INDIANAPOLIS – The exact moment the SEC became a basketball conference is still up for debate. What Rick Barnes can tell you is when his league was barely known for basketball.
It was 1987, the beginning of what will someday be a hall of fame career for Tennessee’s current coach. Barnes had just taken what turned out to be a one-season-and-done job at George Mason. That season marked only the program’s 10th year of existence. It was a year before its first ever NCAA appearance, 18 years before its first NCAA win during a miracle run to the 2006 Final Four.
“Back when I was at George Mason, you tried to schedule SEC teams in November and December because you felt like you could go in and play in front of nobody and maybe steal a game,” Barnes recalled.
Let it be known that Barnes neither beat, nor played, an SEC opponent that season but that’s not for the lack of trying. Besides, never let a good anecdote get in the way of making a point. This Midwest Regional is the main backdrop this weekend for the biggest story of the tournament to date.
The 14 SEC teams in the NCAA Tournament is a record, by three. The Big East had 11 in 2011. The league also has a record seven Sweet 16 teams, shattering the old mark of four. Kentucky meets Tennessee here on Friday in one Midwest semifinal in a bout that will send a third SEC team to the Elite 8 (Alabama and Florida advanced Thursday night). The record for most schools from one conference in an Elite 8 is four. The SEC can tie that mark held by the ACC in 2016 and the Big East in 2009, if Auburn or Ole Miss win Friday and would even surpass it if both do.
“Everybody’s talking about how historic it’s been, the best league probably basketball has ever seen,” Tennessee assistant Rod Clark said. “Everybody was waiting for us [SEC] to flop when we got in the tournament. We look up and we’ve got almost half the Sweet 16. I think people are realizing this league was really for real.”
It’s time, then, to ask some questions. Like, how did all this happen? An overall upgrade in coaching has had a lot to do with it. Defying a national trend, top SEC players are coming to programs and staying. Officiating is better.
Barnes was half coach, half oracle in speaking to the media about the subject Thursday afternoon. He is both one of the reasons the SEC has taken over the world and a keen observer of the process. It was when Barnes arrived at Tennessee 10 years ago that the league was in the process of taking stock in its underperformance.
“The only sport that wasn’t living up to the ‘It Just Means More’ (slogan) was the basketball side of it,” Barnes said.
Then-commissioner Mike Slive had already made the decision to bring in Greg Shaheen, who had run the NCAA Tournament for years as a vice president of championships, as a consultant in 2013 to help upgrade nonconference schedules.
A few years later current commissioner Greg Sankey brought in Mike Tranghese, the retired former commissioner of the Big East to do a top-down evaluation of SEC basketball..
“When Mike said you were good at basketball,” Sankey said, recounting his influence Thursday on the Dan Patrick Show. “You were good at basketball.”
The problem was, the SEC wasn’t good at basketball. At least not good enough. Tranghese took one look at the budgets, arenas and possibilities in the league and concluded, “six, seven, eight teams [in the tournament] should be the norm.” But from 2009-2019 it averaged 4.5.
“They just believed because of their brand …,” Shaheen said, “they’d just be in the tournament. That would always be the conversation.”
“We didn’t get it,” Barnes said.
Standards were put in place early on under Slive’s directive to improve nonconference schedules. Coaches had to submit those schedules to the conference for what Shaheen called “approval.”
“Both Mike and Greg were both clear and pointed about their response to men’s and women’s basketball, ‘The conference can only do so much. You have to do your part too,'” Shaheen recalled. “Slive was just very demanding and he would look point blank at the strongest coaches in the conference and just call them out.”
“I think morale was beaten down,” Tranghese said. “They had lost so much. Coaches were pretty negative. They felt no one really cared. Athletic directors, I felt, almost accepted what they were. It didn’t seem that important.”
As a former commissioner, Tranghese had no problem speaking to SEC coaches, ADs himself.
“You’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got fans, support, television network … you win in every sport with the exception of men’s basketball,” he said. “I said, ‘It was ridiculous.’
That sentence up top about the SEC being a hoops league is pulling your leg. Football always does and always will run the conference. The likes of Alabama basketball didn’t carry the same weight as Alabama football. In the 1950s SEC assistant football coaches at some schools, actually picked up extra cash by coaching basketball in their offseason. Two years after going 58-100 in eight seasons at Mississippi State, Paul Gregory launched a baseball coaching career that lasted 15 years with the Bulldogs.
But Bruce Pearl arrived at Tennessee in 2005. Then he remade Auburn into a national program. Barnes came to Tennessee in 2015. The Vols won the regular season title in 2023-24. They’ll be playing for a spot in their second consecutive Elite Eight on Friday night. Bama’s Nate Oats has the Tide in the Elite Eight after its 113-88 rout of BYU in the Sweet 16 after taking Alabama to last year’s Final Four.
Sankey began referencing SEC softball. In 2024, all 13 teams got into the NCAA tournament. If there was a laugh in the men’s basketball coaches meeting, it was stifled. It almost happened in hoops this season. Only LSU and South Carolina missed out.
“Not surprised, stunned,” Tranghese said when he saw 14 SEC names go up on the board on Selection Sunday.
Kentucky has long been the SEC hoops standard but since 2007 when Florida won the second of back-to-back NCAA Tournaments only the Wildcats (2012) have won a national championship for the SEC.
That has to change this year, doesn’t it? With this many teams in the tournament, someone has to start asking the question: What does success look like for the SEC in the Final Four? Two teams? Three? Sheer numbers dictate a national championship should come out of San Antonio next month.
“I’m going to be honest. For the conference it doesn’t matter,” Tennessee forward Igor Milicic said. “As long as we make it.”
What’s it like to play in the SEC these days? Kentucky coach Mark Pope on Thursday called it both a “blessing” and “painful.” The Wildcats are in the Sweet 16 despite losing 11 regular-season games for the second time in three years. Auburn has been ranked No. 1 for eight weeks this season and is the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. Arkansas remade itself within John Calipari’s first season. Missouri went from 0-18 to 10-8 in the league.
Four teams were ranked in the top seven of the final regular-season AP Top 25 poll. Seven teams are ranked overall.
“It’s just been a magical, brutal, beautiful year in the SEC,” Pope said.
“A lot of bangin’. A lot of playin’ against high level dudes,” Kentucky forward Brandon Garrison said. “After the game you’re sore, like you just played a full two games.”
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There’s a lot of attention to detail too. Barnes smiled Thursday when recalling being reprimanded by the men’s basketball committee years ago while at Texas for not wearing his NCAA Tournament lapel pin. That pin basically is a coaches’ credential, allowing them to get in the building.
Barnes wrote a detailed response noting the high-thread count of his designer suits. The lapel was damaged by wearing a pin, he argued.
“I promise you, I went 10 years without wearing it,” Barnes told CBS Sports.
Yes, it’s been a while. Texas is now in the SEC. Barnes continues to be one of those ruling it.
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