Nate Oats doesn’t want to speak out of turn. Alabama’s coach has only been in the Southeastern Conference for five years. He also admits his theory might be oversimplistic, but it feels more or less spot-on. So here goes: How did the SEC go from joke to juggernaut in men’s basketball?
“I think,” Oats says, “they just decided that they wanted to be good in basketball?”
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So, was the rise from the depths of irrelevance a decade ago to its current heights just because the most powerful conference in college athletics decided to stop messing around?
“That’s a fair assessment,” says SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. He points back to Selection Sunday 2016 as the start of the turnaround.
“It was a bad day,” Sankey says. “We had three teams picked, and that’s my first year as commissioner. I had been thinking about some changes that might be needed, but that day clarified it for me.”
That offseason, he hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as a consultant, then appointed Dan Leibovitz, a former NBA and college coach, the czar of SEC men’s basketball. Together, Tranghese and Leibovitz identified several areas the league needed to improve. The first and biggest was its attitude.
“They had lost for so long that everybody was beaten down,” Tranghese says. “When I talked to coaches, they’d say, ‘Nobody cares about us. We’re in a football conference.’ I told them that was the dumbest thing I had ever heard.”
The man who helped build the Big East into a basketball powerhouse with far fewer resources than the mighty SEC — which last year distributed an average of $51.2 million in revenue to each of its member schools — has a low tolerance for excuses.
“You got everything you need,” Tranghese remembers telling SEC athletic directors in 2016. “You got money, you got incredible fan bases, got a television partner in ESPN that is the No. 1 outlet for college basketball, and you got your own television network. And you’re telling me we can’t be better in basketball? You have so much more than the Big East, in terms of just pure resources, and look what they’ve accomplished.”
So the SEC just decided to stop being bad at men’s basketball, and the rest is history? Well, kind of. That was just the first step — actually, it was the second attempt at that first step. The much harder steps were still to come.
The reclamation of SEC basketball began with Sankey’s predecessor and former boss, the late Mike Slive “and his recognition that we were dominating in everything, men and women, all sports, but we weren’t competitive in men’s basketball,” says Auburn coach Bruce Pearl.
Pearl didn’t yet have that job in March 2014 when Slive gave a lecture before the start of the SEC tournament that has become legendary.
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“People still talk about that Mike Slive meeting,” says Tennessee assistant coach Gregg Polinsky, who was the Brooklyn Nets’ personnel director at the time. “You know, ‘We’re leaving a lot of money on the table, we have the best athletes in the country, the best conference overall in terms of winning championships, so what are we doing with men’s basketball?’ I think that was a real changing point.”
Jay Jacobs, then Auburn’s AD, took it seriously. Shortly after the Tigers lost a 12 vs. 13 game in the league tournament, he fired coach Tony Barbee.
“I joke that the commissioner laid down a mandate that we had better start getting better in men’s basketball and that I made a coaching change as a result,” says Jacobs, who retired in 2018. “That’s not totally accurate, but it’s not far from the truth.”
Slive might’ve identified the problem and demanded better results, but he hadn’t quite solved the how. He thought improved scheduling — especially manipulating the RPI in the league’s favor — was among the most pressing needs. The SEC even discussed “flex scheduling” for the final four conference games, choosing matchups that would help enhance the profiles of teams chasing NCAA bids.
“I didn’t think we were talking about the right things,” Sankey says.
“Mike was frustrated, but he wasn’t getting any results,” Tranghese adds. “You can schedule whoever you want, but if you don’t have the right coaches in place, I don’t care who you schedule.”
The league needed to address the underlying issue: The actual basketball product wasn’t very good. The folks hiring the folks who create the product needed to be better — and take a cue from Jacobs, who landed Pearl less than a week after firing Barbee.
What Pearl has done at Auburn is what he’s always done everywhere: win big. The guy who led Southern Indiana to a Division II national title, Milwaukee to a Sweet 16 and Tennessee to its only Elite Eight appearance in 2010 (before serving a three-year show-cause penalty for NCAA violations with the Vols) has unsurprisingly turned the Tigers into perennial SEC contenders. Auburn hadn’t won a league championship since the 1990s, but now it’s won regular-season titles in 2018 and 2022 and the SEC tournament in 2019, the same year the Tigers made their first Final Four.
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“I said to Greg: You can’t get this league to be good and I can’t get this league to be good. There’s only one core of people who can get this league good, and that’s the coaches,” Tranghese says. “So Danny Leibovitz and I began to spend an inordinate amount of time on coaching. Every time there was a coaching change, all we asked our ADs to do was to listen to what we had to say. All we wanted to make certain was that people weren’t making bad hires.”
Sankey essentially deputized Tranghese and Leibovitz to aggressively intervene across the league to see that schools either swung for the fences on big-name hires or thought outside the box to land rising stars. There were a few occasions when the league office got wind of a potential hire and Tranghese immediately picked up the phone.
“I just told them a guy wouldn’t win,” he says. “Sometimes I thought a guy’s reputation wasn’t good. I told one president, ‘You can’t hire this person. You hire him and you’ll end up on probation.’ And that’s what Greg wanted me to do.”
Today, the SEC is loaded with top-tier head coaches. Pearl, Kentucky’s John Calipari, Tennessee’s Rick Barnes and Ole Miss’ Chris Beard have all won a national coach of the year award. Those four, plus Arkansas’ Eric Musselman, Texas A&M’s Buzz Williams and Georgia’s Mike White — that’s half the coaches in the league — have made at least one Elite Eight.
Florida’s Todd Golden took San Francisco to its first NCAA Tournament in 24 years before arriving in Gainesville and now has the Gators dancing again too. South Carolina’s Lamont Paris won 27 games at Chattanooga two years ago and just guided the Gamecocks from a last-place preseason prediction to a tie for second, earning him SEC Coach of the Year honors.
“Seven years ago, you saw the shift,” former Tennessee star and current SEC Network analyst Ron Slay says. “Universities started being really hellbent on trying to get a name coach, or at least a coach who was going to stay and not just use it as a springboard to a blue-blood program. Look at the coaches in this league now, man. This league can hold its own now in that way.”
It’s no longer Kentucky and everybody else. Or Kentucky and Florida way out in front of the rest, as was the case while Billy Donovan was still coaching the Gators. In Calipari’s first eight seasons in the SEC, UK or UF won at least a share of every regular-season title. In Calipari’s first nine seasons in the league, the Cats won six SEC tournament titles. But these days, competition for the crown is fierce.
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Since 2018, Alabama has won two regular-season and two tournament titles; Auburn has won two regular-season titles and one tournament; Tennessee, this year’s champ, has won two regular-season titles and one tournament; and LSU took the 2019 regular-season championship. Wildcats fans have spent the last few seasons trying to figure out whether Calipari has lost his touch, but perhaps part of his problem is a much tougher conference than the one he used to overwhelm with superior talent.
“Because all the schools are committed to it now,” Calipari says. “It makes every game a hard game.”
The coaches who helped shepherd the SEC’s surge know what the league used to be, either because they coached in it previously, coached against it or observed from afar. Barnes grew up in Hickory, N.C., a short drive to SEC outposts in Knoxville, Tenn., and Athens, Ga., but he only heard about ACC basketball. The SEC only came up if folks were talking about Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.
Barnes saw the reality of investment in SEC men’s basketball as an assistant coach for Alabama’s Wimp Sanderson in the 1985-86 season, a contrast to his ensuing stint at Ohio State and later stops in the Big East, ACC and Big 12.
“Oh, my God, we had a thing called the ‘lower gym’ that we practiced on,” says Polinsky, who replaced Barnes in 1986 at Alabama. “We had a tartan (artificial turf) floor and they put wood over it.”
Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when Slay and a couple of Tennessee teammates worked out at UCLA in the summer before his senior season. “They had their own basketball facilities,” says Slay, who also hosts a sports talk show on 104.5 FM in Nashville. “We’re like, ‘Wait, you didn’t have to wait on the football team to finish lifting or have to do it before them?’”
Fast-forward to Calipari’s postgame news conference after a 2013 win at Ole Miss. He often took shots at dingy, dated Tad Smith Coliseum — the Tad Pad — to help Rebels coach Andy Kennedy get a better facility. On this night, Calipari said: “The locker room we’re in, there’s squirrels in there. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
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That was the perception and reality of non-Kentucky SEC men’s basketball until the past decade. One longtime Big Ten writer routinely referred to the league as “third-world basketball,” an idea extended to officiating, which was so bad for so long that it became an actual joke. The league worked to overhaul its officiating program — focused on adding, developing and retaining top referees — and created a state-of-the-art replay center at the SEC headquarters.
“If you don’t care about officiating, you’re not serious,” Tranghese says. “And I’m not saying the SEC didn’t care about it, I just don’t think the officiating was very good, and I told (Sankey) that. I said, ‘The league is down and officiating is poor. You’re probably having trouble attracting officials to come here because the league is down.’ Everything was piled on, and we just crawled out of it one step at a time.”
The various athletic departments did most of the work, as Jacobs says the influx of College Football Playoff revenue “gave us the funding to invest in men’s basketball … without having to make cuts in other sports and areas.”
“The commitment has to come from the top,” Barnes says. “And when I got in this league, we weren’t all playing on the same field.”
They still aren’t, but it’s much closer. Kentucky had $209.6 million in men’s basketball expenses from the 2012-13 financial year through 2022-23, according to public records — nearly double the next-closest program, Texas A&M at $110.6 million. That’s an average of $19.1 million a year in expenses for Calipari’s program.
For the other 12 programs that must report financials (Vanderbilt, a private school does not), the average expenses per program in 2012-13 were $6.3 million. In 2022-23, that number nearly doubled to $12 million per program.
The financial benefits have increased as well, though not as dramatically. Again, Kentucky is well beyond the field at $290.1 million in revenues during that period, an average of $26.4 million per year. The other 12 programs averaged $10.4 million apiece in revenues in 2012-13; that rose to $14.9 million in 2022-23.
The money has primarily gone to building and updating facilities and paying coaches and their staffs — many of which have swelled in that time. Vanderbilt is building a 90,000-square-foot basketball center, while Kentucky, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi State have had recent, significant basketball renovations. Alabama is raising funds for a new arena, Georgia has looked into one and Auburn and Ole Miss have already built theirs.
On Dec. 29, 2016, when Kentucky arrived at the Rebels’ sparkling new $96.5 million arena, The Sandy and John Black Pavilion, Calipari had a stuffed squirrel and thank-you note in his locker. Signed, “The Tad Pad Squirrels.”
The great thing about better coaches, shinier buildings and deeper pockets is they all help a program land the most important piece of the puzzle: elite players. And while the recruiting game is still, in many ways, Kentucky and everybody else, there is not nearly as vast a gulf these days.
In 2013, Kentucky signed six blue-chip recruits (five five-stars and one four-star) while the rest of the league averaged 1.2 per school. In 2022, that gap closed: Kentucky signed three blue-chip prospects (two five-stars and one four-star) and the rest of the league averaged 2.2 per school. That year was a high-water mark for talent acquisition in the SEC. Eight of the league’s teams signed top-25 classes, including No. 2 Arkansas, No. 3 Alabama, No. 5 Kentucky and No. 9 Tennessee.
From 2013 to 2017, the Cats signed more five-stars (19) than the rest of the league combined (10). But from 2018 to 2022, it flipped. The SEC signed more five-stars (26) than Kentucky (14). Over the last eight classes, nine SEC schools outside of Lexington signed at least one five-star player: Tennessee (6), Alabama (6), Auburn (5), LSU (5), Arkansas (3), Florida (3), Georgia (2), Vanderbilt (2) and Missouri (1).
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“Kentucky is getting pushed in this league now,” Oats says. “They’re still getting the best players in the country, but there’s four or five teams every year in the league that are competing with them — or, shoot, that are better than them. And it’s not the same four or five every year.”
SEC teams are cleaning up in the transfer portal too. Dalton Knecht (Tennessee), Mark Sears (Alabama), Antonio Reeves (Kentucky) and Johni Broome (Auburn), the four best veteran players in the league, all came through the portal. And now, in the name, image and likeness era, both high school recruits and transfers are lured by the impressive NIL war chests in the SEC.
“Let’s be honest, a lot of these kids are using NIL to help make their decision,” says one SEC assistant coach who was granted anonymity so he could speak freely. “I wouldn’t say it’s the No. 1 factor in all recruiting right now, but for some, you’re talking to these kids and their parents and agents and it comes down to, ‘OK, what’s the NIL situation?’”
“In the SEC, the schools are ultra-competitive,” says a second league assistant, “so if we want to be competitive in our league, we better be competitive in the collective.”
Who is better positioned to (legally) buy top talent than the filthy rich SEC and its insatiable boosters, who’ve now acquired a taste for winning basketball? Especially now that, thanks in part to legal challenges by Tennessee’s athletic department, seemingly nothing is off-limits. Oh, to be a fly on the wall as Oats, Pearl, Calipari, Musselman and Barnes file into a living room one right after another for the latest McDonald’s All-American or prized transfer.
“There are some battles,” Oats says, “because this league is not like any other league. It’s all in the same footprint. It seems like a lot of the same schools are going after the same kids and, shoot, now you got NIL involved and nobody knows what’s allowed and what’s not, so it’s definitely some wars. You try not to do any negative recruiting, but you’re comparing yourself to them — this is why you should come here and not go there — and it gets a little tense. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Because talent wins. After putting eight teams in the NCAA Tournament last season, the league had 10 players selected in the 2023 NBA Draft, including six first-rounders. And that wasn’t driven by Kentucky. The first two college players picked were No. 2 Brandon Miller (Alabama) and No. 6 Anthony Black (Arkansas). This season, NBA opening day rosters featured 92 players from the SEC, with 12 of the league’s 14 teams represented.
“There’s always been athleticism in the league,” Oats says, “but when you add the coaching, the toughness, the skill level with that athleticism, it makes for a pretty damn good league.”
The SEC is “just an absolutely dominant league,” says Tennessee junior guard Jordan Gainey, a transfer whose contributions helped the Vols win the SEC regular-season title outright. Tennessee is the No. 1 seed in the SEC tournament, which starts Wednesday at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, and is chasing the school’s first NCAA Tournament No. 1 seed.
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“The (SEC) tournament is going to be amazing,” Gainey says. “Every team is good. Every team is special.”
Oh, and next season Texas and Oklahoma bring strong men’s basketball programs to the league. Those schools were chosen for their football programs, of course, and the SEC remains a football power first. But the old days of coaches from other power leagues trying to schedule road games against SEC teams as early in the season as possible — while football was still going on, ensuring sparse opposing crowds — have made way for fan support that matches the uptick in quality.
That will be on display in Nashville, where some quarterfinal tickets are going for as high as $957 apiece on StubHub. The SEC decided to be good in men’s basketball and it is, from every angle, because it has done the necessary things. Now to get working on the fact that the SEC has no national championships since 2012 and two Final Four appearances since 2015.
“The next step is getting a team back in the Final Four, and somebody’s got to go win a national championship,” Slay says. “That’s when the crossover happens. When that happens, you can be a real basketball conference.”
(Top photo of Alabama celebrating the 2023 SEC tournament title: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)