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In the greatest season of SEC Basketball ever, how do you pick just one SEC Coach of the Year?
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March is almost here.
That means Selection Sunday is just 3 Sundays away and the single greatest sporting weekend on the planet begins in just 3 short Thursdays.
It also means awards season, which for writers like me means difficult choices. Those choices are especially difficult this year, where the SEC has assembled the greatest regular season basketball league in the history of the sport. That’s not hyperbole. It’s fact, at least if you trust the data spit out by the computers that help the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee seed the field.
According to KenPom, a data system developed in 1997 to measure a team’s statistical prowess adjusted for tempo, strength of schedule, and opponent, the SEC is on track to be the best basketball conference since the ACC in 1997. That ACC, by the way, had just 9 teams, making it a bit simpler to achieve the level of efficiency greatness the SEC is attaining with nearly twice that number.
Conference expansion has made picking 5 players for all-league first teams a nearly impossible task, unfair at best and a downright cruel exercise in arbitrariness at worst.
It’s a privilege to receive a ballot to vote, of course, but how does one decide? The SEC Player of the Year award is easy enough, with Johni Broome the worthy National Player of the Year winner and the best player on the best team. Walter Clayton Jr. is likely to join Broome as a First-Team All-American, making his First-Team All-SEC selection inevitable. There might not be 2 more indispensable players in the SEC than Mark Sears and Zakai Zeigler, who, like Broome and Clayton Jr., grade out as top 10 players in America in KenPom. But picking the fifth spot on the All-SEC first team among a cadre of worthy candidates? Good luck. And if like me, you think sunshine is the best disinfectant and you actually publish your ballot weekly, well, brace for social media scorn and blowback that reminds me of when I saw a snapping turtle as big as a beagle snap a broomstick in two.
Which leads me to SEC Coach of the Year.
This is the award I’m most anxious about voting for this season. How does one decide which coach is best in a league that’s likely to break the NCAA record for most NCAA Tournament bids for a single conference (currently 11, by the Big East in 2011)?
We’re in muddy, unchartered waters.
Part of the SEC’s ascendancy to basketball juggernaut was built on a commitment to hiring elite coaches.
John Calipari, now the head coach at Arkansas, arrived in the league in 2009, landing at Kentucky after his friend Billy Donovan, then the national championship winning head coach at Florida, turned down the job for a second time. At that time, current Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl was in the midst of a 6-year run at Tennessee that was, at least in 2009, the best era of Tennessee basketball since the Bernard King days. The Vols advanced to the NCAA Tournament in all 6 of Pearl’s seasons in Knoxville, reaching the second weekend on 2 occasions.
“There was Billy and Bruce but beyond the 3 of us, there was not the commitment to hiring great coaches that we saw in other leagues,” Calipari told SDS at SEC Media Days this autumn. “Slowly, that changed. Especially when Auburn hired Bruce.”
When Auburn hired Pearl, it was a definitive statement by then-Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs.
Yes, folks down in the SEC believe deeply in their supremacy over all pretenders and comers from the likes of the B1G, Big 12, and the deeply fearful parts of Florida too frightened to mix it up with the SEC on the gridiron. These are beliefs that are part of our upbringing, like Sunday school lessons or an insistence that we choose a side between vinegar-based and mustard-based barbeque sauces. Dominance in March? Well, there’s the big blue rafters at Rupp Arena and the back-to-back titles in Gainesville and a few eccentrics in places like Fayetteville and CoMo, but for the most part, SEC fans until Auburn hired Pearl viewed March with casual joy at best and snarky cynicism at worst. A March loss was no big deal, especially if you liked the way the abundant sunshine hit the crystal football trophies when they catch the spring light.
But Auburn hired Pearl and now, Auburn is a basketball school, where students camp out for days to pack an intimate arena that’s every bit as loud as Cameron Indoor Stadium but has state-of-the-art amenities, too. And here’s the thing about winning in the SEC. If my neighbor can do it, you bet I want a shiny trophy, too.
Now, 11 years after Pearl was hired at Auburn, the SEC is the premier coaching destination in college basketball. The league boasts a Basketball Hall-of-Famer (John Calipari), two future Hall-of-Famers (Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl), and 10 other coaches who have won a conference coach of the year award at least once. Among those 11 include Alabama’s Nate Oats, who took Alabama to the Final Four in 2023, one of 6 active SEC coaches who has taken a program to the Final Four.
“It’s the best conference in college basketball, period,” Ole Miss head coach Chris Beard said at SDS Media Days this autumn. “If you want to play the best or you want to coach against the best, come to the SEC.”
Who has coached the best among the elite fraternity of coaches in the SEC this season?
There are 5 legitimate candidates.
Pearl has won SEC Coach of the Year 3 times, and if we aren’t overthinking things, maybe he deserves to win a fourth award this season.
Auburn is 26-2 and has 15 quadrant 1 wins, just 2 away from the NCAA record of 17 in one season, set by Kansas in 2023. Auburn was supposed to be good. The Tigers were picked 2nd by the media in the preseason, thanks to the return of All-American Johni Broome and 3-and-D pieces Denver Jones and Chad Baker-Mazara. But no one expected Auburn to put together this type of season, which currently ranks the Tigers among the best teams the sport has produced this century from an efficiency perspective. At present, only 3 Duke teams (1999, 2001, and 2025), rank higher in KenPom’s NET rating than Pearl’s group.
“He’s one of the best program-builders in the sport, if not the best one when you consider the places he’s built winners,” Florida head coach and former Pearl assistant Todd Golden told SDS earlier this season. “They play incredibly hard. They play fearlessly, without fear of failure, and selflessly. They prioritize development. They evaluate well, and they recruit not only good players but players with character who want to win, work hard, and can be coached hard.”
In another season, Pearl would be the runaway winner. Not this year.
Todd Golden, Pearl’s former assistant, has a compelling argument.
The Gators were picked to finish 6th in the SEC. They currently sit third, with a 24-4 record and a win over Pearl and Auburn — at Auburn, no less. The Gators rank top 5 in every predictive metric as well, including KenPom (4th) and the NET rankings (5th). Florida is competing for a 1 seed and will have a tremendous chance to advance to the program’s 6th Final Four this March. Golden has done it all despite a team that’s been a MASH unit in league play. Starters Walter Clayton Jr. (1 game), Alijah Martin (2 games), and Alex Condon (4 games) have all missed time. In February, Florida won 6 consecutive games, including 2 in Quad 1A, without at least 1 starter in each of them. That’s an incredible feat in year 3 under Golden.
What about a coach that beat Golden this season? What about a great comeback story? Everyone likes a comeback, right?
Dennis Gates checks all those boxes. His Mizzou program went 0-18 in league play a season ago, devastated by injuries and a few questionable roster construction decisions. Gates kept working, using the disastrous campaign as “a chance to learn, but an opportunity to grow and never forget, too,” as he put it at SEC Media Day. Missouri was more balanced in its portal acquisitions, building one of the deepest teams in the SEC but also building a balanced group that can score inside and out and has the versatility needed to win games in myriad ways, a prerequisite to success in March. Missouri is 21-7, has defeated 3 top 5 opponents (a school record), and seems made for a deep run in March. Not bad for a team most predicted would be on the outside looking in come Selection Sunday.
Coaches who get every ounce of the roster they build often win this award. Last season, Lamont Paris and South Carolina were picked to finish last in the SEC by the media. They finished in a tie for second and advanced to the NCAA Tournament. Mark Byington is pulling off that feat in year 1 at Vanderbilt. Left for dead by the media, all Byington has done is parlay one of the most underrated transfer portal classes in America into a NCAA Tournament lock. The Commodores took Power 5 players other programs found surplus to requirements (AJ Hoggard of Michigan State, Tyler Nickel of UNC and Virginia Tech, and Devin McGlockton of Boston College) and 2 undersized mid-major transfers in guard Jason Edwards (North Texas) and forward Jaylen Carey (James Madison) and molded them into the core of a 19-9 outfit with wins over Tennessee, Texas A&M, and Kentucky. If Byington won this award, could anyone legitimately argue?
Finally, there’s Mark Pope at Kentucky and Nate Oats at Alabama.
Yes, Oats started the season ranked 2nd in America and picked to win the league. But Alabama has had a giant target on its back all year and it’s weathered it to the tune of 10 quad 1 wins (second in America, behind Auburn), a top 10 KenPom ranking, and a likely 1 seed. Oats’ only sin, then, seems to be his own success. It was a travesty that after dominating the SEC for most of the 2000s and early 2010s, Billy Donovan finally won his first SEC Coach of the Year award in 2011. Donovan’s consistency was taken for granted. Should we do that to Oats, too? I think not.
Mark Pope?
He’s taken over for a program legend in Lexington and brought joy back to Rupp Arena. Injuries and some defensive liabilities have slowed Big Blue of late, but the Wildcats are 19-9 entering March with more top 20 wins than any team in America outside of Auburn. Kentucky has defeated Duke, Florida, Texas A&M, Gonzaga, and Tennessee (twice). They play a stylish brand of offense and similar to Todd Golden at Florida, Pope has squeezed the lemon dry despite injuries to multiple starters for extended periods of time. If Pope receives Coach of the Year votes, I can’t argue those votes are in bad faith.
In the end, I am leaning Gates, Pearl, and Golden. But the fact it’s almost March and there’s no clear runaway winner is instructive. The SEC isn’t just the best basketball league in America. It’s the most well-coached basketball league, too.
And well-coached teams? They tend to play basketball deep into March.
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.
