And down the stretch they ... limp?
The top five Southeastern Conference men's basketball teams in the standings entering this past weekend - Auburn, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Missouri - all lost on the road Saturday against teams with losing league records.
Auburn had the good fortune of maintaining its two-game lead on Tennessee with four games remaining in the regular season, but the Tigers not only lost 84-75 at South Carolina but must play the rest of the way without 6-foot-7 sophomore forward Anfernee McLemore.
McLemore, who sustained a dislocated ankle and a fractured tibia against the Gamecocks, leads the SEC in blocked shots (73) and blocks per game (2.7).
"With nine guys, we were the 305th tallest team, and he was our second-tallest player," Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said Monday. "Obviously a team that was small just got smaller. Our focus has been twofold, trying to win this championship and also trying to play our best basketball, and we now have an extra 20 minutes that are available.
Auburn must play the rest of the season without 6-foot-7 sophomore forward Anfernee McLemore, who leads the SEC in blocked shots. (Cat Wofford/Auburn Athletics)"Desean Murray, Chuma Okeke, Horace Spencer and perhaps Malik Dunbar will all play more, and that means the productivity of their games and their abilities will have to help us become a better team."
Although Auburn is 11-3 in SEC play and holds the head-to-head tiebreaker over the second-place Volunteers (9-5), Pearl's 23-4 Tigers have remaining tests against Alabama, Florida, Arkansas and the same South Carolina team that built a staggering 40-14 lead Saturday.
Auburn's best hope of winning the league may be rooting for extended chaos, with Tennessee having lost two of three games since its season sweep of Kentucky and with Florida (8-6) having lost last week to Georgia at home and to Vanderbilt on the road. Mike White guided Florida to the NCAA tournament's Elite Eight last season, and he believes the current free-for-all could benefit the league next month.
"I think we're all beating each other up, but I also think we're preparing each other," White said. "The beatings can lead to some exposing, which I think will lead to development from team to team. You can learn a lot about yourself after a win, but you can learn even more after a loss.
"As competitive as this league is, I think we're all helping each other through wins and losses become better and better. You're going to see a bunch of SEC teams named on Selection Sunday, and I think our league will prove again how improved we are."
The SEC never has had more than six representatives in a single NCAA tournament but is still on track for eight in this year's field: Auburn, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas. ESPN analyst Joe Lunardi projects seven SEC teams as 7 seeds or higher (he pegs Arkansas as a 10), and he lists Georgia among his top eight teams on the outside of the 68-team extravaganza.
If Auburn, Florida and Tennessee need an example of how to survive this February grind, they can look no further than to last year's South Carolina. Frank Martin's Gamecocks dropped four of their last six regular-season games before getting bounced by Alabama in an SEC tournament quarterfinal, but they regrouped to thump Marquette, Duke, Baylor and Florida and reach the NCAA Final Four for the first time in program history.
"Winning on the road is hard, and it's no different from what happens in every other league in the country," Martin said Monday. "For whatever reason, in this league everybody looks at it like it's not supposed to happen. There are teams whose seasons are coming to an end, and they have upperclassmen, and the upperclassmen realize that the end is near and play with a greater sense of urgency, so records go out the window, and it gets that much harder.
"We lost four of our last six games last year, but three of them were on the road to NCAA tournament teams and one was at home to an NCAA tournament team. It's hard to win, and it's even harder to win on the road at the end of the year."
Rivalry revisited
The SEC's best rivalry from a quarter century ago resumes tonight (9 EST on ESPN2) when Arkansas and Kentucky meet in Bud Walton Arena. John Calipari's Wildcats have won five consecutive series meetings by double digits, including the championship games of the 2015 and 2017 SEC tournaments, so nobody on the current Razorbacks roster has tasted success against Big Blue.
"It's going to be a hard one," Calipari said. "They're starting four seniors, and we're starting five freshmen. It's a hard game for us, but it's another chance to learn and grow and see where we are."
Differing views
Although Florida is comfortably in Lunardi's projected bracket as a 7 seed, Jerry Palm of CBS has the Gators pegged for a "First Four" game as an 11 seed.
The Gators have lost five of their last seven SEC games and have become a troubling bunch for White.
"If this current Gator team has a great practice, that's an outlier, and it was the opposite last year," White said. "We've got a group of introverted guys, and that's probably a factor, and I'm not sure how competitive this group is.
"I don't think it hurts this group enough when we're not playing well. We can be a different team from one media timeout to the next."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.