Bruce Pearl was fired up.

His team was fresh off an SEC Tournament semifinal victory against Mississippi State, so the Auburn coach made a bold statement ahead of his team’s SEC Championship appearance, where it’ll face a surging Florida squad.

“This has become The Jungle. Our Auburn fans have turned this into The Jungle. So right now, everybody listening at home, get in your car, drive up to Nashville,” Pearl said on Saturday at the ESPN desk. “There are plenty of tickets available. Kentucky’s not here, Tennessee’s not here. Get in the car. Go to church! Ah, actually, you can’t go to church. Come to Tennessee and go to church. Fill this place up. War Eagle!”

That was hardly Pearl’s first or last instance of going on national TV and banging the drum for his program. It was a good time for him to do so. As he alluded to, the top 3 seeds in the SEC Tournament — No. 1 Tennessee, No. 2 Kentucky and No. 3 Alabama — all lost their respective opening games in Nashville. That turned Auburn into the clear favorite to cut down the SEC Tournament nets, and they’ll get the chance Sunday against Florida, which held off Texas A&M in the second semifinal Saturday.

But before the hay was in the barn on the top-heavy collapse in Nashville, Pearl had another bold postgame statement.

“Our league is prepared to make a run in March,” Pearl said after Friday’s win against South Carolina.

Here’s the thing, though.

Depth? The SEC has that. It’d be surprising if the SEC had fewer than 8 teams in the NCAA Tournament when the field is announced on Selection Sunday. Assuming that’s the case, the SEC will tie its record for most teams in the field. It happened in 2018 and more recently, in 2023.

An SEC run in March? This week didn’t confirm that. If anything, it grew that looming March cloud.

Why? Isn’t it a positive that an 8-bid league has an un-chalky conference title game? Sure.

But isn’t it a negative that the conference’s top 3 teams — AKA the ones who showed throughout the regular season that they’re most capable of making a run in March — aren’t playing their best basketball at the right time?

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Before you tell me that’s a glass-half-empty approach, remember this: No team has won the national title after losing their first game of the conference tournament. That’s a troubling trend for Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama.

Remember something else. Last year’s 8-bid SEC netted the exact opposite of a March run for the conference. Forget the Final Four. Zero teams made the Elite Eight. That’s been the story of the 2020s for the SEC. We get an entire regular season that tells us that this isn’t the SEC that the league’s elder statesman, John Calipari, stepped into back in 2009-10, but then the March runs are nowhere to be found. The SEC’s lone coach who even reached the Elite Eight in the 2020s, Eric Musselman, isn’t getting into the NCAA Tournament without a ticket.

It’s well-documented that the last time the SEC produced a Final Four team was 2019. That year, Pearl’s squad became the first SEC team to reach the conference title game without a double-bye since it expanded to 14 teams. Not only did Auburn then win the conference tournament, but it also beat Kentucky in the Elite Eight en route to the Final Four (and it was a missed double-dribble call away from playing for a national title).

It’s possible that Auburn again holds the SEC’s best ticket for a March run. NET and KenPom certainly love the Tigers because of their ability to keep their foot on the gas (Saturday marked their first win by single digits all season). The lone Quad 1 win entering the week seems like a significant question mark facing a March run.

You could argue that Tennessee’s showing against Mississippi State was its worst of the year, which is only compounded by Rick Barnes’ historic struggles in March (last year’s win vs. Duke in the Round of 32 was his first time beating a single-digit seed in the NCAA Tournament since 2008). It’s worth noting that the Vols are +340 to make the Final Four at DraftKings, but the last time an SEC team missed the conference tournament championship and reached the Final Four was 2006 LSU.

Kentucky appeared to be playing its best basketball of the year on the heels of its most impressive win of the season at Tennessee. But then those defensive issues resurfaced against Texas A&M in the quarterfinal round, and we’re back to wondering if John Calipari’s March issues in the 2020s — he has 1 SEC Tournament game win and 1 NCAA Tournament game win since the decade began — are about to rear their ugly head.

And once upon a time, Alabama’s lights-out offense appeared to be setting itself up as one of the scariest March matchups. But those defensive issues against Florida brought the Tide back to a familiar place. Nate Oats had a less-fired-up approach than Pearl after his team’s SEC Tournament showing. It was instead a dose of reality for his defensively-deficient squad after allowing 102 points.

Yep. That feels like something that could be applied to the majority of the league’s tournament-bound squads.

As great as the SEC’s offensive depth is in 2024 — the conference has 4 of the nation’s top 16 teams in offensive efficiency — the defense in March will be questioned. Only 3 (Tennessee, Auburn and Mississippi State) rank among the top 40 in defensive efficiency. There’s a reason that’s the cutoff. Since KenPom began tracking efficiency in 2002, 2021 Baylor is the lone team to win a title without finishing among the nation’s top 40 in defensive efficiency, and the Bears were No. 47.

Take that for what it is. Also take conference tournament week for what it is. It can be equal parts confirmation bias and reality check. The SEC’s reality is a familiar one.

On Sunday afternoon, it’ll get a national spotlight on Selection Sunday. Auburn and Florida earned that right. Whether the selection committee actually takes Sunday’s results into seeding consideration is a different discussion for a different time (2023 Alabama is the SEC’s lone No. 1 seed in the last 7 NCAA Tournaments).

Once the confetti settles, either Todd Golden or Pearl will likely have some sort of postgame moment wherein they praise the conference and speak about what it means to be the last team standing in Nashville. They won’t be wrong.

But if they take it a step further and declare that the SEC is prepared for a March run, it shouldn’t be met with a vigorous nod. A shrug feels more appropriate.