The natural order of the world has been recently violated. The SEC is good at football; that is what they are meant to do, that is what they have done, and that is what they will continue to do. The ACC is good at basketball, because when your conference is full of prep school kids (and by that I’m exclusively speaking about the Duke basketball team) it makes sense that you’re good at the sport about putting balls in hoops.
The issue in that case being that the Big 10, the usurpers of what is right and holy and normal, have taken football from the SEC. The last two football champions have been Big 10 teams (Michigan and Ohio State), and this has upset what is good and right and just and how it ought to be.
And in their infinite revenge, the SEC has taken basketball from us and it may never recover.
The SEC is four out of the top five teams. They’re five out of the top 10, and 10 out of the top 25. Considering there are around 30 D1 basketball conferences, and the next top teams are the Big 10 and the Big 12 with five apiece, this is a huge mismatch. The SEC is playing some really good basketball, and that’s not okay.
What made this even more terrifying was the fact that the Alabama vs Auburn football game was in fact, a No. 1 vs No. 2 matchup. That’s now how it’s supposed to be. The SEC does not play No. 1 vs No. 2 matchups in basketball. That’s for the College Football National Championship.
But alas, there were no SEC teams in the top four in football (and no, UT does not count), so instead, Auburn was No. 1 and Alabama was No. 2, and that game ended in a strange loss for Alabama that should keep them pretty high in the standings. They’re currently just looking at Duke behind them, the highest ranked ACC, and behind Duke are Florida and Tennessee.
Regardless, the college basketball landscape has fundamentally changed thanks to the results of the last few years of NIL and more. It’s easier than ever for the SEC to buy a few key players and put together rosters capable of running for the top five in the rankings, but what really matters is luck, scheming, and coaching in the Big Dance. The season’s a marathon, not a sprint, and who knows what this whole mess will look like in a couple of weeks.
Even then, Auburn vs. ‘Bama was a game with conference seeding, and also conference title implications, and when it comes down to it, the SEC may be in a dogfight trying to win the conference title and some autobid spots. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t want to be any mid-major bubble team, because it will get ugly for those last four in/first four out rankings when March rolls around.
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