Definitely Not A Cop said:
I don't really understand the regional process. If you win the SEC tournament, is it an automatic bid? Or does your season stats still affect whether you get in?
If you win the SEC Tournament, it is an automatic bid.
For the SEC, it doesn't matter a whole lot, since SEC will get multiple at-large bids. The only way it matters is if a team wouldn't otherwise have gotten into the NCAA Tournament wins the SEC Tournament. Some conferences will only be able to send one team to the NCAA Tournament, and for those conferences, it really matters who wins the conference tournament because that's the team that gets to go.
There are 30 automatic qualifiers. The rest of the 34 teams are selected by the committee based on various metrics. There are 16 Regionals with four teams each. Each team in a regional is assigned a seed 1-4. The top 16 teams in the eyes of the committee get to host those regionals and are 1-seeds. The next 16 best teams are 2-seeds, the next are 3-seeds, and the bottom teams are 4-seeds. The committee uses several criteria to determine which teams get sent to which regionals, but the biggest factor is usually distance to the host site (but they also will not put two teams from the same conference in a single Regional).
On the first day in each Regional, the 1-seed plays the 4-seed and the 2-seed plays the 3-seed. The tournament then proceeds in double elimination format until each Regional produces a champion.