Tipsheet: SEC's dominant regular season results in 14 NCAA Tournament bids

These are happy, happy times for Greg Sankey.

The Southeastern Conference commissioner is celebrating his league’s record-setting 14 berths into the NCAA Tournament. The previous high was 11, set by the Big East in 2011.

Tipsheet wondered if the league could pull it off, but its second-tier teams Texas, Vanderbilt, Oklahoma and Georgia did just enough to get over the hump.

The bottom two SEC teams — South Carolina and LSU — graciously got out of the way in the league tourney, losing to Arkansas and Mississippi State in the opening round.

Naturally, other conferences will squawk about this bid hogging. But the SEC’s power was real, as it demonstrated against the other power conferences in non-league play.

Other conferences will just have to catch up.

Writing for CBSSports.com, David Cobb reminded the SEC that now it must justify the love it got from the NCAA Tournament selection committee.

But for all the talk about how the 2025 version of the SEC was the best conference in college basketball history — and for all supporting evidence supplied by the selection committee — the true prize now lies ahead.

NCAA Tournament play will begin Tuesday with the First Four, and the SEC will be under the microscope as it seeks to validate what, so far, has been the most dominant season by any conference in modern college basketball

“Our regular season speaks for itself,” Garth Glissman, the SEC's associate commissioner for men's basketball, told CBS Sports. “But that doesn't guarantee any particular set of outcomes in the postseason, and so we've got to take care of business in the postseason.”

Florida seems ready to do just that. The deep Gators are in peak form heading into the Big Dance. Coach Todd Golden is stalking a national title.

And those surprising late losses might be just what mighty Auburn needs to reset mentally after front-running all season.

Here is what folks have been writing about March Madness:

• Joe Lunardi, ESPN.com: “What coaches, administrators and, yes, bracketologists look for most from the committee is consistency. And at least one of this year's selections is extremely inconsistent. You want to include Texas and its seven Quad 1 wins? I can absolutely live with that despite the 15 losses, the 6-12 league record and the No. 287 nonconference schedule.

"But then you simply cannot include North Carolina (of the Atlantic Coast Conference) as well. The Tar Heels are the opposite of the Longhorns. The No. 5 nonconference schedule produced exactly one Quad 1 win in a whopping 13 attempts. That is disqualifying to me in an era that has correctly prioritized winning the highest-level games. I suspect we'll hear a lot about the two teams' combined records in Quad 1 and Quad 2, which are indeed similar. But that seems a little too much like a convenient answer searching for what is ultimately the wrong question.

"Yes, North Carolina and Texas each have 10 combined Q1/Q2 wins. Was that really what got them in over the likes of West Virginia, Indiana, Ohio State and Boise State? West Virginia also had 10 combined Q1/Q2 wins, Indiana and Ohio State both had nine and Boise had eight.”

• Jeff Eisenberg, Yahoo! Sports: “West Virginia paid a heavy price for its dreadful loss to last-place Colorado in its opening game of the Big 12 tournament. The Mountaineers went from comfortably avoiding the First Four in most bracket projections to missing the NCAA Tournament altogether.

"The omission of West Virginia was a big surprise. This is a Mountaineers team that defeated Gonzaga and Arizona in November, weathered the loss of standout guard Tucker DeVries and then went .500 in the rugged Big 12. West Virginia left itself vulnerable by not doing much of note since wins over Kansas and Iowa State early in conference play. The Mountaineers went 6-9 during the second half of the season and did not beat a single NCAA Tournament-caliber team during that stretch.”

• Paul Myerberg, USA Today: “Several factors combine to make Michigan perhaps the biggest loser in this year’s field. For one, the Wolverines are a No. 5 seed in the South despite beating Wisconsin for the Big Ten championship; the Badgers, meanwhile, are the No. 3 seed in the East. Michigan also plays on Thursday in Denver, giving it a shortened turnaround time to recover from the grind of the Big Ten tournament. Lastly, the Wolverines will take on No. 12 UC San Diego, which ended the regular season No. 35 in the NET rankings after going 30-4 overall and 4-2 against Quad 1 and Quad 2 competition.”
• Dennis Dodd, CBS Sports.com: “The (Houston) Cougars backed up their regular-season Big 12 championship holding their three opponents (Colorado, BYU, Arizona) in the conference tournament to a combined 38.5% shooting. This is the most complete team (Kelvin) Sampson has had at Houston. Maybe the most complete team in the country.

"... The Cougars ran through the Big 12 this season going 22-1 counting this week's three conference tournament wins. The only loss was to Texas Tech by a point more than six weeks ago. Saturday's win was the season's 30th, the sixth 30-win campaign of Sampson's career. Since losing two of three in November's Players Era Festival, the Cougars are 25-2. With a bullet.”

• Brendan Marks, The Athletic: “Throughout this ACC season — arguably the worst of the millennium ...  the recent coaching brain drain has been relitigated ad nauseam. The departures of (Mike) Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, Tony Bennett and so on. The conference’s slippage isn’t solely because of the coaching turnover, but it would be foolish to suggest it hasn’t played a major role.

"This is the first ACC season since 1980-81 in which the league doesn’t have an active national championship-winning coach. That’s what makes (Jon) Scheyer’s accomplishments so noteworthy in leading Duke to a 31-3 record and likely a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament while sweeping the ACC’s regular-season and tournament titles outright.”

Megaphone

“We're not the ACC of old. We've had a lot of change-over with coaches. Once the league play starts, it's hard to move, especially in our league this year. If you look at my schedule, we played 20 league games, and 10 of those were either Quad 3 or Quad 4 games. You just don't have as many opportunities. So how do we fix that? Well, we have to be creative.”

Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes, on his league’s struggle to get NCAA Tournament bids.