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Bruce Pearl: SEC won’t ‘have to put up’ with overrated claims with Sweet 16 record
By Paul Harvey
Published:
Bruce Pearl had to hear plenty of chatter surrounding SEC basketball this season, and a lot of it had to do with whether or not the league was overrated.
When the NCAA Tournament tipped off, the conference grabbed a record 14 teams in the final bracket, a new record for March Madness. However, some early upsets had that old word of “overrated” resurfacing.
Well, now that the Sweet 16 is finalized, that talk is ancient history. The SEC is sending 7 teams into the 2nd weekend of the NCAA Tournament, another record for the league that eclipses the previous record of 6 teams set by the ACC.
On Monday, Pearl was interviewed by Colin Cowherd to discuss the intensity level of the SEC, and the head coach at Auburn pointed to a similar level of investment across the board within the league:
“Everybody in the SEC is invested, it just means more,” said Pearl. “And I said this at the beginning of the season as we were out there in recruiting and competing. What was going to make the SEC really special this year and really deep and difficult to win is that the teams at the bottom of our league are investing very similarly to the teams in the middle and the top of the league. There’s just not much difference.”
Pearl compared that investment to the teams that were the last ones standing in the College Football Playoff. In this era of NIL and the transfer portal, the teams with a bigger investment often find themselves still fighting for championships at the end of the year.
As for the Sweet 16 record? That just shows that the SEC is far from overrated, regardless of what happens down the road:
“I’m happy that the SEC has got 7 teams in the Sweet 16. Not that it needed to validate what we did in the regular season because what we did in the regular season was real. We earned the teams that we got,” Pearl said. “But I’m glad this many teams advanced, that way we don’t have to put up with the argument that we were overrated.”
The SEC might not be overrated, but that doesn’t mean an SEC team is going to win it all. The latest March Madness odds have Duke as the favorite with the Blue Devils coming in at +225 via ESPN Bet. Florida (+310) is not far behind while Pearl’s Tigers check in at +550 ahead of the Sweet 16.
Paul Harvey lives in Atlanta and covers SEC football.
