Jay Bilas says SEC basketball’s performance this season is the best ever by a conference. Bold statement, but true? He’s got a case.
The Big East set a Final Four record in 1985 and a NCAA Tournament bids record in 2011. The SEC pursues those bars of greatness.
How many March Madness bids for SEC? Fourteen teams are in play.
Jay Bilas, ESPN’s erudite college hoops voice, abandoned his east coast allegiance and saluted the SEC’s fiefdom.
“This is the most powerful basketball league, top to bottom, that there has ever been,” Bilas said Tuesday on the SEC Network. “I have never seen anything remotely like what we’re seeing in the Southeastern Conference this year.”
Oh, my! Best ever? That’s lofty praise from a blue-blooded Dukie. Such words could be considered treason for ACC or Big East fans.
Nobody should dispute the SEC’s claim to the best conference this season after it dunked on non-conference competition, but are we ready to award GOAT status?
The 1985 Big East would like a word.
The 2011 Big East, too.
What about when the ACC snagged three No. 1 seeds in 2019 and Virginia took home the title?
For Bilas, this SEC season trumps all of that and more.
Bilas’ opinion is no crackpot musing. He knows ball. He’s enjoyed a front-row seat to quality hoops throughout his three decades broadcasting games.
A Big East and SEC expert weighs in
But, did Bilas suffer from recency bias anointing the SEC? I knew I needed to consult with Mike Tranghese, the former Big East commissioner who spent three decades in a conference synonymous with basketball. Tranghese later joined the SEC to help galvanize its hoops.
Forty years after No. 8 seed Villanova became the O.G. Cinderella and won the national championship, Tranghese can still rattle off results from the Big East’s magical 1985 season. Six of the Big East’s nine teams made the NCAA Tournament. Georgetown and St. John’s joined Villanova in a Final Four resembling a Big East Invitational that Memphis stumbled into.
The Big East’s six qualifiers combined for an 18-5 March Madness record. Five Big East teams won at least one tournament game. Four reached the Sweet 16, including 11th-seeded Boston College, which upset No. 3 Duke along the way.
So, what about this idea of the SEC enjoying the best season ever for a conference? Well, Tranghese won’t refute it. He sides with Bilas.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tranghese said.
And he’s seen plenty, from Chris Mullin and Patrick Ewing and Ed Pinckney to Allen Iverson and Rip Hamilton to Carmelo Anthony and Emeka Okafor. Still, he’s ready to crown the SEC.
“It’s probably the best I’ve seen from any conference, in a particular year,” Tranghese said. “I watch games all the time, and the SEC is really, really good.”
No argument on that point, but college basketball’s judgement day arrives in March.
At least for me, it’s premature to anoint the SEC the GOAT before March Madness. The SEC last produced a national champion in 2012. It last put a team in the championship game in 2014. Kentucky delivered on both fronts.
Load up the Sweet 16, put multiple teams in the Final Four, bring a national championship home to the South, and that’ll settle this debate, hands down.
Tranghese sees nothing to suggest the SEC won’t keep the good times rolling.
“They’ve all got a chance to do damage in the tournament,” Tranghese said.
SEC basketball uprising a culmination of Greg Sankey’s mandate
Let’s dig into this tremendous SEC uprising. Fourteen of the league’s 16 teams assemble résumés worthy of tournament consideration.
Even if the SEC finishes a bid or two short of 14 qualifiers, it threatens to break the record of 11 NCAA bids, set by the 2011 Big East. That’s the only time any league reached double figures.
The SEC’s 14-2 record in the SEC/ACC challenge highlighted its evisceration of non-conference opponents. That interconference dominance formed the linchpin of Bilas’ argument. Case in point: SEC cellar dweller South Carolina beat Clemson, one of the ACC’s best teams.
This season marks a crescendo of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey’s decade-long push to elevate men’s basketball. The SEC’s initiative involved smarter scheduling and improving officiating, but hiring better coaches and investing in retaining them became the biggest factor in this hoops movement.
“In the pudding, regardless of what league you administrate, you’ve got to start with coaches. That’s just where it all is,” said Chris Plonsky, Texas’ executive senior associate athletics director. She previously worked for the Big East.
Two hires help change SEC basketball
In 2016, one year into Sankey’s commissionership, his league’s basketball product dragged the bottom. Just three SEC teams earned NCAA bids. Sankey wouldn’t tolerate that. He made two important hires to spur an uprising. Sankey tapped Tranghese as his special assistant for men’s basketball and hired former coach Dan Leibovitz as an associate commissioner for men’s basketball. Each served in their roles for seven years.
The new personnel sparked change and ignited some fires. Tranghese remembers delivering a rally cry to the conference’s athletic directors.
“In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think it would get to this,” Tranghese said, “but I remember when I went in and told the ADs, ‘For the SEC not to be winning in basketball, it’s absurd. Utterly absurd.’ It’s just got too many things going for it.’”
Combine enviable financial resources, elite facilities, the conference’s television network, passionate fan bases and access to talent, and Tranghese insisted the SEC possessed tools to thrive in basketball.
Insert better coaches, and a limping league started to sprint.
“The most important thing is, we got our schools to hire good coaches,” Tranghese said.
SEC in 2025 or Big East in 1985? Who gets the edge?
The 1972 Miami Dolphins sip a champagne toast each year when the NFL’s last undefeated team loses, to celebrate the Dolphins remaining the league’s only team to finish a season unbeaten.
Members of the Big East’s old guard don’t break out the bubbly, but they relish the league’s unprecedented and unmatched 1985 record of three Final Four bids.
“We all still converse, and we love that stat: Three out of four in ’85,” said Plonsky, who joined the Big East in 1986. “That’s a badge of pride.”
She also nods to the Big East’s 2011 feat of 11 qualifiers. Only two reached the Sweet 16, but Connecticut won the national championship.
“It was a collection of some of the best, deepest basketball, with great coaches – a similar scenario of what the SEC men are enjoying right now,” Plonsky said of that 2011 Big East season, by which point she’d settled in at Texas.
The argument for the SEC being the best ever resides in its top to bottom strength. The top four teams in the USA TODAY Sports men’s basketball poll hail from the SEC. No. 1 Alabama will face No. 2 Auburn on Saturday. All but two SEC teams rank in the NET rankings’ top 50. Oklahoma, the SEC’s 14th-place team, owns wins against Arizona, Louisville, Michigan and Oklahoma State.
By comparison, the 1985 Big East included three teams with losing records. A few anchors existed within the 2011 Big East, too.
This sport revolves around March Madness, so the SEC’s final exam begins next month, but “there is a new standard, potentially, being created,” Plonsky said.
And would it surprise anyone if the last team standing wears an SEC jersey patch? Nonbelievers are so hard to find, you wonder whether any still exist.
“I don’t want to jinx it, but I picked a team at the beginning of the year, and they’re having a great season, and I think they’ve got a heck of a chance to win the whole thing,” Tranghese said. “And, it’s an SEC team.”
Blake Toppmeyer is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer. Subscribe to read all of his columns.