What SEC Teams Seek This Weekend
Posted by Brian Joyce on March 18th, 2015
The Southeastern Conference has been hit hard in the national media and on social media and everywhere else for its less than stellar basketball reputation. To be fair, it’s not completely unwarranted. Ole Miss opened the season with a loss to Charleston Southern. Mississippi State lost to Arkansas State and McNeese State. Missouri boasts a loss to UMKC. Those are bad losses to be sure, but the SEC is definitely not a one-team league, and the NCAA Tournament is a very good time to prove it.
Even folks in the south would agree that Kentucky carries the flag of SEC basketball. But the other four in the Big Dance have a great opportunity to add to the party. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Five SEC teams made the NCAA Tournament this season, including undefeated Kentucky, which is a step in the right direction. You have to wonder, though, how much the Wildcats running through the conference without a loss has tarnished the perception of the rest of the league. Close followers of the SEC recognize its depth of talent from top to bottom this year but college basketball success is often defined by how the conference performs in March. Whether you subscribe to that opinion or think it’s bunk, it is important for the SEC to prove its worth on the national stage this weekend. Below we will examine what each team stands to gain during the NCAA Tournament in addition to bolstering the overall perception of the conference.
- Kentucky: ESPN has made you acutely aware that Kentucky is chasing history, but even though the Wildcats are on the pursuit of perfection, there are still plenty of doubters. Everybody knows haters are gonna hate, but there is really only one way to silence those detractors, and that’s to win. For Kentucky, anything short of a National Championship will bring out a chorus of “I told you sos” from the numerous Twitter trolls who have persistently claimed that Kentucky has benefited from a weak SEC slate. John Calipari‘s club is on a mission to achieve something much more substantial than providing trash talk ammunition for the Big Blue Nation to take on Louisville fans. The 2012 version of the Wildcats may very well have been a better team than this season’s crew, but the Anthony Davis Wildcats can’t claim a 40-0 record. With six more wins the 2015 Kentucky Wildcats will forever be remembered as one of the great teams in college basketball history. Lose, however, and this team might be categorized in the same breath as the 2009-10 John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins Wildcats; a talented team that fell short when it counted the most.
- Arkansas: Arkansas took a big step forward this season. The Razorbacks won seven road games this season after winning just five in the previous three since head coach Mike Anderson arrived from Missouri. Anderson was supposed to return the Hogs to its glory of yesteryear and there has been some clear progress. Arkansas is finally back in the NCAA Tournament but it isn’t enough to just get there. John Pelphrey and Stan Heath both accomplished that much. The folks in Fayetteville as well as Anderson expect more. He’s taken two teams to the Sweet Sixteen, including an Elite Eight run with Missouri in 2009, so now would be a great time to make another postseason run.
If Stefan Moody gets hot, Ole Miss could go a long, long way. (USA TODAY Sports)
- Georgia: Mark Fox has the difficult task of matching wits with Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, one of college basketball’s elite coaches. Fox isn’t at that level, clearly, but he can match Xs and Os with the best of them and this is his opportunity to prove it. This game also represents an opportunity for the Bulldogs to gain some valuable experience for next season. J.J. Frazier, Kenny Gaines and Charles Mann should all be back in Athens next year. They represent a solid nucleus to make next season a competitive one in Athens, and an NCAA Tournament win (or two) here would give that squad a lot of confidence to begin with.
- LSU: The Tigers have a chance to erase the growing perception that they are a team of underachievers. The existence of two future NBA front line players in his lineup has resulted in lofty expectations that Johnny Jones hasn’t yet shown that he can meet. The third-year head coach at LSU has never won an NCAA Tournament game, but there’s no time like the present. In fact, the program hasn’t won a Tournament game since 2009. There is a lot of talent on the way to Baton Rouge next season (and a lot of talent probably also leaving for the NBA Draft), so Jones needs some positive momentum to keep the program moving in the right direction.
- Ole Miss: We already mentioned how Ole Miss started the season; the Rebs didn’t finish it all that well either. Andy Kennedy’s team lost four of its last five games but found success last night at the First Four in Dayton after trailing BYU by 17 at halftime. Which version of Andy Kennedy’s squad will show up on Thursday against Xavier? The NCAA Tournament is a chance for Ole Miss to show that the version that took Kentucky to the wire earlier this year is the real thing. If Stefan Moody gets hot, the Rebels will be a tough out the rest of the way.
Brian Joyce is an advanced metrics enthusiast, college hoops junkie, and writer for the SEC basketball microsite for Rush the Court.
