Southern is No. 16 seed in NCAA tournament, will face Holy Cross in First Four game in Dayton, Ohio

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Southern will play fellow No. 16 seed Holy Cross in a First Four game in the NCAA tournament Wednesday in Dayton, Ohio.

The teams will tip off at 5:40 p.m. CDT, and the game will air on truTV. The winner will play the No. 1 seed in the West region — Oregon — at 6:27 p.m. Friday in Spokane, Washington. That game also will air on truTV.

“At the end of the day, it didn’t matter who or where,” Jaguars coach Roman Banks said. “We were just glad to see our name pop up on the screen.”

Southern (22-12) is playing in the NCAA tournament for the first time in four seasons after claiming an automatic bid by winning the Southwestern Athletic Conference tournament championship. The fourth-seeded Jaguars edged third-seeded Jackson State 54-53 in the title game Saturday night at the Toyota Center in Houston. The program had been ineligible for postseason play the past two seasons because the university had submitted “unusable data” on student-athletes Academic Progress Rates to the NCAA.

“To make the NCAA tournament the first year after the ban was lifted speaks volumes about these student-athletes,” Banks said.

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