Bruce Pearl has never been hesitant to jump out on the proverbial ledge. He's a master marketer and an even better basketball coach.
Consider what he has accomplished at Auburn in what has been a historic regular season for the No. 1 Tigers -- and for the entire SEC. With the SEC's men's basketball tournament set to begin Wednesday in Nashville, Tennessee, the league is projected to send 13 teams to the NCAA tournament, according to ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi, which would break the Big East's record of 11 bids set in 2011.
The crème de la crème has come courtesy of Pearl, who has transformed the "Loveliest Village on the Plains" into a village as consumed with basketball as it is football, and Pearl has a unique perspective on what a monster the football-obsessed SEC has become in terms of hoops.
"I really mean this. It's going to be interesting to see how many coaches want to stay in this league," Pearl said. "In other words, we've got some coaches that are doing great jobs, coaches who've really elevated their programs, and they're still in the middle or lower half of this league because of how tough it is.
"Some of those guys are going to say, 'You know what? You can have it,' and go elsewhere."
It's the kind of grind the SEC has long been known for in football. Six different schools in the conference have won national championships going back to the first year of the BCS in 1998, and the league won seven in a row from 2006 to 2012.
But in men's basketball?
Outside of a select few teams, the SEC was chucking up air balls in 2016 when Greg Sankey took over as commissioner. Only three SEC teams made it into the NCAA tournament that year, and one of those was an 11-seed Vanderbilt team that lost in the First Four. Only Texas A&M made it past the second round.
"A bad day" is how Sankey described that Selection Sunday, which was preceded by a largely woeful stretch of basketball. In the four years from 2013 to 2016, the SEC had just three teams in the NCAA field three times.
It had become a bad situation that was allowed to fester.
"There was a little bit of a hesitancy to just basically come out and say we want to put resources in basketball," said Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter, who was an All-SEC basketball player for the Rebels in 1999. "Football has been and still is the cash cow, and I think there was a fear in this league that we were somehow going to take away from football. What we've figured out is we absolutely can do both and be elite in both."
THE BIDS FOR this year's NCAA tournament go out Sunday, and six SEC teams -- Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas A&M -- are in position to get top-three seeds, with Auburn the likely No. 1 overall seed.
"That's six out of the top 12. I mean, jeez," said Texas A&M coach Buzz Williams, who has taken teams from three conferences to the NCAA tournament. "I personally think there's going to be an SEC vs. SEC matchup just to go to the Sweet 16. There for sure will be an SEC vs. SEC matchup in the Sweet 16."
Just in the last two weeks of the regular season, there was chaos that illustrated the league's depth. Unranked Georgia upset No. 3 Florida, which turned around a week later and won at Alabama. Texas A&M had lost four in a row before beating No. 1 Auburn by double digits March 4. On that same night, unranked Ole Miss upset No. 4 Tennessee, which was three days after Tennessee beat Alabama at the buzzer on Jahmai Mashack's 35-footer. Not to be outdone, Alabama bounced back on the last day of the regular season to win at Auburn in overtime on Mark Sears' floater at the buzzer.
In a lot of ways, Vanderbilt epitomizes the balance in the league. Picked to finish last in the preseason in Mark Byington's first season as coach, the Commodores have won 20 games and are all but a lock for an NCAA tournament berth. The same goes for Georgia, which hasn't been to the NCAA tournament since 2015.
"You see the depth of the league, and that's obvious with the number of teams we have poised to make the [NCAA] tournament," said Williams, who took Marquette to the Sweet 16 in 2011 when the Big East had a record 11 NCAA tournament teams. "But it's also the depth of the talent on each team's roster. We got [Rueben Chinyelu] in foul trouble when we played Florida, and he's a really good player. They sub in [Micah Handlogten], and he's better than [Chinyelu]. That's not even counting [Alex Condon], who absolutely torched Alabama."
John Calipari is in his first season at Arkansas, but it's his 16th in the SEC after 15 years at Kentucky. There was a time when he did his own barnstorming trying to convince everybody that the SEC wasn't just Kentucky and everybody else. The Wildcats have been to the Final Four in seven of the past eight decades (not including this one) going back to the 1940s.
The Big Blue will always be the bluest of blue bloods in the SEC, but they now have company.
"All you do is look at the investment, the coaches in this league, the fans, how hard it is to win on the road," Calipari said. "It's a Sweet 16 type environment every time you play."
Seeing the SEC so strong from top to bottom would have seemed like pure fantasy to Tennessee's Rick Barnes when he was growing up in ACC country in Hickory, North Carolina. He coached under Wimp Sanderson at Alabama in the mid-1980s when the SEC had some good teams and some decorated players.
But there was a lingering stigma that hovered over basketball in the SEC, that it was more tolerated than embraced within the league office and by most of the schools not named Kentucky.
"The running joke was that you've got football season, spring football, and then everything else falls behind it, and that basketball is in there somewhere," said Barnes, who has taken teams from four conferences to the NCAA tournament. "That was a mentality that was created by leadership, whether you want to call it the leadership in the conference, the schools or whatever. There just wasn't an emphasis placed on basketball across the league."
Sankey was determined to change that. His predecessor, Mike Slive, had already started the ball rolling in 2013 when he brought in Greg Shaheen, who had previously overseen NCAA championships, to help the league's teams strengthen their nonconference schedules. The SEC received just three NCAA bids that year, and only Florida advanced past the first weekend.
One of Sankey's first calls after taking over as SEC commissioner in 2016 was to former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese. Sankey hired Tranghese as a consultant and three months later brought in Dan Leibovitz as associate commissioner of men's basketball. Leibovitz had coached in both the college and NBA ranks.
"We needed somebody like that with a basketball pedigree, somebody who understood what we as coaches go through," Barnes said. "We were struggling. Our scheduling was poor. The officiating was poor, and back when John Guthrie was in the league, we had the best officials in the country in the SEC. We needed somebody like Dan, a strong voice for basketball in our league."
When Leibovitz left for the Big East in 2023, Sankey replaced him with Garth Glissman, who was the vice president of basketball operations for the NBA.
"We've just continued to reinvest in basketball in this league, and the level of play, the fan engagement, the depth of talent in the league ... it's just continued to go to another level," said Pearl, whose Tigers have won either the SEC regular-season championship or tournament championship in five of the past eight years.
Tranghese downplays his role in getting the SEC "off their asses in basketball," as one former league coach described the situation. But he said he didn't hold back in those initial meetings with athletic directors and coaches in 2016.
"They were just totally beaten down," Tranghese said. "The coaches felt nobody cared. I'm not certain if all the ADs in that room believed they could win. I found it ludicrous, to be honest with you. I told the ADs, 'This is the most unbelievably nonsensical thing I've ever heard.' I even had one AD tell me that you couldn't win in basketball because the league was so good in football.
"My response: 'Why not? You have the resources, the fan bases, great athletes in your backyards. Use football to your advantage.' Most of all, I told them to quit whining and quit making excuses."
Tranghese also served as a sounding board for schools when they were hiring coaches.
"I didn't tell them who to hire as much as I told them who not to hire," said Tranghese, noting nine of the current 16 coaches in the SEC have taken teams to the Elite Eight.
Tranghese, who had the added perspective of serving on the College Football Playoff selection committee in 2014-15, recognized there was uneasiness among coaches that basketball was not a priority for their athletic directors. He remains grateful to former Florida AD Jeremy Foley, who was at some of those early meetings. Florida, which won football national championships in 2006 and 2008, had proven that success in both sports was very much possible. The Gators under Billy Donovan won back-to-back national championships in basketball in 2006-07, which wasn't duplicated until UConn went back-to-back the past two seasons.
"I looked at the coaches and just said, 'You could have Humpty Dumpty as your athletic director. That's not an excuse for not winning,'" Tranghese said. "Maybe they don't hold your hand. Maybe they don't pay as much attention to you as they do football, but who cares as long as you have the tools to succeed?"
THERE WERE SIGNS that this season's success might be coming after last season, when the SEC matched its all-time high with eight NCAA bids (also achieved in 2023 and 2018). The league's four top-4 seeds a year ago were its most since 2002, and Alabama went to its first Final Four. The Tide have been to at least the Sweet 16 in three of the past four seasons. Prior to Nate Oats' arrival six seasons ago, Alabama had not advanced to the Sweet 16 since 2004.
"And we were adding Texas and Oklahoma," Mississippi State coach Chris Jans said. "I don't think there was a team in the league that didn't think it had a good enough roster to go to the NCAA tournament, and that's about the way it's played out."
Pearl said one of the difference-makers has been a major commitment to NIL.
"It's everybody, too, up and down the league," Pearl said. "Schools are paying. You've heard me say that we can do more at Auburn in the NIL space. We're nowhere near the top."
Pearl, along with just about everybody else in the SEC, also has struck it rich in the transfer portal. Senior center Johni Broome, a top candidate for national player of the year, is in his third season at Auburn after starting his career at Morehead State.
In fact, several stars in the SEC started at the mid-major level, including Florida's Walter Clayton Jr. (Iona), Alabama's Sears (Ohio), Tennessee's Chaz Lanier (North Florida) and Vanderbilt's Jason Edwards (North Texas). A year ago, Tennessee's Dalton Knecht led the SEC in scoring after transferring from Northern Colorado.
"Every year, it's gotten tougher and tougher, and I'd say this year is the toughest," said Tennessee senior point guard Zakai Zeigler, who's in his fourth season. "It shows how good the teams are in this league. You've got teams ranked in the top four or five in the country, and they're getting beat by teams in the middle of our league or even lower. It's every game.
"When you get out there in conference play, there's no ducking, no smoke. You have to play every night."
Zeigler is one of many seniors who are playing big roles in the SEC, providing the kind of experience that could set them up for postseason success. According to ESPN Research, 77 seniors in the SEC have started at least one game this season with 58 starting double-digit games. In the Big Ten and ACC, 68 seniors have started games, while 50 have double-digit starts in the Big Ten and 48 do in the ACC. Auburn has six fifth-year or older players (only four teams in the country have more), and the average age of its starting five is 23.2. Alabama's starting five averages 22 years old, Tennessee's 21.8 and Florida's 21.6.
In the nonconference portion of the schedule, the depth of the league was clear. The SEC's nonconference winning percentage was .889 (185-23). The last time any conference was that good in nonleague play was the ACC in 2003-04 with an .882 winning percentage. The SEC was 30-4 against the ACC, 14-2 against the Big 12 and 10-9 against the Big Ten.
Last month, ESPN's Jay Bilas, who played on Duke's 1986 national runner-up team, called the SEC the "the most powerful basketball league, top to bottom, that there has ever been. I have never seen anything remotely like what we're seeing in the Southeastern Conference this year."
While discussing the significance of Auburn and Alabama being ranked No. 1 and 2, respectively, Jay Bilas explains why the SEC has the best men's basketball league he's ever seen.
But that was February, and college basketball legacies are built in March. Anointing a conference as the strongest in history prior to the postseason is akin to calling a 100-meter race at the 80-meter mark.
Tranghese was the right-hand man to former Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt when that league was formed, and in the 1980s, the Big East was known as a beast for good reason. In 1985, Georgetown, St. John's and Villanova all made the Final Four, with Villanova upsetting Georgetown in the championship game. Boston College also made the Sweet 16 that season as six of the league's nine teams made the NCAA tournament.
That remains the only time three teams from the same conference advanced to the Final Four.
"I don't think anybody has ever dominated regular-season play like the SEC has this year," Tranghese said. "We had arguably the best postseason anybody's had that year in the Big East, but I just think when you're comparing regular seasons, the SEC is staring at two No. 1 seeds, four of the top eight seeds, nine of the top 25. I've just never seen anything like that before."
An SEC team has not won the national championship since Kentucky in 2012, so ending that drought will go a long way toward writing the final chapter of this season. In 2019, the ACC produced three No. 1 seeds, including eventual national champion Virginia. Duke and North Carolina were also No. 1 seeds that year.
"There's a chance that the SEC tournament could be potentially harder than making it to the Final Four," Pearl said of a season in which the SEC could tie the record for three No. 1 seeds from the same conference. "You're talking about facing higher ranked teams than you would in the Sweet 16."
Zeigler, who hopes to lead Tennessee to its first Final Four, said it's not unimaginable that all four spots could be occupied by SEC teams.
"I know how good the SEC is," he said. "I'm out there every game playing against these guys. So if it comes down to an SEC school being on each side of the bracket, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
"You could probably ask anybody in our conference that. We've lived it."
THERE ARE TWO schools of thought on the impact of playing in such a rugged league when teams have to switch gears to the one-and-done mindset of the NCAA tournament. Either it prepares you by making you more battle tested, or the wear and tear from the regular-season grind catches up with you.
"We're going to find out," Pearl said. "The only way we'll know the answer to that is when we get later in March. I think the combination of just the mental fatigue as well as the physical fatigue compared to teams that have kind of been able to blow through their league is different. Look, most of the power conference leagues are good. It's just that the SEC is dominant."
Pearl said he has reduced the amount of time Auburn spends on the court between games to alleviate fatigue.
"You've got to practice less and lighter so that we can stay fresh," he said. "But I think it takes a mental toll in the sense that you look at everybody's schedule. There is absolutely no break. And you've got to bring the effort and energy every night if you want to win."
Williams said regardless of what happens later this month, it shouldn't diminish the SEC's regular-season superiority.
"I think the true test of your competitive character is what you do over the 10-week conference season because you are judged 18 times," Williams said. "I don't necessarily think that a one-game scenario in the postseason should dull or negate those 10 weeks of playing in statistically the best league that there has ever been."
For Barnes, in his 10th season at Tennessee, things have come full circle. The Vols are the only team in the SEC to have won 25 or more games in each of the past four seasons. The school twice tried to hire Barnes when he was younger, the first time when he was at Providence and then again when he was at Clemson. He simply wasn't sold on the SEC's commitment to basketball.
When Tennessee fired Don DeVoe following the 1989 season, Barnes met with then-Tennessee athletic director Doug Dickey about the job. Barnes remembers telling journalist and close friend John Feinstein and Gavitt, who remained a mentor to Barnes until his death in 2011, about the Tennessee interview.
"They both said, 'You can't take that job. They don't care about basketball. You're already in a basketball league,'" Barnes said. "That was the perception, and it didn't have anything to do with Doug Dickey. That's just where the league was. They were set on being the best football league in the country.
"Now there is an emphasis in this league to be the best in every sport, a tremendous amount of pride, and what's happened in basketball is unlike anything I ever thought I'd see in the SEC, not from where I grew up in the Carolinas."