“The bullseye is to always be a part of that tournament,” Miller said. “You’ve failed if you are not a part of it. I don’t want to come across any different than that — I own that. But the reality of it is, the thing about the tournament is, you’ve got to earn it. And you’ve got to be super excited. I mean, this is March Madness. You’ve got to fly around.”

Now I don’t exactly have an argument on why Texas deserves to be in the field. As Lunardi put it, “best” is a subjective measure, but “deserving” is more based on facts. Nobody necessarily deserves it more than the other.

So, when you get on the couch on Sunday at 5 p.m. CT, all I ask is for you to watch the 11-seed line closely. If the bracket card reads “Texas,” Miller and the Longhorns will have earned their flight to Dayton.

And if it doesn’t — well, I’ll have another column to write.