1 seeds Florida & Duke prep for Elite 8 against Texas Tech & Alabama
Mackenzie Salmon breaks down Elite 8 matchups, as No. 1 Florida will take on No. 3 Texas Tech and No. 1 Duke will verse No. 2 Alabama.
Sports Seriously
ATLANTA – If you thought SEC commissioner Greg Sankey has been insufferable these past few years while he’s been busy wrecking other conferences, stacking the deck in the new College Football Playoff format and pushing for an unnecessary NCAA men’s basketball tournament expansion while passing the blame to everyone else for all of college sports’ problems, just you wait until Sunday.
Because by the time they cut down the nets here at the South Regional, it’s possible the SEC will have pulled off something that’s never happened in the history of this tournament.
The conference of “It Just Means More” has a chance to sweep the Final Four, something no other conference has done.
A real chance.
With overall No. 1 seed Auburn’s taking care of No. 5 seed Michigan here on Friday night 78-65, the SEC will officially have teams in all four regional finals. That’s a first for this event and just the third time any conference has achieved the feat.
And it’s not like any of the four SEC teams are longshots. Sankey would only need one or two mild upsets to pull off the all-time basketball brag, one-upping the Big East’s landmark moment 40 years ago when three of its members reached the Final Four.
“Four teams in the Elite Eight,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said. “That’s pretty good.”
We have known since December that the SEC was going to be a force in the postseason. You can’t schedule or fluke your way to a 185-23 collective non-conference record. You can’t trick the computers that have shown eight SEC teams among the top 20 or so. The NCAA tournament selection committee didn’t give bids to 14 of the league’s 16 teams as a gift to Sankey. They earned it.
Still, this tournament can be so random and unpredictable that predicting an all-SEC Final Four would have been beyond imagination. You don’t just need to dodge upsets and injuries, but the matchups have to work out just right.
Now it’s simple. Auburn will be favored over Michigan State here in a game played less than two hours from its campus. Florida, which won the conference tournament and has arguably been playing the best basketball of anyone in the country over the last month, is a solid favorite over Texas Tech. Tennessee will be in a coin flip type of matchup against No. 1 seed Houston while trying to reach the first Final Four in program history. And if Alabama pulls the upset against Duke, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise – especially considering the Crimson Tide are capable of hitting 25 threes like they did Thursday against BYU.
“(Duke) is the only team we haven’t played that’s ranked ahead of us,” Alabama coach Nate Oats said. “I think playing those other teams has prepped us to play a game of this caliber.”
Speaking of which, an Iron Bowl for the national championship is still a possibility. Wouldn’t that be rather disrespectful to the other 49 states in the union?
But you can’t deny the Southern supremacy of this basketball season. It was real from the beginning, and it’s been proven in the tournament. Unlike in football, where the SEC has been living off reputation for the past two years while the Big Ten took home the hardware, the teams in this conference are making a huge statement about their coaching, their investment in basketball and their talent.
Will that annoy fans of other conferences? Absolutely, and it should. The SEC is not modest or humble about trumpeting its successes, and the league’s vast propaganda machine makes it such that they rarely have to own a failure.
And then there’s the Sankey factor. He is, for better or worse, the face of college sports’ current conundrum as the SEC and Big Ten grow so much richer and bigger than everyone else that it seems like they can create their own rules – and reality – with the snap of a finger.
As conference commissioners discuss another CFP expansion from 12 to either 14 or 16 teams, Sankey has pushed for quotas that would guarantee the SEC as many as four teams. He has also been a proponent of expanding the basketball tournament in a way that would likely advantage the power conferences, and the threat of the SEC and Big Ten breaking away and doing their own thing is such a pervasive fear that they’ll probably get whatever they want.
And the sad part is, they don’t need the help. They’ve proven it this year in March, earning everything they get the old fashioned way: On the floor. And with a couple breaks this weekend, San Antonio, Texas, will feel more like SEC Antonio next week for a one-of-a-kind Final Four.
