Prepare Yourselves SEC Basketball Fans, The Media Is Ready To Pounce At The NCAA Tournament
The SEC is undeniably the most-hated conference in collegiate athletics. Criticism comes when you're constantly on the national stage in every major sport, and while the conference is used to having a target on its back, the target has never been bigger heading into the 2025 NCAA Tournament.
The SEC set a record by having 14 of its 16 teams earn spots in the 68-team field. That sentence alone is enough to raise the blood pressure of some people, especially those who still believe in inclusivity and yearn for the cute story of a mid-major getting an at-large bid instead of the ‘big, bad Power Five school.’
The tournament selection committee laughed at the idea of being inclusive and including ‘the little’ guy by putting 14 SEC teams in the field. Making sure x-amount of mid-major teams or x-amount of teams from one specific conference in the name of being politically correct isn't the job of the committee, getting the best 68 teams into the tournament is.
If the committee had specific guidelines or marks they had to hit regarding certain teams from certain conferences getting in, well, then this would be another story, but it doesn't. That's probably a smart move given that money, whether it be NIL, salaries, the NCAA's bottom line, and TV contracts, is the end all be all here.
Playing in the SEC this season was a gauntlet. Twelve teams finished the year ranked inside the Top 40 in NET rankings, not a single team in the conference finished outside of the Top 90 in the final NET rankings, 13 teams earned at least five Quad One wins, and seven teams were ranked in the final AP Top 25 poll.
The SEC set an NCAA Tournament record by getting 14 teams into the March Madness field. (Photo by Matthew Maxey/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images via Getty Images)
Every rational person in the college basketball world can rationalize on some level that the 14 SEC teams that got into the tournament deserve to be there. But, as we all know, not every person is rational.
It is a guarantee that plenty of college basketball analysts, national media members, and certainly plenty of fans are hoping to see the SEC teams struggle out of the gates to begin March Madness.
They can not wait to fire off that post on Twitter about how the SEC was overrated, write that article about how 14 SEC teams getting in was a mistake from the get-go, or how yet another tournament selection committee fell victim to SEC bias.
It will be a legitimate race for some to publish that anti-SEC story if or when a few SEC teams lose in the first round. Even if the Sweet Sixteen arrives and ‘only’ four SEC teams are left standing, the bashing will still take place.
What those critics will be missing, or just choosing to ignore because it doesn't fit the narrative, is that how each of the 14 SEC teams fares in their first and even second-round games has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that those 14 teams earned spots in the tournament field to begin with.
The body of work, the résumé teams built to get into the field is the measuring stick for whether they deserved a place in the field.
An SEC team being upset, or even just losing to a higher-seeded team, has no bearing on whether or not that team was deserving of a bid.
It may sound ridiculous to say, but it doesn't make it untrue: the NCAA Tournament has 68 spots therefore 68 teams have to make the field. The SEC was deserving of 14 of those 68 spots, and spoiler alert, 67 of the 68 teams in the field will end up losing along the way.