How the SEC went from basketball afterthought to juggernaut

The league is piecing together what might be the best season a basketball conference has ever had. How did it get so good so quickly?

About 10 years ago, there was a tweet I came across that has stuck with me all these years later.

Like many tweets, and because of the platform’s fundamentally broken search function, I can’t find it. The beautiful mind behind it won’t get their proper credit and I don’t remember the exact verbiage, but I’ve never forgotten the gist of the post.

Instead of playing basketball during the winter, SEC schools should just stage arena football games.

Not every idea from 2015 has aged particularly well. Steph Curry and a bunch of jump-shooters are trying to win a title? I don’t know if that can be done. A thirtysomething college dropout with no medical background has invented a device that can tell if you have cancer with a single drop of blood? Sounds great! The host of “The Celebrity Apprentice” is running to be the most powerful person in the world? What could go wrong?

The SEC arena football league, though? It’s got some juice.

As is the case with the other, decade-old sentiments, you have to understand the time in which it was birthed.

In the mid-2010s, and for many of the 15 years that preceded it, SEC basketball was flat-out bad. It got just three teams into the NCAA Tournament three times over a four-year period from 2013-16. Over a 10-year stretch from 2008-17, it was ranked higher than the fifth-best conference in the country by KenPom just once. In 2011 and 2013, it fell as far as No. 7, behind the Mountain West in both seasons. Apathy for the sport was high in many fan bases. Far too many of the schools didn’t invest significant resources into their programs, instead saving it for football and even baseball. The league had its marquee attractions that competed for Final Fours and national titles, like John Calipari’s early Kentucky teams and Billy Donovan’s final squads at Florida, but beyond that, there wasn’t much.

Those woes, like that fateful tweet, now seem like a distant memory from a very different time.

Long regarded as a football conference in which men’s basketball was an afterthought relegated to the shadows, the SEC has improved significantly on the hardwood in recent years and this season, it looks like a potentially historic behemoth.

The league had nine teams ranked in the top 25 of the latest Associated Press poll, including four of the top six, five of the top nine and eight of the top 16 squads. Entering the weekend, it had four of the top eight, seven of the top 18 and nine of the top 30 teams on KenPom. That same set of formulas that once routinely had it last among its major-conference peers now has it first and with the highest efficiency rating in the website’s history, going all the way back to the 1996-97 season.

The statistical dominance doesn’t end there.

Back in early January, all 16 of the SEC’s teams had at least a .750 win percentage, the first time any conference had done that entering January since the ACC in 1983-84, according to ESPN (and the ACC had just eight teams back then). Its teams have collectively gone 185-23 in non-conference play, with a record 21 wins against opponents ranked in the AP poll.

Perhaps most notably, it has 13 teams in Joe Lunardi’s most recent mock NCAA Tournament bracket. That would break the Big East’s record from 2011 for most tournament bids in a year from a single conference.

The SEC didn’t arrive at this enviable point by some happy accident. It’s the result of a dedicated, years-long effort to not only improve its men’s basketball product, but make it a force on par with SEC football.

Here’s how it got there:

It started taking the sport seriously

The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging you have one.

In 2016, within weeks of getting just three teams in the NCAA Tournament, the SEC hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, for a role officially titled “special advisor to the commissioner for men’s basketball.”

Tranghese had been Dave Gavitt’s right-hand man as the former Providence coach built the Big East into the sport’s dominant conference and ultimately succeeded him as commissioner before stepping down in 2009. He knew what it took to build and maintain a successful basketball league and went to work applying that knowledge to the SEC.

It began with some tough talk, according to this account from Dana O’Neil of The Athletic in a 2019 story:

Now in front of Tranghese sat a group of men whose schools had every advantage — rabid fan bases and national exposure, fully funded budgets and willing donors — and they were blaming everyone for their struggles. After exchanging pleasantries, Tranghese took his seat and shook his head in frustration. “Cut the crap,’’ he said. “Stop complaining. Stop pointing fingers and stop whining.’’

Tranghese wasn’t the only outside voice the SEC sought, as it also brought in Dan Leibovitz, the former head coach at Hartford who had been working for the American Athletic Conference, to be its new associate commissioner for men’s basketball.

The league had previously made a similar effort at self-improvement in 2013, but even then, it hired a former NCAA administrator who helped run the NCAA Tournament, whose biggest advice related to non-conference scheduling. What it got with Tranghese and Leibovitz was something more holistic. The conference didn’t just want to game the metrics, but it wanted to get better in a meaningful and lasting way.

What they helped provide was a blueprint, one complete with recommendations that were soon put into practice.

It dumped some of its football fortune into basketball

While football was long seen as a hindrance to basketball in the SEC, with the attention and passion the sport drew diverting it from other teams in an athletic department, it offered schools in the conference something incredibly valuable – money.