Despite falling to costly defeats against No. 1 Texas, No. 3 UConn, and No. 4 UCLA, South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley has adamantly stated the case for her team

South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley has admitted that losing to Geno Auriemma’s Connecticut was an “embarrassing defeat” – before asserting that her team should be No. 1 seed in March Madness.

The four-time Naismith Coach of the Year is preparing to lead her defending champions into the NCAA Tournament as the No. 2 seeds in the competition based on current projections. However, following the Gamecocks’ resounding victories over Vanderbilt, Oklahoma, and Texas in the SEC Tournament, Staley has revealed her frustrations.

Ultimately, South Carolina has lost three times this season but the South Carolina HC has been eager to stress that these losses came against top quality opposition in the form of No. 1 Texas, No. 3 UConn, and No. 4 UCLA. Staley recently guided her team to a third-straight SEC Tournament triumph.

With Selection Sunday set to take place on March 16, the team will learn its fate in terms of its seeding on that date as they face an anxious wait in the interim days before the decision is made. Either way, Staley stated her case for the Gamecocks being No. 1 seeds in March Madness, saying: “We’re going to be the overall number one seed. It’s really simple.

“It’s not the new math. The new math may have us second, third or fourth or maybe a two-seed. But the old original math with the body of work, the schedule that we put together, the Quad One wins, the strength of schedule, the NET. If you add all those metrics together, nobody has the body of work we have.”

While confessing that the defeat to Connecticut, in particular, proved costly, she praised her team for their response, adding: “You can look at the three losses and you can say the Connecticut loss was an embarrassing loss, and it was. But how we responded to each and every loss, I think, shows the type of team that we are.”

Staley also stressed that her all-conquering team has had to play a tough schedule, as she further presented her argument on the subject of seeding. She vowed: When you win this tournament and play the schedule that we play, I do think we’re the No. 1 overall seed,”

“We manufactured our schedule to put ourselves in this situation. So I hope the committee doesn’t discount our entire résumé,” she continued. “There isn’t anybody in the country that has played the schedule that we have played, that had a share of the regular-season title, won this tournament, and beat the No. 1 team in the country…There is no one.

“If you get so much credit for beating us, and yet when we have had some of the toughest stretches in the country and came out of it unscathed, you can’t discount that.”

She added: “You can’t discredit that. I’m going to speak up about it because you have to hear the voice of the other side. Because if you don’t think our body of works deserves it, then you need to speak out on it…I’m going to go down fighting for what our team earned.”