Ad Disclosure
SEC basketball is an absolute wagon. The journey to being the best was a long one
Published:
Maybe you were too busy debating whether 3-loss SEC teams should get in the College Football Playoff, but something amazing is happening on the hardwood: The SEC is the king of college basketball in 2024-25.
The SEC has 5 teams ranked in the top 10 (No. 1 Tennessee, No. 2 Auburn, No. 5 Kentucky, No. 7 Alabama and No. 9 Florida. That’s a conference record, but that’s not all. Thirteen — yes, 13! SEC teams rank in the top 50 of KenPom in terms of adjusted efficiency, and the league’s overall record is a staggering 128-19. Three (Tennessee, Florida and No. 13 Oklahoma of the 9 remaining undefeated teams in college basketball hail from the SEC, and only 1 (South Carolina) of the SEC’s 16 programs has lost more than twice.
The league has future NBA lottery picks (Asa Newell of Georgia, Tre Johnson of Texas and Labaron Philon of Alabama are all projected to go in the lottery at present, per NBADraft.net) and immense depth, as evidenced by the 2 teams picked to finish 15th and 16th, Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, being a combined 18-1 with 7 wins over Power 4 opponents.
Last week, the SEC won the made for TV ACC-SEC Challenge 14 wins to 2, the most lopsided Challenge result since ESPN started creating these power conference challenge events in 1999. Collectively, the SEC is 50-18 against Power 4 competition plus Gonzaga and Memphis.
That’s staggering stuff, and part of the reason the SEC should at least equal, and likely surpass the NCAA record for bids by a league, currently held by the Big East, which sent 11 teams, including eventual national champion UConn, to the field in 2011.
The SEC has never finished a season ranked higher than the 2nd-best league in the KenPom conference power ranking.
But the SEC’s college hoops dominance this season isn’t a surprise, at least to anyone who has been reading us (we predicted it in this space in October) or paying close attention.
The league’s journey from parochial basketball backwater in the shadowlands to center of the college hoops universe has been a long and winding road, but it started a decade ago and the vision was always the summit of the sport.
Ten years ago, as the SEC languished as a 3-bid league ranked at the bottom of the Power 6 (now Power 5: Big East, SEC, ACC, B1G, Big 12) college basketball conferences, Mike Slive dialed up two coaching titans, Florida’s Billy Donovan and then-Kentucky head coach John Calipari, asking what could be done to fix it.
“Investment, coaching, scheduling, you have to start with that,” Donovan recalled telling Slive at the time.
“We used to have to promote our league in basketball,” Calipari, how the head coach at Arkansas, told SDS at SEC Media Day. “Billy (Donovan) and I used to have to go tell people that our league was good, that it was hard to win on the road especially, and we would end those conversations hopeful they believed us. Mike and later Greg (Sankey) wanted to change that.”
When Slive left the SEC offices in Birmingham in 2015, basketball was still floundering. Sure, Kentucky had wrapped up a 38-1 season just a year removed from Donovan’s Florida going 36-3, but the Wildcats lost in the Final Four to Wisconsin, perhaps in some part due to a lack of seasoning in close regular-season games.
“I do think we find a way to beat Wisconsin if we had played in more of those games,” former Kentucky guard and 2015 team member Devin Booker told SDS earlier this year. “We played a tough nonconference. But we weren’t pushed in the league. I think that stuff matters.”
Making matters worse for the SEC, Donovan resigned from the Florida job, where he helped build the Gators into a national power, after the 2015 season to coach in the NBA.
After a 2016 season where the SEC ranked last among Power 6 conferences again, new commissioner Greg Sankey decided it was time to get serious about change.
The SEC hired a group of outside consultants who came to one overarching conclusion: For the SEC to win, they needed to invest.
“I think the league understood that with the emergence of the SEC Network, passionate fans, and all that television programming, a quality product was important,” Georgia coach Mike White, who took over for Donovan at Florida in 2015, said at SEC Media Days.
Investment came and slowly, but surely, winning began to follow.
Look no farther than the state of Alabama, where 2 of the nation’s best teams this season reside.
Auburn, a program lost in the college hoops wilderness for decades, made the Final Four in 2019, coached by Bruce Pearl, who won hundreds of games at Tennessee in the aughts but was always a bridesmaid to Donovan’s Florida behemoth. The Tigers have now won 2 SEC regular-season titles and 2 SEC Tournament titles under Pearl, doubling their program total in the modern, post-integration era in both categories.
This season, the Tigers may have the best team in the country, led by a legitimate national player of the year candidate in do-everything big man Johni Broome and a trio of guards and wings who Chad Baker-Mazara, Denver Jones and Chaney Johnson, who do everything Pearl asks his players to do defensively to impact winning. The Tigers pressure the ball, attack the glass and protect the paint, a modern-day incarnation of 40 minutes of hell that leaves you remembering you played the Tigers. Auburn’s fans have responded, turning Neville Arena into one of the most intimidating, loud, special environments in the sport.
It isn’t just Neville, either. Auburn’s fan base traveled in droves to Cameron Indoor Stadium last week, where a longtime hoops scribe in attendance told me he’d never seen so many visiting fans in the building, even for Carolina-Duke.
Turning Auburn into a place where basketball mattered deeply was part of Pearl’s mission when he took the job in 2014.
“We want an environment at Auburn that is among the best in the country. It can be done at places that aren’t Kentucky. Look at Florida, where they have an incredible environment. That’s a brutal place to play. We want to do that at Auburn and we will,” Pearl said prophetically shortly after taking the Auburn job.
Auburn isn’t a “basketball” school, but it’s not “not” a basketball school, either.
Up the road in Tuscaloosa, another football-mad school is building a monster.
Nate Oats took Alabama to their first Final Four last season, and when star guard Mark Sears returned to join Oats’ latest brilliant transfer portal haul, the Crimson Tide were among 2 conventional consensus favorites, along with blue-blood Kansas, to win the national championship this April.
Alabama dropped 2 tough games in the nonconference, and Sears hasn’t hit shots at his usual rate out of the gate, but the Crimson Tide played beautifully last week in a comfortable win over North Carolina at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill.
“It’s amazing to see what they have built there, obviously,” North Carolina coach Hubert Davis said after the defeat. “They play outstanding as a unit, run high-level modern offense, are terribly difficult to guard. They have a great team again, which is a testament to the consistency they are building.”
Oats, like Donovan at Florida before him, has used football as an advantage. Oats elaborated on that at SEC Media Day, opining that the advantage of having an elite football program is even larger now than when Florida ascended to the summit of the sport under Donovan.
“If you understand the way college athletics is working now, with all the money and the House settlement and the coming revenue sharing, you realize the biggest money-maker in college athletics is football. It is not close.
“We have the best football program in the history of college football. We make a lot of money on football. That money is used across the entire athletic department, including basketball. We have all we need to win here.”
Win Alabama has.
The Crimson Tide were always one of the SEC’s winningest programs anyway, ranking No. 2 behind only Kentucky in program victories in the modern, post-integration era. That legacy waned in the 2000s though until Oats’ arrival. Now, Alabama has won 2 SEC titles and 2 SEC Tournament titles since 2021 alone and advanced to at least the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament in 3 of the past 4 seasons. With Oats’ blend of modern offense, high-level recruiting, and outstanding portal evaluations, joining Kentucky, Arkansas, and Florida as SEC institutions to win a national championship seems to be only a matter of time.
There are success stories across the league, from Tennessee’s renaissance under Hall of Famer Rick Barnes to Florida’s revival under Todd Golden, who like Donovan before him was hired as a young up and comer in his 30s with a different, modern way of approaching basketball. Even Kentucky seems rejuvenated by a fresh start under program alum Mark Pope. The additions of Texas and Oklahoma, 2 programs that have been to the Final Four this century, only add to the shine.
Everywhere you look in the SEC, basketball is big business, and business is booming
The common threads are investment and coaching.
“They have spent the money, on coaches, on NIL, on facilities,” Barnes told SDS at SEC Media Day. “The commitment has to come from the top. When I got to the league, there was Kentucky and Florida and not everyone was playing on that field. Now there’s a race to invest and win.”
The SEC had a hand in all of it, from league directives to programs to schedule better in the non-conference to increase the SEC’s profile on Selection Sunday to encouraging facility renovations and new facility construction as the league office did at Ole Miss and Auburn. The league even focused on officiating, developing and retaining top referees and building a new state -of-the-art replay center at SEC headquarters
The best coaches have flocked to the SEC’s big investments.
Barnes is 1 of 2 Hall of Famers coaching in the SEC, along with Calipari. Bruce Pearl’s career is trending toward the Hall of Fame, and Oats, while only 50, seems well on his way. When Alabama made the Final Four last March, Oats joined Barnes, Calipari, Chris Beard of Ole Miss and Pearl as SEC head coaches who have been to the Final Four. Porter Moser’s arrival in the SEC with Oklahoma drives the number of Final Four coaches in the league to 6. Three other SEC head coaches have won SEC Coach of the Year and reached at least the Sweet 16.
“It is the best league in America, period,” Beard said at SEC Media Day. “The best coaching, the deepest teams, the best environments top to bottom. Who wouldn’t want to compete here?”
The build was a long journey, with many disappointing Selection Sundays and early round exits along the way. But the SEC has arrived, and it isn’t going anywhere.
“All the sudden, we are the ‘it’ league in basketball, too,” Calipari told SDS. “You look at the investment. The facilities. The passion of the fan bases. The great coaches. The home sites in this league. Winning a road game is ridiculous. Coaches and players all at the top of their game. It’s incredible.”
SEC fans outside of Lexington may not set their seasons by basketball, but the fans are passionate and the venues are special. Winning, I suppose, just means more.
Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
