The SEC is a — no, the — basketball league

Its structural dominance is the story of the season

Photo credit: Auburn Plainsman

Our 2024-25 Southeastern Conference men's basketball preview began with a tale from 2013. At its media day in Birmingham, the league was reeling, coming off a three-bid tournament, years of underweight tournament allocations, and an offseason full of mutual recriminations about nonconference scheduling and programmatic ambition — led by then-Kentucky Supreme Potentate for Life John Calipari, who was hardly too shy to call out the rest of the league for being content with drift:

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.") SEC commissioner Mike Slive declared coaches should start sending their league schedules to him 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.

Note the caution there. "Might." Laughable. We told that story as a way of noting how far the SEC had come in a decade, how its structural and cultural investment in basketball — a windfall from the money-printing machine that is SEC football — had paid dividends. But the dividends we had in mind were modest. Hey, look, this conference is super competitive now! Wow, right? It might even be the best conference this season!

After yet another dominant weekend — after another Saturday chock full of high-profile nonconference competition that hammered home arguably the most interesting single storyline in the sport this season — the SEC might just be the best men's basketball league ever.

Whatever small chunks we thought might get taken out of the league's side in the past couple of weeks — because surely it couldn't keep up that November performance forever, right? — have totally failed to materialize.

Auburn's Dec. 4 loss at Cameron Indoor Stadium was a more impressive coming-of-age hold for Duke than any substantive knock on the Tigers. All Bruce Pearl's team has done since is hammer Richmond and then treat a top-30 Ohio State team, like, well, Richmond, winning 91-53 in 65 possessions in Atlanta Saturday. It was Ohio State's largest loss since 1994, and the biggest Big Ten noncon defeat since 2011. Johni Broome continues to be the best and most productive player in the country by a wide margin: He had 21 points, 20 rebounds, six assists, three blocks and a steal on 40 percent usage Saturday. He's also responsible for this nutso stat: