Better Know a Conference: SEC

A mad dash through the best (?) league in college basketball

Photo credit: Auburn Athletics

Better Know a Conference is Buzzer’s league-by-league preview of the 2024-25 season, featuring Bubble Watch-length narrative looks at every team in every major league — and other miscellany and mid-majors along the way — in rough order of expected finish.

To read the full series (and start posting on the best college hoops comment section on the Internet!) consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Today: The SEC.

It was the fall of 2013, and SEC men’s basketball was in crisis. The league had sent just three teams to the previous NCAA Tournament. Just one, Florida, made it out of the first weekend. Status anxiety was afoot, but only in so far as a football-obsessed conference even cared about being good at basketball in the first place. Did it, really? The entire conference still gave off a collective yeah-cool-but-when-is-spring-football vibe.

Kentucky coach John Calipari spent his 2013 media day press conference chiding rival SEC hoops coaches for not scheduling well enough to make the league more nationally competitive in the nonconference portion of the season, a failing he attributed to “jealousy.” ("And we can all be about our own programs and we'll all go down one by one, or we can all be about each other,” Calipari said, hilariously. “You've got to bury the jealousy and let's go. I think we're all ears: Let's do this.") SEC commissioner Mike Slive declared coaches should start sending their league schedules to for feedback and optimization — in other words, advice on how to game the easily gameable RPI — and even hired former NCAA Executive Vice President Greg Shaheen to consult.

A little over a decade later, this might just be the best league in the sport.

Gaming the metrics may have helped at the margins, but the real factor here is money. In the past decade SEC athletics programs, awash in TV cash, invested meaningfully in men’s basketball. Auburn hired a proven winner and built a new gym. Alabama plucked a forward-thinking program builder and offered him new tools. Tennessee hired Rick Barnes. Texas A&M dropped a bag on Buzz Williams. Ole Miss ruthlessly looked past Chris Beard’s personal life for the sake of winning at hoops. And so on. The coaching acumen here never been higher; quality teams have never run this deep. The era when Kentucky and Florida dominated teams in half-interested road gyms is long since over. Now the league looks like this:

In this final edition of our high-major conference preview series — undergone in part to force ourselves to figure out exactly who is playing on, and what we think of, all of these basketball teams we’ll be covering all season — we find ourselves confronted with not just 16 teams but 16 viable tournament hopefuls. Wild.

(Note: We’ll be back on Monday with some mid-major takes and final preseason thoughts. The season is nigh. Maybe it even snuck up on us slightly? Maybe.)

Auburn