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It’s pretty simple. When you smash the all-time record with 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament, anything short of a national title for the SEC would be deemed a failure for the conference.
It goes double for the conference that hasn’t won a title in 13 years. That’s the SEC.
Sunday’s Selection Show cannot be the high point of SEC hoops in 2024-25. And the same is true of Saturday’s SEC Tournament semifinal round, which featured 4 eventual 1-2 seeds facing off. As great as those things were, this is still all about March. Or rather, it’s still about the latter half of March.
The SEC will be the laughing stock of the sport if it repeats its disastrous 2024 NCAA Tournament showing. This opportunity is a few levels better than that one. Of the 68 teams in the field, the SEC represents 20.1% of it. And if we want to trim the fat and eliminate teams seeded 11-16 because their odds of winning 6 (or even 7) games in the NCAA Tournament are slim to none, the SEC boasts 13 of those 40 remaining teams, which is 32.5%. In other words, of the teams who can actually win a title, 1/3 of them are from the SEC.
Six SEC teams have top-4 seeds. Three years ago, the SEC only had 6 teams in the entire field of 68. Shoot, in 2017, the SEC got just 5 bids. Of course, the conference wasn’t a national punching bag that year because South Carolina had a Cinderella run to the Final Four and 3 of its 5 teams reached the Elite Eight.
This year’s crop won’t be crowned by how many it sends to the Elite Eight. It will, however, take it on the chin nationally if it only sends 1 team to a Regional Final. The anti-SEC crowd will claim the conference was fraudulent even though it set a record with 14 teams ranked in the AP Top 25 at least once, and it had the best nonconference winning percentage (.889) of any conference since the 1983-84 ACC.
You’ve heard these things before reading this. You’ve also heard that 4 SEC teams felt they should’ve been considered for a 1-seed heading into conference tournament week. Anything short of an Elite Eight berth for all of them and that’ll be seen as an indictment against the SEC.
With all due respect to the 10 (!) other SEC teams in the field, those 4 will have the biggest say in how this all shakes out. Auburn, Florida, Alabama and Tennessee boast the SEC’s best chance to do something else that hasn’t been done in more than a decade — win a Final Four game. Yep. That’s a wild thought.
(Yes, Auburn fans. It was a missed double-dribble call in the 2019 Final Four. You can claim Virginia’s national title, if you must.)
Go figure that the SEC’s 2 active coaches who have won a Final Four game aren’t part of that top-tier group. John Calipari and Chris Beard are both making their first NCAA Tournament appearances with their respective schools. Sweet 16 runs from both of them and we’d get no shortage of reminders of what they did at their previous stops.
But even with this golden age of SEC coaches, the uncertainty lies in the unpredictable nature of March. Take away Calipari and Beard and the combined Final Four record of active SEC coaches is 0-4:
- Rick Barnes, Tennessee 0-1
- Nate Oats, Alabama 0-1
- Bruce Pearl, Auburn 0-1
- Porter Moser, Oklahoma 0-1
What’s the significance of that? As obvious as this opportunity is for the SEC to capitalize on, this is still a ruthless tournament that won’t have any issues scoffing at the SEC’s regular-season dominance. It happened last year, though the SEC did produce its first Final Four team (Alabama) of the 2020s.
Will this year be different? And if not, then what?
Teams play games, not conferences. Sure. It’s also true that conferences that get historically beneficial treatment without the postseason track record are examined differently. That’s reality. If the SEC doesn’t have the last laugh, this uphill climb in the 2020s — one that began with the SEC failing to earn a No. 1 seed from 2016-22 — will continue.
The notion of the SEC holding the title of “nation’s premier basketball conference” hasn’t carried over from one year into the next since … ever? This year, finally, has the makings to change that.
But it’ll just mean more frustration than ever if 2025 comes up empty.
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.
