The Great Alaska Shootout. The Bluebonnet Bowl. The NCAA tournament’s third-place game. The Blue-Gray Football Classic.
Multiple college competitions have come and gone through the years, and this weekend marked the laying to rest of the Big 12/SEC Challenge after 10 basketball seasons. Its passing was the result of ESPN, the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference formulating an ACC/SEC Challenge that will begin with the 2023-24 season and will take place the week after Thanksgiving.
“I think when this started that it was a good thing for both leagues,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Saturday night after his No. 4 Volunteers took down No. 10 Texas 82-71 in Thompson-Boling Arena. “I also think it took ESPN a couple of years to get it into this spot. From the very beginning, this is when they wanted to play it.
“It’s been good for both leagues, but next season we start with the ACC, and the next year Oklahoma and Texas will be coming into the league.”
Barnes went 6-4 in the Big 12/SEC Challenge, posting a 1-1 record with Texas and a 5-3 mark with the Vols. His biggest complaint about the annual 10-game extravaganza was the numbers issue, with the SEC containing 14 members and the Big 12 only 10.
That four-team difference will continue when Oklahoma and Texas join the SEC to form a 16-team conference and when the Big 12 replaces the Sooners and Longhorns with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF. The ACC, by comparison, already has 15 members in basketball.
“When we start with the ACC, we’ll have all of our teams in, and it will be a real challenge,” Barnes said. “Texas A&M was not even in this challenge, so I don’t even know that we can call it a real challenge. You wish you could schedule the games the week before and really get the matchups that you wanted, but I just think you have to have all the teams involved to call it a real challenge.”
The Big 12/SEC Challenge wrapped up like it began, with the Big 12 winning seven of the 10 games. The Big 12 wound up winning five of the annual showcases, with the SEC claiming three and the 2017 and 2020 events ending in 5-5 draws.
“I think it’s always great for college basketball when you can step outside your league and try to pitch your league against another league in terms of the best versus the best,” Texas interim head coach Rodney Terry said. “I think Tennessee is playing the best in its league right now, and Alabama went to Oklahoma today and had a 30-point loss. We have a really good team that has not been out-toughed or out-physicaled this year, but tonight we were, and we’ll learn from it and be better from it.
“You keep these games for one night whether you win or lose.”
The Big 12 won 55 total games to the SEC’s 44, with one of the most surprising results over the past decade being Oklahoma’s 93-69 ambush Saturday afternoon of No. 2 Alabama in Norman. The Sooners, who are 2-6 in league play, led by as many as 32 points.
“They jumped on us from the beginning, and we never really got back in it,” Alabama coach Nate Oats said in a news conference. “They shot better from 3 than we did from the free-throw line. To be honest, I don’t think we’ve played well for a couple of weeks.
“I think we’ve lost our edge a little bit, and they got us at the right time.”
No. 9 Kansas broke free from Kentucky for a 77-68 triumph at Rupp Arena to cap the dominating day for the Big 12, which entered with six teams ranked among the top 17 in the Associated Press poll. The good news for the SEC is that its top teams that lost didn’t suffer much in Sunday’s NET rankings, with Alabama dropping from third to fourth, Auburn from 30th to 31st and Kentucky from 33rd to 35th.
Oklahoma jumped from 65th to 55th in the NET with its resounding triumph, and Mississippi State made the SEC’s biggest move from 59th to 54th after upsetting TCU.
Perhaps the biggest testament to the Big 12’s strength was that West Virginia’s 80-77 outlasting of No. 15 Auburn was viewed as a surprise due to Auburn’s ranking and Bruce Pearl’s Tigers being 6-2 in SEC play and the Mountaineers 2-6 within their league. Yet West Virginia entered with a NET ranking of 25th, five spots higher than Auburn.
The Big 12/SEC Challenge was often accompanied by perception, and the perception this year — or perhaps the reality — is that the SEC is significantly inferior.
“This doesn’t have any effect on SEC standings, which is the only good thing to come out of this,” Oats said. “Hopefully, we’ll recover from a loss out of conference, but it’s not good. We needed the SEC to do well, and we obviously didn’t do our job on it.”
Said Pearl: “That was a real prize that we missed.”
Odds and ends
Tennessee has won five consecutive home games against AP top-10 teams, downing No. 4 Kentucky in March 2019, No. 6 Arizona in December 2021, No. 4 Kentucky in February 2022, No. 3 Auburn in February 2022 and No. 10 Texas on Saturday. … Vols sophomore point guard Zakai Zeigler turned in the seventh performance in program history with 20 or more points and 10 or more assists. … The Baylor Bears had the best record, at 8-2, of any team over the course of the Big 12/SEC Challenge.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.