As Clarion University basketball coach Marcess Williams was wrapping up his assessment of his team's 108-51 exhibition loss to No. 2 Kentucky last Sunday, he said of the Wildcats, "The sky's the limit (for them). We'll see those guys in the Final Four."
That mindset of Big Blue being good enough to chase a ninth national championship is nothing new within the Southeastern Conference. When votes were tabulated at the league's preseason media day, Kentucky was picked the Southeastern Conference's best at season's dawn for the 12th time in 19 years.
Yet whether the Cats ultimately reach their fifth Final Four in the past seven seasons under coach John Calipari, many of the rest of the league's coaches are concerned that too many people who vote in the Associated Press college poll and those on the NCAA tournament selection committee have come to view the SEC as Kentucky and 13 football schools.
"That's the problem with our league," Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said during the preseason event in Nashville three weeks ago. "We can't be considered one of the top leagues in the country without three or four teams in the Top 25. It's not that I don't think our conference has gotten better, top to bottom, since I was at Tennessee (the 2005-06 season through 2011), because I think it has.
"But other than Kentucky, we're not as good at the top as we used to be when Florida was winning national championships under Billy Donovan and we were going to the NCAA tournament every year when I was at Tennessee. For our league to become a great league, whether it's Florida or Texas A&M or Alabama or Auburn or LSU, we need some consistency at (the) two, three, four and five (spots)."
Positioning to vie for those spots begins this Friday, when 12 of the SEC's 14 schools start their regular-season basketball schedules, including Tennessee hosting the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga at 7 p.m.
"The bottom line, you have to schedule well, but you have to win some of those games," second-year UT coach Rick Barnes said of his blueprint for getting more than three SEC teams in the 2017 NCAA tournament, which has been the case three of the last four years, including last season. "We need to win some nonleague games against some high-caliber competition and come into our conference (schedule) with higher RPIs."
UTC, which will enter Thompson-Boling Arena this week with a higher Ken Pomeroy rating (97 to 99) than the Vols, is one of three opening-night opponents ranked higher than its SEC foe. The other two are Marquette (47) against Vanderbilt (64) and Clemson (23) hosting Georgia (58).
Yet while Georgia coach Mark Fox applauds the SEC bringing in both former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese and Dan Leibovitz to help elevate the league's hoops profile - Leibovitz was the American Athletic Conference's associate commissioner for basketball as well as a former NBA assistant coach - he also would like to see a more concrete set of guidelines for what's needed to make the NCAA tourney.
"It can't be a moving target," Fox said at the league's media event. "One year it's RPI. Another year it's strength of schedule. It used to be your last 10 games. It's like it changes every year. It needs to be more transparent."
A newly formed ad hoc committee of coaches, including Calipari, hopes to change that by working with the selection comittee to voice coaching concerns about the process.
Said the UK coach in a press release last summer: "We all understand it's an inexact science and our suggestions won't make it perfect. We just want it to be better and more transparent for the players so that they know what they're playing for."
The new dean of SEC basketball coaches - Ole Miss's Andy Kennedy, who's about to begin his 11th season with the Rebels - believes there may be something of a built-in bias against the league in hoops because of its superiority in football.
"I think people get so overwhelmed with the dominance that is SEC football they all want to take a pause from the SEC," Kennedy said last month in Nashville. "They happen to want to pause when we're in the midst of our conference schedule. This should be a five-, six-, seven-bid league every year, and my hope is we can get back (to that) soon."
Indeed, from 1997 to 2008, the SEC never had fewer than five invitations to the NCAA tournament and counted six bids on eight occasions. Coincidence or not, the league's run of seven straight BCS football titles began in 2006.
Yet to test Kennedy's conspiracy theory, after the league's three lone NCAA entries in 2014 - Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee - all advanced to at least the Sweet 16, with the Cats and Gators reaching the Final Four, the SEC earned five bids to the 2015 tourney before returning to three last year. To be fair to the committee, only Texas A&M reached last year's Sweet 16 before being knocked out by Oklahoma.
So will this year be different? Is everybody beyond Kentucky close to being good enough to force the NCAA selection committee to include four or more SEC schools in next March's 68-team field?
According to bracket guru Pomeroy's early ratings, only Kentucky (4), Florida (17) and A&M (30) are inside the top 50. But Arkansas (53), Georgia (58), South Carolina (62) and Vanderbilt (64) are in the top 68.
"We're in position where we can turn that this year," Tennessee's Barnes said of the SEC's postseason possibilities, "and I'll be shocked if we don't."
Until people outside the league start saying the same thing, don't be surprised if the conference's options in March look a lot like Pomeroy's rankings in November. After all, nowhere does change come as slowly as in the South.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com