This weekend, redemption was spelled S-E-C.
Throughout the college basketball season, the Southeastern Conference was much maligned as one of the worst “power conferences” in recent memory.
Top-ranked Florida was dominant from the jump, but beyond the Gators, the conference was considered to be a full-blown dumpster fire with a couple of decent teams sprinkled among a sea of programs ranging from below-average to downright awful.
After months of jokes about “SEC Basketball Fever” — a crippling disease characterized by unwatchable basketball games and hard-to-comprehend losses — the NCAA tournament has served as a somewhat unexpected remedy. Following respective Elite 8 triumphs on Saturday and Sunday, No. 1 seed Florida and No. 8 seed Kentucky give the SEC half of the Final Four.
As Kentucky freshman Aaron Harrison drained an ice-cold step-back 3-pointer to knock out No. 2 seed Michigan Sunday, it’s hard not to picture SEC Commissioner Mike Slive lighting up a victory cigar in his office with a big ole grin on his face.
Combined with a strong three-win showing from the conference’s third and final tournament team, No. 11 seed Tennessee, the SEC seemingly awoke from its regular-season doormat status and made a case for the parade of league coaches who cried disrespect throughout the season.
But before the growing chants of S-E-C become too deafening to hear, let me make my point — March success is a big step toward respectability, but SEC basketball as a whole isn’t much better than it was three weeks ago.
Having two of the last four teams standing is a nice feather in the SEC’s cap — a houndstooth fedora, of course — but it really did nothing but punctuate the criticism that has echoed around the Southeast since early November — the league is as top heavy as humpty dumpty.
Florida has been the most complete team in the country since day one and we all knew how dangerous Kentucky could be if the young cats could put it together, but a pair of Final Four runs don’t erase the rest of the league’s overwhelming mediocrity.
Beyond the three NCAA tournament teams and a surprisingly good Georgia team, the rest of the conference is either awful or virtually a mirror image of the rest of the mediocre teams log jammed in the middle.
Just three games separate fifth place Arkansas from Vanderbilt and Alabama, which tied for 10th in the league. All of the teams in between, including LSU, had seasons characterized by glimpses of promise at home and subsequently terrible performances on the road.
Nothing characterizes the drop off within the conference more than the fact that the other 12 SEC teams combined for a putrid 4-28 regular-season record against the top two, and that doesn’t even include Florida and Kentucky running roughshod through the SEC tournament.
Florida and Kentucky are national powers riding impressive runs through the NCAA tournament, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the conference gets to ride the coattails of that success.
The SEC’s run of football championships didn’t mean Kentucky football was any less of a joke, and there’s no reason the opposite should be true when it comes to hoops. For a conference to be good, there has to be some amount of competition from top to bottom.
While it doesn’t make the conference better as a whole, it should temporarily put a stop on the jokes.
Now if only some of those talented-yet-inconsistent teams could make that leap from mediocre to good — looking at you, LSU, Missouri and Arkansas — the SEC would really have something going.
James Moran is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Beacon, N.Y.