A television interview with SEC commissioner Mike Slive quickly turned to football Friday night between SEC tournament basketball games.
No surprise there. When the conference wants to put its best foot forward, it puts on cleats — regardless of the venue.
The Bridgestone Arena merely provided a curious backdrop when the BCS questions popped up in the midst of March Madness.
Imagine an interview following the same course in the Big East or the ACC. It would have made as much sense as questions about World Cup soccer.
It didn’t seem out of line in the SEC, though. Not after seven consecutive national championships in football.
Not after the previous two games of the SEC basketball tournament.
SEC football is all about coming up big in the most crucial games. That’s why Slive must have been shaking his head off camera after the first three quarterfinal games.
Both Tennessee (20-12) and Kentucky (21-11) were tantalizingly close to the NCAA tournament, whose field will be announced today. One more victory likely would have left them in the good graces of the selection committee.
So what happened?
The Vols missed 22 of 29 shots in the second half and lost to Alabama 58-48.
UT’s play was practically glorious compared to Kentucky’s. The defending national champs looked as hopelessly adrift in a 64-48 loss to Vanderbilt as they did in a 30-point, regular-season defeat at Thompson-Boling Arena.
After the Vols’ clunker, Skylar McBee pointed out, “it stinks” to think just one game could wreck a possible NCAA venture.
It doesn’t, unless — as in the case of both Tennessee and Kentucky — your margin for error is as perilously thin as tournament-bracket gurus suggest.
So the Vols stumbled into the weekend as an NCAA tournament long shot, though probably not as long as Kentucky. Wonder how many teams have beaten the Wildcats by 30 points and not made the NCAA tournament?
But there was so much more to overcome in the SEC this season. It was the antithesis of football, where the glowing perception of the league props up everybody in it.
Auburn lost 23 games. Mississippi State lost 22. South Carolina lost 18. Georgia and Vanderbilt each lost 17 games.
And in many cases, the non-conference schedules were more damning than the records.
Ever since serving on the selection committee, Slive has challenged teams to upgrade their non-conference schedules. The plea has been lost on most of them.
UT is an exception, as exemplified by a non-conference schedule that included Georgetown, Oklahoma State, Wichita State, Memphis and Virginia — five teams who have combined to average 25 wins. The Vols beat only Wichita State, but they played No. 5 Georgetown to a one-point game on the road.
The non-conference schedule was a plus. The SEC wasn’t.
But even if the Vols and Wildcats fall short of the NCAA tournament, the weekend won’t be a total washout for the SEC. Credit Ole Miss for that.
If Ole Miss hadn’t beaten Missouri in the quarterfinals Friday night, the league would have been in danger of having only two teams (Florida and Missouri) in the tournament.
The Rebels summoned the kind of effort that UT and Kentucky couldn’t, overcoming a 14-point deficit to win in the final seconds. They followed that up with victory No. 25, against Vanderbilt in Saturday’s semifinals.
Their football team should be proud.
John Adams is a senior columnist. He may be reached at 865-342-6284 or adamsj@knoxnews.com. Follow him at http://twitter.com/johnadamskns.
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Comments » 5
MrPid writes:
Slive said it best. Until the SEC has stronger non conference schedules it will be difficult to improve the impression on the league.
The RPI is simply mathematical formulas based solely on wins and loses (it does not matter who you play so long as they have a lot of victories...meaning schedule the best teams in the worst conferences can pad your RPI (take note your opponent's opponents win/loss record is also important). And as long as the teams in the league do not schedule stronger opponents across the board then the RPI of all teams will suffer. The perception will be difficult to change if the schedules do not change, because the RPIs will not change. Other conferences have taken advantage of the math and so should the SEC!
Look at the schedules across the SEC and it is down right laughable! We should demand better from our SEC brothers to improve the league standing. This RPI is not a bias from the media....just math. (where a team's wins occur are important as they are weighted differently).
The selection committee could be biased, the top 25 could be biased but the RPI is not. And the RPI is usually what creates the bias from the media, so the SEC needs to get with the program and take advantage of the system.
jmaples54 writes:
best results of the season:
1. 20 wins for the vols without their best player all year.
2. the development of jordan mcrae.
3. kentucky taking a giant step backward.
johnlg00 writes:
Good comment. It seems that ADs and perhaps some coaches in the SEC fall in love with the "fool's gold" they see in gaudy won-lost stats and don't realize that the NCAA selection committee knows a cream-puff schedule when it sees one. Some coaches, especially those with young teams, may well schedule weak opponents to give their teams confidence by piling up wins, seeming not to realize that a team improves most by playing the best possible competition whether you win or lose. Others may be trying to pad their own resumes, figuring that if they win 20 games every year, nobody will notice when they don't make the Big Dance for several years. All of these erroneous thoughts may show a lack of sophistication about basketball in a football-dominated conference.
Volbound1700 writes:
Mountain West got 5 teams and they didn't play anyone accept themselves and had bad losses too. I call BS. SEC will continue to get screwed until our spineless commish stands up and says if this happens again we are leaving including are football. The loss of $$ would cause the rest of NCAA to cave.
johnlg00 writes:
I certainly agree with you about the Mountain West. I also think the Atlantic-10 got too many in. That said, the SEC really wasn't much this year. I will be surprised if even one of our three get to the Sweet Sixteen, and Ole Miss may have as good a chance of doing that as Florida or Mizzou.
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