A decade ago, the Southeastern Conference stood at the center of the basketball world.
After the last vestiges of the college football season died off and a newfangled playoff format fully receded from the spotlight, the nation’s sporting attention began to zero in on the hard court when the calendar moved slowly from February into March.
The league’s hoops heavyweight, the Kentucky Wildcats, were rolling along at a clip that was historic even by their blueblood nature. Then-coach John Calipari had brought in Devin Booker and Karl-Anthony Towns as part of a stacked recruiting class, infusing the latest crop of five-stars into the core of a team that was fresh off a national title game appearance and in the midst of making a fourth Final Four trip in six years.
The Cats rolled through the nonconference slate without a blemish and turned heads as they put a stranglehold on the top spot in the polls. It was a charmed time in Lexington, Ky., as conference play got underway and the winning continued.
And continued. And continued.
Kentucky went undefeated in the regular season as that spring’s must-see TV every time it took the floor. The added mystique of chasing history as UK attempted to become the first team since the famed 1975–76 Indiana Hoosiers squad to finish the year undefeated in men’s basketball drew neutrals in.
While the pursuit of perfection was good for business—the 2015 NCAA tournament was the most watched in 22 years—and spotlighted the league’s logo on national television on a regular basis, it was also a grand smoke screen covering the cracks that had developed with SEC basketball. Even before the Wisconsin Badgers put an end to such thoughts of Big Blue immortality during the national semifinals, blocking the best attempt in 39 years any team had at going undefeated, the underpinnings of the league were plainly evident.
Between 2012 and ’17, the SEC averaged fewer than four bids to the NCAA tournament—long the measuring stick when it came to proclaiming conference superiority—and many were double-digit seeds that snuck into the field. Nonconference losses were a regular occurrence early each season, putting the league in a bind with regard to the typical metrics the selection committee evaluated. Several programs were cited for major infractions in men’s basketball, and many jobs in the SEC became a slew of revolving doors for coaches ushered in and out with regularity.
On social media, it was not uncommon to see a sarcastic #SECBasketballFever hashtag trending after the latest inexplicable loss. The tongue-in-cheek expression may have been worth a laugh in the moment, but it also underscored that the symptoms were real with the product.
A few months after Kentucky’s run ended in 2015, the SEC installed Greg Sankey as its commissioner. While the conference had no issues puffing its chest when it came to football and the slew of national championships its schools were racking up over the years, the basketball-loving New Yorker quickly identified men’s basketball as a priority to address.
Seeking solutions to the league’s subpar performance on the court, he hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as an adviser on the eve of the 2016 tournament and eventually installed former coach and administrator Dan Leibovitz as a dedicated associate commissioner for the sport.
“Men’s basketball in the SEC gained positive momentum during the last 12 months, but we are not meeting our own expectations,” Sankey said at the time. “As a conference, we seek continuing improvement in the national competitive success of our men’s basketball programs.”
Though it took a few years for the message to get through and results to start showing, the SEC’s eponymous slogan, “It Just Means More,” finally started to apply to hoops.
Across the board at schools in the conference, facilities were refurbished or put up amid a sports building boom on many of the 14 campuses. Experienced, big-name coaches were brought in on a more consistent basis, and high-profile games early in the season were encouraged to get the fan bases interested in the sport long before football wrapped up.
Strategic scheduling, especially in multi-team events, helped various metrics and the creation of the SEC Network in conjunction with ESPN proved to be an equal boon in terms of exposure from one side of the conference to the other.
“I think the league has gotten better and better since I’ve gotten into the league,” Alabama Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats said before this season tipped. “It’ll be Year 6 now, which I can’t believe it’s been that long, but there’s no easy games, particularly road games in the SEC. And that’s part of the reason I try to schedule so tough in the nonconference, to get us ready for SEC play.”
Most tangible was the show of investment by athletic directors to the second-biggest revenue sport in the NCAA. In 2014, just two programs had men’s basketball expenses exceeding $10 million per year. By ’22, 11 members hit eight figures.
The conference has increasingly seen this pay off each year in March Madness, with a record eight NCAA bids three times in the last six tournaments. Nine different programs have made it to the second weekend in the same time frame. Last year, a quartet of teams earned top-four seeds from the committee—the SEC’s most in two decades.
Associate commissioner for men’s basketball Garth Glissman, who took over for Leibovitz in 2023, says even larger factors helped fuel the rise of the SEC in college athletics (and can keep such positive trend lines going). He points to the population shift into the league’s footprint and the region’s share of the nation’s gross domestic product recently exceeding that of the Northeast for the first time in ’23.
“I was aware of the tremendous macro momentum that not only the Southeastern part of the country had, but how that manifested itself in strength for the Southeastern Conference. You have this tremendous economic growth in the region combined with the cultural importance of sports in the Southeast, which I could identify with coming from the Midwest,” says Glissman, a former football and basketball player at Nebraska who joined the conference after working as a vice president in the NBA league office. “I believe in what we’re selling, I believe in our product and I believe that there’s an opportunity for even more people to see that SEC men’s basketball is special.
“They already know about football. On a relative basis, I think SEC baseball success speaks for itself. But in basketball, we still have some room to grow and part of my job is to help tell that story.”
It’s one bordering on all-time in 2024–25, thanks to a combination of unprecedented depth and a cast of legitimate national championship contenders.
Seven SEC teams are ranked in the top 25 of the NCAA selection committee’s key NET metric before the conference tournament begins Wednesday. The conference’s overall KenPom rating is on pace to be the highest in the metric’s history, breaking the previous mark of +21.37 by the ACC in 1997.
All but two of the 16 SEC teams have been in the top 25 at some point this season and 10 teams were ranked at the same time on three separate occasions. In February, four of the top five teams in the AP poll remarkably sported the conference’s logo—the first time any league accomplished such a feat in the weekly poll era.
“People talk about the top of the league, which obviously is very strong, but really there’s no real bottom of the league which is extremely unusual for a league of this size,” says Ken Pomeroy, the founder of the analytics site bearing his name. “The previous great leagues, certainly like the 11-bid Big East [in 2012] that gets all the publicity, that year top to bottom they weren’t even the best league in the country because the bottom of the league was not very good. I think in some respect, getting 11 bids was because those middling teams were able to get some easy wins so the records looked halfway decent.
“You’re also comparing the SEC to the 1997 ACC. They had a rating of over 21, in terms of average rating, but that was a nine-team league that got six bids and eight of the nine teams were ranked in the top 26. It’s kind of absurd, but also hard to compare a 16-team league to a nine-team league.”
Try everyone will, however, especially come tournament time as the go-to proxy to compare conferences and eras.
In the sights of the SEC league office is the Big East’s record in 2012 when it sent 11 programs to the tourney. Nine were at least a No. 6 seed, and all won at least 20 games.
Thanks in part to the additions of the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners this season, the SEC has a shot at surpassing that mark with at least a dozen programs projected to dance this year. The last vestiges of the schedule down the stretch put a damper on some of the overall win-loss records, but the best nonconference performance in recent memory should still be enough to prop up the league in the eyes of the committee.
The SEC has a winning record against each of the other four high-major conferences and impressively went 30–4 against the ACC and 14–2 against the Big 12 earlier this season.
“You could sense this momentum was building in terms of SEC men’s basketball. There was a tremendous respect for the league. We’ve got a number of veteran coaches who have been in the league for a while,” Glissman says. “Every one of them said the league has never been anything close to this good, and it just keeps getting better every year.”
Just as notable as the success is who it is coming from.
Calipari’s offseason switch from Kentucky to the Arkansas Razorbacks seemed to give a shot in the arm at both programs, but even the non-traditional basketball powers have gotten in on the act. The Florida Gators are back in the national title hunt for the first time since Billy Donovan was on the sideline, while Buzz Williams notched a school record for victories over ranked teams with the Texas A&M Aggies.
Rick Barnes has the Tennessee Volunteers playing the best defense in the country by most metrics and both programs in the state of Mississippi made shrewd hires and are on track to make the tournament together. Even new Vanderbilt Commodores coach Mark Byington has taken little time getting started on a postseason run in the Music City.
One cannot discuss the SEC without the Yellowhammer State though, as gridiron struggles last fall gave way to a dueling renaissance on the court between the two Iron Bowl rivals who are two of the top favorites to cut down the nets in San Antonio next month. Alabama and the Auburn Tigers staged the first No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup in college basketball in three years when they met in mid-February—the first meeting of the top teams in the polls during conference play since the Big 12 had the Kansas Jayhawks memorably outduel the Oklahoma Sooners in 2016.
“I don’t think many people would have picked Auburn and Alabama to be those teams,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said of the matchup. “The championships, in the last eight years in the SEC, have kind of run through the state of Alabama.”
While the statement is equal parts true and hard to fathom in the land of Paul Finebaum callers still coming to grips with the SEC becoming known as a basketball conference this season, it’s also reflective of the growing talent the league has to work with in the age of NIL and the transfer portal.
Oklahoma guard Jeremiah Fears, Texas wing Tre Johnson and Georgia forward Asa Newell are among the potential NBA draft lottery picks from the SEC, while Auburn forward Johni Broome has made the most of his transfer from Morehead State to the Plains two years ago and might wind up as the consensus national player of the year come April.
The pipeline is showing no signs of slowing either, with the arrival of revenue sharing among power-conference schools set to supplement the extensive collective operations already in existence across the SEC.
“What we are now undertaking in college athletics is something that pro sports has been doing for many decades and a lot of lessons can be learned in terms of what roster building looks like—how do you assign value to a particular player at a particular position?” Glissman says. “We’re trying to encourage our coaches to be very intellectual and data driven as to how they put together a roster.”
No matter how good the players and coaches are or even how historic the conference’s performance has been, there remains the unforgiving nature of the one-and-done NCAA tournament. As just about everyone involved in the SEC knows, this is where such results can be either cemented in stone as one of the greatest seasons ever … or the place where the door is opened on the seeds of doubt about just how high the highs really were.
Back in 2018 when the league first placed eight teams in the tournament, there was plenty of rejoicing as the fruits of the conference office’s emphasis showed dividends in a major way. Unfortunately, just two schools made it to the second weekend and none survived the Sweet 16.
Last year, eight programs made the tourney and Alabama reached the Final Four for the first time in program history, but the SEC finished just 9–8 overall and took a starring role in memorable upsets like the Oakland Golden Grizzlies shocking No. 3 seed Kentucky in the first round.
What will the narrative be this time around as the SEC deals with the pressure of a potentially record-setting tournament field? Given how open the sport has been this season and with numerous legitimate contenders to win it all, that’s the one thing left on the plate for the league to still grab hold of in 2025.
“When you have that many teams in the tournament, I don’t know that winning a title is really a validation of the league as much as it’s going to be validation for one team. But getting like three teams in the Elite Eight or two teams in the Final Four, that’s going to be really tough, honestly, for the SEC to perform as well in the tournament as they have in the regular season to keep their rating where it is,” Pomeroy says. “I did have the SEC as the best conference coming into the year, but the level they’ve taken it to is kind of freaky. You wonder if this is a trend or is this a fluke and I don’t know the answer to that.”
Those in the conference office in Birmingham, certainly believe it’s the former and have been leaving no stone unturned, and no foundational crack unseen, in making sure that’s the case after years of hard work under the surface.
Make all the jokes you want, but the SEC is indeed a basketball league—back at the center of the hoops world for all the right reasons this time around.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How the SEC Became a Men’s Basketball Hub.