Minutes after his Kentucky basketball team thumped South Carolina 85-69 Saturday night in Rupp Arena, coach John Calipari briefly mentioned the Southeastern Conference his Wildcats are owning so far this winter.
"There was a lot of stuff that happened in our league today - crazy," Calipari said in his news conference.
Calipari's "crazy" may have been the nicest way to say "awkward."
After an autumn in which Alabama completely controlled the league, winning its regular-season conference football games by an average of 23.3 points before trouncing Florida 54-16 in the Georgia Dome, Calipari's Wildcats are 17-2 overall and have won all seven SEC games by an average of 20 points. Kentucky plays at Tennessee tonight at 9 on ESPN.
The gap between Kentucky and the rest of the league widened considerably Saturday, when No. 19 Florida lost at home to an 8-10 Vanderbilt, Alabama fell 84-64 at Auburn and Georgia allowed Texas A&M to score the last 10 points of a 63-62 Aggies upset win. The Bulldogs had the last possession in College Station, but the clock froze with 5.6 seconds left and with none of the officials noticing, which forced the league to send out a statement to address the embarrassing finish.
"There was a malfunction of the Precision Timing system, which stopped the game clock while play continued," the statement read. "Game officials failed to recognize the game clock was not functioning properly during live action. Once the clock stoppage was discovered, NCAA rules were appropriately administered with the use of the courtside monitor for replay and a digital stopwatch to determine that time expired before a foul was assessed to a Texas A&M defender.
"Because rules do not permit time to be put back on the clock in this situation, the contest was ended."
Saturday's upheaval nearly left the SEC with only one ranked team in Monday's new Associated Press Top 25. Kentucky moved up one spot to No. 4, while South Carolina (15-4, 5-1) and Florida (14-5, 5-2) are just hanging on at No. 23 and No. 25.
ESPN analyst Joe Lunardi still has four league teams - Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina and Arkansas (15-4, 4-3) - in his latest 68-team NCAA tournament projection, which would be a slight improvement over the three league teams that went in three of the past four March events.
"Our league is better than what people think it is, and I think there are other leagues that are overrated because of the perception," Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said last week. "We have a lot of young players, and I don't think there is any question that we have a great future ahead of us in this league. I have so much respect for the coaches in the league, and there really are a lot of young players."
Calipari defended the SEC on Saturday night, saying, "It's happening all over college basketball. It's hard to be at your best every day."
Inconsistency has been reflected throughout the country, even in the Atlantic Coast Conference, where Duke entered this week 3-3 in league play. North Carolina, in the span of nine days, had a 12-point loss to Georgia Tech and a 51-point win over N.C. State.
The notable contrast, however, is that more than half of the ACC is expected to land in the NCAA bracket.
"Going forward, I think our league is going to get to the level everybody wants it to be," Barnes said. "Somebody told me that there are 10 projected teams from the ACC, and I think there will be the day when they say that about this league. You've got to be willing to schedule those teams, and you've got to be able to win some of them, because that starts it as much as anything.
"We need to get to the point, and this is not so much in preseason rankings, where we begin league play in January with four or five ranked teams."
And not be viewed as a league that starts and stops with Kentucky, which is seeking its third undefeated run through SEC play in six seasons.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.