As soon as he saw Tennessee go on the board as a nine seed during Sunday's NCAA selection show, Jeff Lebo knew his team wasn't in good shape.

"The kids didn’t know it, but I knew that we were going to be in trouble at that point," Auburn's coach said. "You kind of knew where the league stood in the eyes of the people making the decisions when I saw that."

Auburn didn't make the NCAA tournament field Sunday and, while disappointed, looked forward to a likely high seed in the National Invitation Tournament. The NIT bracket will be announced on ESPNU starting at 9 p.m. EST.

"Our team’s disappointed," Lebo said. "But I told them that I didn’t want it to diminish the year that they had. There’s not a whole lot you can say to them. They were disappointed. They were hurt. But they made a heck of a run here at the end and it put them in a position to get in."

Auburn went 22-11 this year with a 10-6 record in the SEC. No eligible SEC team with 10 conference wins had ever been left out since the league expanded to 12 teams in 1991.

Some other thoughts on selection day ...

• Lebo and the players openly admitted that they were disappointed, which brings into question how motivated they will be for a first-round NIT game that will happen this week. "I told them we’ll hurt for the rest of today and then we’ll not talk about it anymore and we’ll focus on tomorrow and see what it brings and move forward.," Lebo said.

• Mississippi State's win in the SEC title game earned it an automatic bid and lessened Auburn's chances of making it. Lebo had a chuckle went pointing out that the committee likes to stress body of work when teams earning automatic bids after winning four games in a conference tournament counters that argument. "So that’s what’s ironic about the whole tournament, the whole setup, "he said. "That’s just the way it is. That’s what makes it exciting. That’s what makes it heartbreaking."

• He was very surprised by the low seeds of the conference's top two seeds. LSU was an eight seed. Tennessee was a nine.

• Predictably, Lebo is in favor of expanding the tournament. "You look at the teams that have been on the bubble, I think a lot of teams if they get the right draw can go to the Sweet Sixteen," he said. "There are too many good basketball teams out there in my opinion. ... I’d like to see it expanded just to have the kids experience being in an NCAA tournament."
  

• Auburn's non-conference schedule was a major factor against it getting an at-large bid, but Lebo said a lot of that was out of the team's control. George Washington, Missouri State and Virginia are three teams that looked like formidable challenges when the Tigers scheduled them. "People think you just go out and schedule people," Lebo said. "You’ve just got to schedule good teams. Well, it’s hard to get some teams to play you home and home. You don’t just call up, ‘All right, North Carolina, let’s play home and home.’ That’s hard to do. Easy to play, hard to do."

• SEC commissioner Mike Slive was the chair of the selection committee and Lebo, as usual, will ask questions about what his team needs to do to get selected in future years.