After an opening weekend of upsets and surprises that lived up to the March Madness name, the Sweet 16 begins Saturday in Indiana. Will chaos continue to reign supreme —  or, as so often happens on the tournament’s tough second weekend, will the elite restore order?

The SEC’s elite did rise to the top on the first weekend, with only league champion Alabama and league runner-up Arkansas advancing to the second weekend. It’s a testament to the league’s continued evolution as a basketball league — thank you Greg Sankey! — that the SEC can advance two teams to the second weekend in a year when historic blueblood and SEC bellcow Kentucky sat at home in March, preseason league favorite Tennessee was bounced in 40 short minutes against a middling bid thief from the Pac-12, and the league’s “new blood” Florida coughed up an 11-point lead in the final 10 minutes against a 15 seed with a Sweet 16 berth in the balance.

Both SEC participants are terrific stories, and there are plenty of similarities.

Both teams are playing under second-year head coaches in Eric Musselman and Nate Oats. Both have backcourt star power in Alabama’s John Petty and Arkansas’ Moses Moody but ultimately feature balanced offensive attacks and better than you think, hard-nosed man-to-man defenses.

Both have waited a while as programs to have a moment this big on the national scene.

Oats is the biggest difference in Bama basketball

For regular-season and SEC Tournament champion Alabama, it is the first Sweet 16 appearance since 2004, when Mark Gottfried stunned the college basketball world by taking a bubbly No. 8 seed led by senior guard Antoine Pettway all the way to the Elite 8, where they lost to eventual national champion UConn. Until last weekend, there had been only two Crimson Tide NCAA Tournament wins since that Elite 8, despite three head coaches.

Alabama has always been a bit of an enigma in hoops. The program has immense resources, including solid facilities, thanks to the revenue generated by the school’s peerless football program. But Coleman Coliseum is hardly one of the better gyms in the SEC and the recruiting base isn’t great in football-mad Alabama, with every program in the country recruiting basketball hotbeds like Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta.

Sure, there had been pockets of success, including the houndstooth pockets of SEC Tournament dominance in the Wimp Sanderson years, which saw Alabama, and Wimp, in suits custom made by Bear Bryant’s tailor, win 5 SEC Tournament titles in 12 years. But a legitimate national championship contender — and the type of head coach you need for long-term sustainable program success — eluded the Tide.

Enter Oats.

The Tide took a chance on a mid-major coach with a slender albeit impressive résumé two offseasons ago. It was a risky move, but in a way, it made sense.

The Tide had tried the big NBA name when they brought in Avery Johnson and while recruiting boomed, winning didn’t follow. They had also tried the hotshot destined for greatness assistant when they hired Anthony Grant after Gottfried’s resignation in 2009. Grant ran a clean program, something Gottfried couldn’t say with a straight face. He also didn’t win enough games, reaching the NCAA Tournament once in six seasons.

When Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne hired Oats, the Tide went a different direction.

“(Alabama) ignored the huge names, and went and hired the dude that everyone in basketball circles said would not fail — and we said that because we knew it,” a Power 6 assistant told me this week.

The Tide went 16-15 in year one under Oats, struggling to adapt to the former high school math teacher’s innovative, analytic and demanding brand of offense and, perhaps more importantly and subtly, Oats’ unrelenting, ball pressure heavy man defense.

Oats’ offensive acumen, and his team’s stylish way of launching record numbers of 3-pointers and playing at a frenetic, fun pace, was well-documented in his 4 years at Buffalo, where he led the Bulls to 3 NCAA Tournament appearances. What got less attention, and what this Alabama team hangs its championship hats on, is uncompromising, physical, nasty defense.

“It’s easy to sell shooting threes and playing fast to kids,” said the same Power 6 assistant, who declined to be identified by name due to recruiting against Oats. “It’s harder to make him play fast, shoot 3s and get in a stance and chase people around on defense for 30 minutes a night. That takes buy-in, and that’s been the difference with them this season.”

The Tide rank No. 3 in America in adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom, and they are the 2nd-best defensive team left in the NCAA Tournament, behind only Loyola-Chicago, a mid-major that — wait for it — plays a relentless version of ball pressure man defense.

Can Oats sustain this season’s success?

Time will tell. The Crimson Tide are a veteran team, and will lose at least 4 senior contributors, including SEC Player of the Year Herb Jones, one of the most tenacious defenders in America, and John Petty, one of the country’s best pure scorers, this offseason. Oats is recruiting with purpose — but his uptempo brand of basketball is a “get old, stay old” style that will make this year’s success difficult to replicate, at least in the short term.

Still, Oats is ahead of his time. His analytic-driven brand of fast basketball is where the game is trending — he’s just arrived there a bit sooner, a bit like Urban Meyer’s spread offense arriving at Florida just before everyone in the country started using spread concepts. The resources are there, and Oats, only 46, is boundless in his enthusiasm for the game and his energy. That’s not going away anytime soon.

Musselman restoring Arkansas’ proud hoops history

Across the bracket, at Arkansas, the path to the second weekend came about a bit differently but the basketball team that came about as a result of the process looks remarkably similar.

The Razorbacks’ history in the sport is well known.

At their best, this is the second-best basketball job in the SEC — a school where national championship banners hang from the rafters and SEC Storied films play on a loop in booster suites before games. The facilities need a bit of polish, but Bud Walton Arena is one of the league’s best two venues when it’s full, and the recruiting base is marvelous, with in-state talents like Moses Moody and Davonte Davis yearning to play for the home Hogs and easy access to hoops-rich St. Louis and athlete rich Texas all at the program’s disposal.

Of course, the Razorbacks haven’t been at their best in quite some time. Yes, Mike Anderson’s teams were always respectable, and his connections to Nolan Richardson and the halcyon days of “40 minutes of Hell” made the parting bittersweet. But the Hogs will play in the Sweet 16 for the first time in a quarter-century this season — an unthinkable drought for a program with access to that rich a recruiting base and home to so many hoops resources.

That the drought is over, of course, is a credit to Eric Musselman.

Nicknamed “the importer” by college hoops hype man Jon Rothstein, Musselman arrived in Fayetteville with a reputation as a basketball journeyman, a crafty cultivator of talent and a bit of a hypeman himself who rarely stayed in one place. Musselman spent 4 years building Nevada into an NCAA contender and, ultimately, a second-weekend program in 2018. But before taking that gig, he hadn’t spent 4 years anywhere, coaching at nearly every level for 3 years or less, from the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings of the NBA to Reno Bighorns of the NBA’s D-League to college assistant gigs under Herb Sendek (then at Arizona State) and Johnny Jones (LSU).

No one would call Musselman, who runs a very spread out, isolation-heavy style of offense, a tactical innovator. But his offenses play fast and are fun, and that makes it easy to recruit to his system. His special skill — and you could call it innovative in its own way, even if it isn’t the Nate Oats way — is roster construction. At both of his college head coaching stops, Musselman has proven masterfully adept at building a roster suited to play a spaced-out isolation brand of offense and his own tenacious, switch everything NBA-styled defense.

Musselman’s first season in Fayetteville, like Oats’s at Alabama, was transitional. The Hogs won 20 games — making him the first Arkansas coach since John Pelphrey in 2007 to win that much Year 1 — but did so against a kleenex soft schedule, and finished a disappointing 10th in the SEC. But that was just Musselman seeing the hand he was dealt and visualizing what he needed — to borrow from Rothstein a bit — to import and export.

Arkansas flipped the roster in 2020-21, bringing in 10 new scholarship players, a Musselman-crafted cocktail of good fit transfers and high energy, supernova freshman– players like in-state heroes Moody and Davis.

The result has been a team with a perfect blend of star power and veteran savvy, a group with seniors like Jalen Tate and glue guy Justin Smith, who have the battle scars of prior disappointments and destinations, and NBA lottery-bound talents like Moody, whom Musselman has convinced to play within himself, a piece, though a marvelous one, of a larger machine.

The result has been vintage Musselman. The Hogs are one of the best defensive teams in the country (10th in KenPom efficiency), but they also are extremely well-balanced, making them hard to guard even though they aren’t too creative schematically. They are also one of the hottest teams in America — winners of 14 of their last 16 games since beginning league play 2-4.

Is it sustainable? Why not? Mussleman has certainly enjoyed being in Fayetteville, the rare SEC school with a basketball-first flavor.

“Arkansas has always been one of the best jobs in the SEC,” longtime SEC basketball writer Blake Lovell, who is the Assistant Editor at Blue Ribbon, told me this week. “Musselman has embraced that tradition and has reignited a fan base that still remembers the Razorbacks as a national power in the 90s.”

Any coach who can construct a roster to his system can win for a long time — and with the ever-expanding world of the transfer portal and the expected change to the NCAA’s transfer rules — a coach like Musselman, who was already bucking the system and anticipating the trends — appears well-situated for long term success. The “portal” becomes an even bigger weapon at Arkansas, according to Lovell.

“The reason (Musselman) has had success is because he’s excelled at the two most important areas for a coach of this era in college basketball. He masterfully works the transfer portal, and he recruits top freshmen,” Lovell said. “People laugh about Arkansas contacting nearly everyone in the transfer portal, but there’s a reason Musselman does it, a method. By doing his due diligence on so many players, it gives his staff the best chance of finding the right fit at Arkansas. He’s turned it into a science. He was one of the first coaches to really embrace transfers, and it transformed Nevada into a Top-25 program and he is doing it again at Arkansas.”

The other thing?  The brand of Arkansas may be big enough to cure “the itch” Musselman constantly fees to find “the next best thing.” SEC basketball is better when Arkansas is good, and Musselman, who can become an institution in Fayetteville simply by staying and winning, could keep it that way for a long time.

For Alabama and Arkansas, the paths have been distinct, but the results are similar. As a result, both programs have honest, “no self-respecting southerner cooks instant grits” paths to the Final Four.

But it starts this weekend in the Sweet 16.