SEC releases bracket, schedule for men’s basketball tournament in Nashville
By Keith Farner
Published:
Nate Oats’ Alabama team will take its blue-collar approach to Nashville as the favorite in this week’s men’s basketball SEC Tournament.
Alabama overcame 22 turnovers on Saturday to beat Georgia and match its school record for SEC wins in the 1986-87 season. The Crimson Tide will take a three-game winning streak and the No. 1 seed into next week’s SEC Tournament in Tennessee. They finished the regular season 21-6 overall, and 16-2 in league play.
Oats said after the game that the slow start will be a teaching point entering the SEC Tournament.
“We can’t afford in Nashville to come out like we did,” he said. “For us to finish at 16-2 in the SEC and tie for the most wins in school history shows a lot of what this team is made of. We have to get back to playing more like we did in the second half than we did in the first half when we get to Nashville.”
Another contender for the title is Arkansas, which comes in riding an 11-game winning streak including a win over Alabama. The Razorbacks knocked off Texas A&M on Saturday.
“The general fan doesn’t understand how hard it is to win 11 games in a row in league play,” Arkansas coach Eric Musselman said, per the Associated Press. “Trust me, it’s difficult. Did we play great tonight? No. We played well enough to win and we buckled down the stretch when we had to get defensive stops.”
Arkansas is expected to be a top-six for the NCAA Tournament, but could play its way into a top two or three seed with a deep SEC run.
Here is the bracket:
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
