Does the SEC have to win everything? Apparently
There might be 12 SEC teams, at least, in the 2025 men's NCAA basketball tournament.
Not that you ever need an excuse to visit Nashville, but it might be good to circle March 12 through 16, and not just because Trombone Shorty is playing at Ryman Auditorium.
The Southeastern Conference basketball tournament will be happening at Bridgestone Arena, and it might just be the best hoop event of the college season, anywhere.
It won’t actually decide much of anything. Of the 16 teams in the league, at least 12 figure to be in the NCAA tournament field. There are people who project the bracket, two-and–a-half months before Selection Sunday. If that isn’t depraved enough, there are also people who actually read such things and nod their heads knowingly. The ESPN version of this has 13 SEC teams in the tournament, and three teams getting No. 1 seeds.
There’s the possibility exhaustion will have set in by the time everybody gets to Nashville, and that some teams will secretly give thanks if they get eliminated early, the better to rest for the NCAAs. But the growing fan bases in the SEC might demand full commitment because, after all, there’s a trophy on the line, and the basketball rivalries are getting as nasty as the ones that fill October stadiums.
In Ken Pomeroy’s rankings, Auburn is No. 1 nationally. Tennessee is 2. Florida and Alabama are 7 and 9. Kentucky is 12, Texas A&M 19, Mississippi State 26, Oklahoma 36, Texas 38, Georgia 39 and Arkansas 40. South Carolina is the lowest-ranked SEC team, at 68.
This is the same South Carolina that beat Clemson, ranked 23th in the wire-service poll, on Tuesday and is 8-3. And that Oklahoma team that is judged eighth in its own league? The Sooners are merely undefeated, with wins over Arizona and Louisville. On Wednesday it got a four-point play from freshman Jeremiah Fears Jr. in the final five seconds and shocked Michigan, 87-86.
Of the four remaining undefeated teams in Division I, three are from the SEC: Florida, Oklahoma and Tennessee. After Wednesday’s games, the league was 53-4 in December. In a jarring symbol of the transfer of power, the SEC took on the Atlantic Coast Conference in a head-to-head “challenge” and won 14 of the 16 games, five of them by a margin of 20 or more. That would have been inconceivable even 10 years ago, much less 40, when basketball awareness in the SEC lasted from the final bowl game to Day One of spring practice. In fact, UAB upset Virginia, with Ralph Sampson, in the 1981 NCAA tournament, and the lead column in the Birmingham Post-Herald the next day was Bear Bryant’s analysis of upcoming spring workouts. That might seem backwards to some, but in Alabama that was known as knowing your readership.
Last season the SEC was second to the Big Ten in average attendance and drew 1,500 per game more than the ACC did. Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas ranked 4-5-6 nationally in attendance. Sure, football is the emperor and always will be, but SEC basketball has upgraded itself to stand beside women’s basketball, track and field, baseball, golf and most other conference sports. It is nationally prominent and sometimes dominant. That’s what happens when you land at the intersection of money and expertise.
To wit:
— Auburn (10-1) has wins over Houston, North Carolina, Ohio State (by 28), and Iowa State and has only lost at Duke.
— Tennessee (11-0) has beaten Louisville and Virginia by 22 apiece and Baylor by 15. Its closest game was a 2-pointer at the buzzer at Illinois.
— Florida (11-0) didn’t have a lot of quality wins until it won at North Carolina, which is 0-3 vs. the ACC, but did spank Virginia and Wake Forest by 18 and 17.
— Alabama (9-2) beat Houston in overtime, beat Illinois by 13, beat North Carolina on the road by 15, and only lost to Purdue and Oregon.
— Kentucky (10-1), with its most experienced team in years, has beaten Duke, Gonzaga and Louisville and lost only to Clemson.
— Texas A&M (9-2) just finished beating Creighton, Rutgers, Wake Forest, Texas Tech and Purdue consecutively. Its losses are to UCF and Oregon.
— Mississippi State (10-1) hasn’t played a great schedule and lost to Butler by 10. It did blow out Pittsburgh by 33.
— Mississippi (10-1) has wins over Louisville and BYU, and a lone loss to Purdue by two.
— Texas (10-2) has only lost to Ohio State and Connecticut.
— Georgia (9-1) has only lost to Marquette and has beaten St. John’s.
— Arkansas (9-2) has only lost to Baylor and Illinois and has beaten Michigan.
Talent has never been a problem in the Southeast, particularly in and around Atlanta. Money for facilities has been there, too. Now the money can go straight to the players. Most SEC schools were already conversant in that. What SEC basketball needed was a group of athletic directors who were conversant in basketball. They have come up with coaches who didn’t necessarily win the press conferences but were plugged into the analytics, the AAU programs, the grassroots of the game.
Alabama went to Buffalo to hire Nate Oats. Florida went to San Francisco to hire Todd Golden. Ole Miss took Chris Beard after Texas had fired him for personal indiscretions. Mississippi State got Chris Jans from New Mexico State. Georgia took Mike White off Florida’s hands. Texas A&M hired Buzz Williams away from Virginia Tech.
In last spring’s dramatic interlude, John Calipari lost to Oakland — the university from suburban Detroit, not Al Davis’ old football team — and sensed that the shot clock was winding down on his Kentucky days. Thanks to some heavy lifting by poultry executives, he fled to Arkansas, which had just lost Eric Musselman to USC. That left Kentucky with the pick of the litter, or so it thought. The Wildcats got a no-thanks from UConn’s Danny Hurley and wisely looked for someone who understood the psyche, and the psychoses, of the Kentucky faithful. It took Mark Pope, the BYU coach who had played for Kentucky and knew how strong the undertow could be in Rupp Arena. So far he has embraced the wave.
The two coaching heavyweights are Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, who had left Tennessee after recruiting violations, and Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, who was dismissed at Texas for failing to get far enough in the NCAAs. Barnes still hasn’t reached a Final Four in Knoxville, but he has stamped his program with a defensive ID badge, and the fans are reacting as if Pat Summitt has somehow returned. Pearl’s Auburn teams run and press and shoot and play with joy and vigor, enough to make some fans forget that the Tigers lost to Yale in the first NCAA round last year.
The point is that all these coaches had won somewhere else. They had certificates of authenticity. There was no gambling on an unproven assistant coach from a successful program. The SEC schools are now basketball destinations, as long as they keep winning. Their only problem, as those in Nashville will notice in March, is each other.
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I'm a huge Kentucky fan (I grew up there) and appreciate what Mark Pope has done. That team is not nearly as good as last year's -- a very, very sad conclusion for that team, which should've won the title -- but this is an experienced and cohesive unit. I am amazed at the overall power of the SEC -- my friend Rick Cleveland wrote about that today, too -- and the depth of that talent. I predict that very few road teams will be favored to win a regular-season conference game. The champion might be 11-7. In any event, I'm also old enough to remember when Ole Miss announced in a release that head basketball coach Eddie Crawford had been "promoted to assistant football coach." Things have changed.
I understand your angst Mark, but somewhere along the way the football dominate SEC decided it wanted to rule the world of college sports. It's still early in the hoops season, but it sure looks like the SEC is on its way to the top with a swarm of very good teams. Let's not forget baseball, where SEC teams have 13 titles since the turn of the century. The oddity is, football, its most important product, is experiencing what should be called a "down'' season because the teams beat the hell out of each other. At least that's the way I see it from way down yonder, where the phrase " laissez les bon temps rouler'' is coldly stripped from the local newspaper.