The SEC men’s basketball tournament is currently taking place in Nashville, Tennessee, with a lot on the line for both the winner and those teams who make it further than perhaps they were expected to. The SEC was far and away the best conference in the sport this year and is expected to have several teams in the NCAA tournament when the results are announced on Selection Sunday.
Recently, commissioner Greg Sankey spoke on the blessing and the curse that is having such a talented field of teams in the league, and how that might factor into the committee’s tournament selections.
“It’s a unicorn league right now,” Sankey said, per Pete Thamel of ESPN. “We’re not going to change our name, but we stand alone historically. And I think that’ll be rewarded.”
Sankey also referenced the LSU team that finished with just three conference wins this year.
“You got somebody that’s got a nice NET (ranking), but one Quad 1 win. LSU has two Quad 1 wins for goodness sake,” Sankey said. “We went 30-4 against the ACC. Put their high-end teams in our league, and they’re in a very different place. You do that with the Big 12, they’re in a very different place.”
An interesting dilemma
In many ways, the SEC’s plight in the college basketball world mirrors the struggle it has in college football, as it’s difficult to compare how good a below average SEC team is to, say, an above average ACC team when the level of competition in each conference is far from equal.
“That’s the unicorn we’ve created this year,” Sankey said. “And I hope our coaches are proud. I hope our athletics directors are proud. We had a great visit with our presidents and chancellors, where I went through some graphics of where we were from 2006 to 2015 and then 2016 and beyond. And it’s been building, and it’d be nice to kick the door down as they say.”
It remains to be seen how the selection committee will handle having such a deserving list of contenders out of the SEC and only a limited number of slots to fill.
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