SEC’s stock rising in basketball

Published 7:00 pm Friday, January 26, 2018

We interrupt these final two weeks of football recruiting and the looming threat of spring games for this startling announcement:

The Southeastern Conference has gotten pretty decent in — are you sitting down? — yes, it’s basketball. 

Better than pretty decent, actually. Pretty darn good, bordering on very good.

At any rate, the league, after lo these many years of wandering and struggling (and shrugging shoulders about it) is way, way improved.

For a change it seems to be more than lip service — don’t worry, not looking at you, Kentucky.

But this newfound hoops proficiency is one of the reasons a team like, say, LSU under first-year preacher/coach Will Wade can be light years ahead of the Tigers’ travails in recent years, but without all that much to show for the improvement.

My guess is that, based solely on the eye test, LSU is a little better than even Wade might have dreamed.

The Tigers are 3-4 in the conference, which is easily outperforming expectations — they were the near-unanimous choice in the preseason polls for last place — but any other recent year maybe they could even have been a contender.

Probably not this year.

Just to pick a nice, round number, if the Tigers can finish .500 in SEC play — or anywhere near it — Wade should be coach of the year.

Wade has loftier goals, of course, and he is going to get LSU there. You can book that. The Tigers don’t always win, of course, but they always look prepared, do a good job of carrying out his plan and have even started occasionally playing defense. 

Maybe the biggest stunt Wade has pulled was Tuesday in beating Texas A&M by 12 — on a night when the Tigers were outrebounded by 20.

You shouldn’t try something that foolhardy at home, kiddies, especially if you’re LSU, which for some odd reason is much better on the road.

But forget the whistle and chalkboard. That’s coaching with smoke and mirrors.

Yes, this is just the preview under Wade, who’s working around a lot of holes this season, but has a highly ranked recruiting class on the way.

He’ll be up there sooner or later at the top of the standings.

Trouble is, he might have a lot of company when LSU gets there.

It turns out that that SEC slogan that so annoys other conferences — “It Just Means More” — can apply to hoops as well, at least a diversionary tactic after the bowls are finished.

There are a lot of ways to measure the SEC’s return to basketball relevance.

But if you’re looking for such things, the surest indicator that the SEC is much, much better — maybe even taking hoops semi-seriously — look no further than seeing Kentucky in a three-way tie … for third place.

The Wildcats aren’t used to such affronts. They’ve got to be looking around, scratching heads and thinking, “What in Big Blue tarnation is going on around here? We own this joint. How about a little respect, huh?”

Or consider what happened to A&M (beyond getting beat by 12 while outrebounding LSU by 20).

The Aggies tuned up for SEC play with an 11-1 record against good enough competition to land at No. 11 in the country. Then came conference play, where they started 0-4 and even now are only 2-6 with two losses to the preseason pick to finish in the cellar.

Oh, yes, it’s a jungle out there.

Even Kentucky can’t just roll the ball out on the floor and tell its future NBA stars to have fun. 

The Wildcats, blind sided by a two-game losing streak, are too busy trying to shake loose from Alabama and Tennessee in the three hole so they can chase down Florida and, of all folks, Auburn.

They also lost to South Carolina. Even LSU had a shot at the buzzer to beat the ’Cats (it was at home, so it didn’t go down).

The numbers are starting to reflect the SEC’s resurgence.

The RPI rankings — which sound dangerously like the same kind of computers that did in the football BCS — are the holy grail of college basketball.

Right now, the SEC has nine teams ranked in the top 50 — the mighty ACC is next with eight. 

Two one of the SEC’s 14 teams are outside the top 90 of the 351 teams — LSU (No. 91) and Vanderbilt (No. 137). Only Vanderbilt (7-13) has a losing record. The SEC sports a .661 winning percentage, .685 without Vandy.

In the conference power rankings, the SEC is fourth, behind the No. 1 Big 12, Big East and ACC, but ahead of the Big Ten and Pac-12.

Those are just numbers.

This will be a big weekend for the conference — the SEC-Big 12 Challenge, with the two leagues going at it team by team.

LSU will sit out the Challenge, instead playing at Auburn on Saturday.

The math-challenged Big 12 has only 10 available teams, so there’s not enough games to go around for the bloated SEC. 

Most years the Big 12 could have sent a few of its JV teams over to round out the fight card and still kept it watchable.

The Tigers sitting it out is understandable — you want to send only the very best for these affairs, and LSU looked nothing of the sort when the schedule was made last summer.

But as whacky as things are turning out, the SEC won’t even be sending its No. 1 team — apparently nobody saw Auburn’s 18-2 record coming (certainly not the 6-1 part in the SEC). 

So LSU and Auburn will play each other instead, along with Missouri playing Mississippi State.

But we should get a better picture of just how much more it means now.