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Does SEC basketball need a national title to avoid ridicule after this historic season?
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In case you somehow missed it, Saturday was a historic day for SEC basketball. No. 1 vs. No. 2 faced off in the regular season for the first time in the history of SEC men’s hoops, and it yielded a Final Four-like showdown between Auburn and Alabama. The eyes of the college basketball world were on the SEC for that, and it only added credibility to the conference when the NCAA’s first Bracket Preview Show revealed on Saturday that 3 of the top 4 teams and 6 of the top 10 teams were from the SEC.
SEC basketball flexing might be at an all-time high. Anything less than a flex throughout March, however, will mean the alternative is in play.
That is, SEC basketball mocking could also soon be at an all-time high.
The conference has set itself up for that, in part because of comments from respected basketball minds like Jay Bilas, who said on “The Paul Finebaum Show” that he had “never seen anything like it,” as it relates to the SEC’s regular-season dominance.
“This is the most powerful basketball league, top to bottom, that there has ever been,” Bilas said last Tuesday on the SEC Network. “I have never seen anything remotely like what we’re seeing in the Southeastern Conference this year.”
The reality is that type of comment will be on the minds of many as the SEC pursues its first men’s hoops national title since 2012. The conference that hasn’t put a team in the national championship since 2014 has a prime opportunity to change its reputation.
But yeah, it’s title or bust.
The SEC could have 6 teams in the Sweet 16, 4 in the Elite Eight, 3 in the Final Four and 1 in the national championship … and yet, it’ll still be subjected to mocking if an SEC team isn’t the last one standing. Welcome to March. Or rather, welcome to April, which is when conference reputations are truly cemented. That doesn’t happen in February.
The bar has never been higher, and the margin for error has never been slimmer.
Let’s also remember that while reputations are defined by national champions — that’s the same reason the SEC always could put the Big Ten in its place with all 21st-century football arguments — the SEC’s regular-season prowess opened up the door for potential mocking at every stage of the NCAA Tournament.
If title contenders like Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Tennessee and Texas A&M — those 5 teams are among the 9 favorites to win the national title (via DraftKings) — fail to reach the second weekend because of an upset loss, that’ll fire up those “SEC is overrated” arguments. It’s more likely that you’ll hear that chatter than the SEC love-fest that was amplified leading up to the 1-2 matchup in Tuscaloosa. Brace for it. It comes with the territory.
If a record 14 SEC teams make the field — the mark that Joe Lunardi has projected on ESPN.com would beat the Big East’s record of NCAA Tournament bids by a conference when it had 11 teams in the 2011 field — the SEC will likely have multiple programs that stub their toe during the first 2 rounds and open the door for conference-wide criticism. The “F” word will come out if and when that happens. The term “fraud” will, of course, lack context.
It’s not media narratives that earned the SEC’s projected No. 1 seeds (Auburn, Alabama and Florida) a combined 27 Quad 1 victories (and counting). The media didn’t lead Kentucky to that monumental nonconference win against Duke in Atlanta. Go figure that Kentucky did that, but it was then responsible for 1 of just 2 SEC losses in a historically lopsided 14-2 ACC-SEC challenge victory for the SEC, who won 11 of those 14 games by double-digits back in early December, and it has since further distanced itself from the field.
Well, I suppose that’s not true if you were unaware that SEC teams having a .500 record since early January was the only result possible since conference play began (Archie Miller and Karl Ravech have had better moments in front of a microphone than falling for that bait).
That’s where we’re at. The SEC has been so dominant that even the pushback to its dominance is worth mocking.
But a lot can change in March. You don’t have to tell the SEC that.
Let’s not forget that last year’s SEC hype train was off and running heading into the NCAA Tournament. After Auburn coach Bruce Pearl declared during the SEC Tournament that “our league is prepared to make a run in March,” he was part of the conference’s disastrous start that saw 5 of its 8 teams lose in the opening round. Mind you, that happened even though 7 of 8 SEC teams were favored in their opening matchups. That included Pearl’s squad getting stunned by 13-seed Yale after it publicly voiced its frustration about its seeding and location as the team that earned an SEC Tournament title, as well as a top-5 ranking in both KenPom and NET.
To the conference’s credit, the SEC’s remaining teams did their best to salvage that disastrous opening weekend showing by finally sending a non-Arkansas team to the Elite Eight in the 2020s (Alabama and Tennessee did that), and Alabama was the SEC’s first Final Four participant in the 2020s. But without a national title to point to, the SEC’s hoops reputation didn’t improve in 2023-24.
Time will tell if it’ll improve in 2025. The stage is set for the SEC to have as loud of an NCAA Tournament presence as it’s ever had.
Whether that’s flexing or mocking remains to be seen.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
