This week’s Southeastern Conference basketball tournament in Nashville is overrun with intrigue.
The league currently boasts three Associated Press top-10 teams – No. 4 Kentucky, No. 8 Tennessee and No. 9 LSU – and has No. 22 Auburn headlining the second-tier hopefuls such as Ole Miss, Mississippi State and South Carolina. Florida and Alabama are squarely on the NCAA tournament bubble going into their respective Thursday matchups, and both the Gators and Crimson Tide need to perform well for the league to repeat last year’s feat of eight NCAA bids.
SEC TOURNAMENT SCHEDULE
WEDNESDAYNo. 12 Missouri vs. No. 13 Georgia (7 p.m. on SEC Network)No. 11 Texas A&M vs. No. 14 Vanderbilt (9:30 on SEC Network)THURSDAYNo. 8 Florida vs. No. 9 Arkansas (1 p.m. on SEC Network)No. 5 Auburn vs Mizzou/Georgia winner (3:30 on SEC Network)No. 7 Ole Miss vs. No. 10 Alabama (7 on SEC Network)No. 6 Miss. State vs A&M/Vandy winner (9:30 on SEC Network)FRIDAYNo. 1 LSU vs. Fla/Ark winner (1 p.m. on SEC Network)No. 4 So. Carolina vs. Aub/Miz/Ga (3:30 on SEC Network)No. 2 Kentucky vs. Miss/Bama winner (7 on SEC Network)No. 3 Tennessee vs. MSU/A&M/Vandy (9:30 on SEC Network)SATURDAYFirst semifinal (1 p.m. on ESPN)Second semifinal (3:30 on ESPN)SUNDAYChampionship (1 p.m. on ESPN)
“This tournament is going to be incredible this year,” said Mississippi State coach Ben Howland, whose Bulldogs have the towering task of potentially having to defeat third-seeded Tennessee, second-seeded Kentucky and top-seeded LSU on consecutive days to win the title. “There are so many good teams and so many teams that are capable of winning it. The bottom half of the bracket is particularly difficult, and the one thing about postseason play is that it’s a whole new season for everybody and a whole new beginning.”
There is also a very ugly side to this week’s extravaganza inside Bridgestone Arena, which is housing this event for the fourth time in five years.
LSU won its first regular-season title in a decade Saturday night with an 80-59 drubbing of Vanderbilt that capped a 16-2 league run featuring a 9-0 road record and a 5-1 mark in overtime games. Yet the thrilling season in Baton Rouge was jolted last Friday afternoon, when the university suspended second-year coach Will Wade following a Yahoo Sports report claiming Wade had been heard on FBI wiretaps discussing a deal to snag current freshman guard Javonte Smart.
The university then announced Saturday that it was holding Smart out of the Vandy game for what it described as “an abundance of caution.”
Assistant Tony Benford replaced Wade, who coached the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons, on an interim basis and is expected to do the same in Nashville.
“I haven’t been told otherwise,” Benford said Monday on a league teleconference. “We’re in here today preparing just like we did for the Vanderbilt game.”
Benford hopes to know the status of Smart at some point Tuesday.
This is not the SEC’s first brush with chaos at league tournament time. Georgia pulled out of the 2003 event following a 19-8 regular season and 11-5 conference finish after NCAA violations under former coach Jim Harrick were revealed, and Kentucky was ineligible for the 1991 SEC tournament as a result of sanctions from the Eddie Sutton era.
The 1990-91 Wildacts competed under second-year coach Rick Pitino and posted the league’s best regular-season mark at 14-4.
More recently, Missouri was not allowed to compete in the 2016 SEC tournament due to violations under former coach Frank Haith. Those 2016 Tigers did not impact the league landscape, however, finishing last with a 3-15 record.
“I hate it for our game. I really do,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Monday during his weekly news conference. “I think this game has been great to so many people and what it does for so many. I just hate to see a cloud over college basketball.”
Barnes and his Volunteers are slight favorites over Kentucky to win the SEC tournament, which begins Wednesday night when 12th-seeded Missouri faces 13th-seeded Georgia. LSU and Auburn actually share the next best odds behind the Vols and Wildcats, who according to coach John Calipari will have graduate transfer Reid Travis only in a backup role this week if at all.
Auburn ended the regular season with four straight wins, including Saturday’s 84-80 topping of Tennessee, but Bruce Pearl’s Tigers haven’t advanced in the SEC tournament since his first year in 2015, when they pulled off three upsets to reach Saturday’s semifinals.
“It’s been a few years since we’ve won a game,” Pearl said, “and that’s something that our team is going to talk about. We want to see if we can spend a weekend in Nashville.”
Florida and Alabama may have the most pressure this week, given that their NCAA tournament fates are uncertain. Both the eighth-seeded Gators and the 10th-seeded Crimson Tide closed the regular season with three straight losses.
Most projections have Florida just in the NCAA field and Alabama just out, but the coaches of those two teams don’t want to leave things up to analysts.
“I would feel very uneasy if we didn’t have success for a lot of reasons,” Florida’s Mike White said, “but I’m not going to worry about bracketology. I’m going to spend all my time and energy focused on Arkansas and playing as well as we can possibly play.”
Said Alabama’s Avery Johnson: “We’re ready for a new season and a new opportunity. It gives us a chance to hit the reset button, and I’m hoping that our best basketball is ahead of us.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.