The bigger concern is that a team capable of losing to a 1-6 SWAC team is capable of losing to a hell of a lot of other teams, too.
Maybe we recover and play well going forward. But I don’t think you’ll find a case in history where a team had a loss like this, yet still rebounded to be like a 5-seed or something. Lingering all year is the correct term. Looking at a difference of 3 or 4 seeds from where we’d be otherwise, even a best case scenario.
It's pretty rare. Just doing a quick run 4-7 seeds of the last couple of years, I found a couple, but you can make the case that none of those losses are as bad as the loss to Southern:
2022-2023 - Texas A&M ended up with a 7 seed after a few curious losses:
Murray State (17-15, 11-9 MVC)
Wofford Terriers (17-15, 8-10 SoCon)
Colorado (18-17, 8-12 Pac)
2020-2021 - Virginia ended up with a 4 seed after a loss to San Francisco (11-14, 4-9 WCC)
2020-2021 - Florida State ended up with a 4 seed after a loss to UCF (11-12, 8-10 American)
On the bright side, this can still be a tournament team, but there's an uphill climb and a need to show a pulse in conference play if they want to be on the top side of the bracket.