If they weren’t being played on home courts, the following three games would sound much more like Sweet 16 pairings in the NCAA tournament than regular-season matchups scheduled for the last Saturday in January.
But No. 14 Iowa State at No. 5 Texas A&M, No. 1 Oklahoma at LSU and expected overall No. 1 NBA Draft pick Ben Simmons and No. 20 Kentucky at No. 4 Kansas are exactly that: Regular-season college basketball games at the top of Saturday’s 10-game Big 12-SEC Challenge.
“This was kind of an idea that the two conferences and ESPN collaborated on,” said Southeastern Conference associate commissioner Mark Whitworth, who did most of the heavy lifting for his league. “And regardless of the outcomes, these games are going to have a significant positive impact on strength of schedule and RPI for everyone.”
College basketball needs more significant positive impacts. The season’s too long and filled with too many meaningless games before conference play begins. But while the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 10 schedule their annual Challenge during the first month of the season, the SEC and Big 12 deserve credit for staging their event midway through conference races.
“There was some concern,” said Whitworth, mindful that most coaches detest anything that distracts their players from league play once January rolls around. “But at the same time, our coaches and athletic directors saw this as so consistent with what we’re trying to achieve in this conference.”
To be blunt, what the SEC is trying to achieve is national respect. Two years ago, only three SEC teams made the NCAA field, despite all three of those schools – Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee – advancing to the Sweet 16 and Florida and the Wildcats reaching the Final Four.
To make it worse, UT and UK were placed in the same regional. Nothing screams disrespect more than watching a tournament with four regionals select but three teams from a Power Five league, then put two of them in the same regional.
Yet former SEC commissioner Mike Slive wisely chose not to dwell on the selection committee’s wrongs but rather his league’s shortcomings. He preached for tougher schedules, more big-name coaching hires and arenas befitting of eight-to-nine-figure athletic budgets.
Look around the SEC today and you see Bruce Pearl at Auburn, former UCLA coach Ben Howland – he of three straight Final Fours between 2006 and 2008 – at Mississippi State and Rick Barnes at Tennessee. Ole Miss has a sparkling new arena. Other schools are planning new practice facilities.
And for the first time in recent memory, a quick glance at conference RPI rankings has the SEC in fifth, one spot ahead of the Big Ten and such traditional basketball powerhouses as Indiana, Michigan State, Ohio State and Purdue.
“There’s still work to be done,” Whitworth said. “But we’re pleased that as of Monday, we had seven teams in the top 59 in RPI. That’s half our league in the top 17 to 18 percent of Division I programs.”
The Big 12-SEC challenge isn’t new, but moving it to the end of January is. It previously fell on the weekend of the SEC football title game weekend on the first weekend of December, which meant only Kentucky and Vanderbilt probably paid any attention to it.
(Side note: When the conference’s football championship game began in 1992, Kentucky media outlets used to joke that if UK ever reached it on the same day the basketball Cats were playing North Carolina or some other traditional hoops power, the state’s sports sections would send five writers to the basketball game and let the wire services handle the title game. Twenty-four years later, that theory is still to be tested.)
But with the Big 12 currently ranked No. 1 in RPI thanks to three teams in the top 10 and five among the top 17, the SEC has a great chance to test its perceived improvement across the board, at least among 10 of its programs, including Tennessee (which visits TCU at 2 p.m. on ESPN2), Georgia (which visits No. 17 Baylor at 6 p.m. on ESPN 2) and Vanderbilt (which hosts Texas at noon on ESPN2).
And to prove that both conferences and ESPN had a heart, no one pushed the SEC’s UT (Tennessee) to play the Big 12’s UT (Texas), despite Barnes spending the past 17 year with the Longhorns prior to this one.
“We’ve actually been working on this for more than a year,” Whitworth said. “A lot of this was pretty much done long before Rick became the Tennessee coach.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t intriguing storylines. For instance, Iowa State coach Steve Prohm worked for, then succeeded Billy Kennedy at Murray State when Kennedy went to Texas A&M. All you need to know about Kentucky and Kansas is that the Wildcats are the winningest team in the history of college basketball (2,193 victories prior to Wednesday) and the Jayhawks are second (2,169). Then there’s top-ranked Oklahoma and possible Wooden Award (basketball’s Heisman Trophy) winner Buddy Hield facing Simmons, another likely Wooden finalist.
Road teams this year will host next year, but the matchups could change, although the four SEC schols left out of the mix this year – Alabama, South Carolina, Missouri and Mississippi State – will also miss in 2017.
But every SEC school will benefit eventually.
“I think this is a tremendous opportunity for us to promote not only our conference and the Big 12 conference, but all of college basketball,” Whitworth said.
And as January rolls into February, all of college basketball could certainly use a boost in interest.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.