SEC's March Madness bonanza is chance to back up Jay Bilas' bold claims

Jay Bilas, normally one of ESPN’s most rational college basketball minds, jumped the shark earlier this season. Bilas, while praising the SEC’s uprising, brazenly claimed during an appearance on a Birmingham radio station that “winning the SEC Tournament is going to be harder than winning the national championship.”

The math doesn’t add up. Florida won three games to win the SEC Tournament. Winning the NCAA Tournament requires six victories. Landmines like Duke, Houston, St. John’s, Michigan State and Texas Tech join the SEC’s record-breaking 14 tournament qualifiers to create a March Madness gauntlet.

This tournament will amount to a final exam for the conference that aced every test so far.

SEC's basketball prowess starts with four headliners

Florida can win the NCAA Tournament, for the same reasons it won three games in three days in Nashville. The Gators excel at both ends of the court, and they can put five or more players in double-figure scoring in a single game. Senior guard Walter Clayton Jr. serves as a sufficient tip of the spear.

Or the SEC’s Auburn, Tennessee or Alabama could win the title, because, to Bilas’ larger point, the conference has been excellent. It’s not just the league’s impressive depth. It’s the four-deep crème de la crème.

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Auburn has been ranked within the top three of the USA TODAY Sports coaches’ poll every week since mid-November. Tennessee and Alabama ascended to the No. 1 ranking earlier this season, and Florida climbed as high as No. 2.

Some say the SEC supplied the best single-season performance by a conference, but that claim seems premature before the NCAA Tournament unfolds.

We tend to remember two elements of a college basketball season: We remember the upsets, and we remember the champions. For the SEC to cement this idea of best-ever conference performance, its teams must perform these next three weeks.

No banners are raised based on results achieved during the thick of football season, but the selection committee clearly noticed that the SEC smashed the ACC to the tune of a 14-2 record in the ACC/SEC challenge in November. In fact, the SEC dazzled throughout its nonconference scheduling.

The only opposition that could slow the SEC was the conference itself. The league’s cumulative .500 conference record became a running joke within SEC circles. Rhode Island coach Archie Miller and ESPN’s Karl Ravech weren't in on the joke. They became bewildered by how such a strong conference couldn’t break the .500 mark in conference play.

(Hint: When one SEC team wins a conference game, the other team loses.)

We’ve never seen anything like this SEC basketball season. The conference accounts for more than 20% of the NCAA bracket. The Big East previously set the record for most NCAA bids, with 11 in 2011, and UConn capped that season with a national championship.

The 1985 Big East remains the other standard for conference dominance. The Big East qualified six of its nine teams for the NCAA Tournament that season. That six-pack of qualifiers combined for an 18-5 March Madness record. Three Big East teams reached the Final Four, and eighth-seeded Villanova won the national championship.

Auburn, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama are positioned in four different regions. Just pointing that out. No conference has ever occupied all four spots in the Final Four.

SEC's March Madness seeding ups chance for title

This bid haul marks a zenith of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey’s years-long efforts for a basketball revolution. That push began in earnest in 2016 after the SEC qualified just three teams for the NCAA Tournament.

You could point to smarter scheduling, good facilities and strong financial commitment to explain the SEC’s uprising – all of that matters – but the starting point to explain what happened to this conference begins with coaching.

The SEC became home to the best collection of college basketball coaches.

Case in point: Auburn went from Tony Barbee to Bruce Pearl.

And still, a national championship has eluded the SEC, because despite Bilas’ assertion, winning the NCAA Tournament is a more treacherous journey than capturing a conference tournament crown. The SEC qualified eight teams for March Madness last season, and although Alabama reached the Final Four, the conference underwhelmed overall. Kentucky and Auburn suffered shocking first-round upsets, and the SEC finished the tournament with an 8-8 record.

The league is stronger – and deeper – this season. The SEC’s sheer volume of qualifiers affords the conference a great opportunity to produce a national champion for the first time since 2012 Kentucky. Plus, Auburn and Florida earning No. 1 seeds and Tennessee and Alabama grabbing No. 2 seeds buoys the SEC’s odds.

Seven of the last nine national champions were a No. 1 seed, and in the 39 tournaments since the bracket included at least 64 teams, a No. 1 or No. 2 seed won the national championship 77% of the time.

In a show of recognition for the SEC's dominance, ESPN assigned Bilas to call SEC Tournament games instead of his typical ACC assignment. During one broadcast, Bilas proclaimed that the SEC Tournament semifinals might be more robust than the Final Four.

Alternatively, the SEC’s semifinals could have previewed the Final Four.

Blake Toppmeyer is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer. Subscribe to read all of his columns.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: SEC's March Madness bonanza is chance to back up bold claims

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