After recently winning a 10th national championship in college football's last 14 seasons, the Southeastern Conference appears to be reclaiming an underdog role in men's basketball.
The SEC had four Associated Press top-15 teams entering last season's NCAA tournament - Tennessee, Kentucky, LSU and Auburn - and all four reached the Sweet 16. Auburn advanced to the Final Four and followed that with a 15-0 start to this season to earn Bruce Pearl's Tigers a No. 4 ranking, but lopsided losses last week at Alabama and at Florida have resulted in the SEC currently not having any top-10 teams.
"Last year, there were four great teams in our league," Pearl said Saturday in a news conference. "Kentucky was Final Four good with two lottery picks. Tennessee was dominant all year long. LSU won the league. We were probably the fourth-best team, and we got to the Final Four. Mississippi State was really good, and Florida had a great run at the end of the year.
"I don't know if anybody now is as good as those top four or five teams, and that's not a knock or a criticism on the league being down. We just lost a ton of players to the draft, and several of those left early."
The SEC's top four teams last season all were top-five seeds in their respective NCAA tournament regions, but the league may be strained to provide more than one top-five seed this year.
In Monday's AP poll, Kentucky was the highest-ranked SEC team at No. 15, with Auburn a spot behind. Auburn has the highest NET ranking at No. 20, with LSU 23rd, Kentucky 27th, Arkansas 32nd, Florida 39th and Alabama 42nd, which seemingly would place six SEC teams in the NCAA tournament at the moment.
LSU suffered four nonconference setbacks, including a 74-63 blowout loss to East Tennessee State in Baton Rouge, but Will Wade's Tigers have won four straight league games by four or fewer points in their 5-0 SEC start.
"I think our league is wide open," Wade said. "There are going to be a lot of close games, and it's going to come down to whoever can finish those games and win the close ones."
The two league teams with the loftiest preseason expectations, Kentucky and Florida, are each 4-1 in conference contests, with the pack of Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn and Tennessee each 3-2. The Volunteers are 64th in the NET rankings, which would place them more in the NIT picture, and are still adjusting to last month's loss of Lamonte Turner and the more recent additions of Santiago Vescovi and Uros Plavsic.
"I feel bad for my good friend Rick Barnes losing his point guard, but he'll figure it out," Kentucky coach John Calipari said. "How do I know that? He always has."
Auburn and Tennessee tied for the SEC regular-season title two years ago with 13-5 league records, while Ole Miss finished last at 5-13. That balance eroded last year, when LSU went 16-2 to top the 15-3 duo of Kentucky and Tennessee, and when Georgia went 2-16 and Vanderbilt 0-18.
The Commodores lost five-star talent Darius Garland before league play a year ago and lost top player Aaron Nesmith this season just one game into their conference slate.
"When Nesmith was playing for Vanderbilt, they could beat anybody," Pearl said, "but if he doesn't come back, that's going to be hard. The teams that keep their locker rooms are going to finish in the upper division of the league and play in the NCAA tournament.
"Teams are going to get beat. We lost seven games in the league last year, but we had a good team."
The SEC was continually striving for basketball respect from 2009 through 2016, when Kentucky was elite but the league overall had just three NCAA tournament representatives four times in that eight-year stretch. The league began to strengthen in 2017, when Florida, Kentucky and South Carolina reached the Elite Eight and when Frank Martin's Gamecocks advanced to the Final Four, and eight SEC teams reached NCAA play in 2018.
Seven SEC teams were invited to the 68-team field last year, but the league will be challenged to replicate that and is on track to have far fewer elite seeds.
"How about South Carolina going to Virginia and winning?" Calipari said. "How about our Michigan State win to start the season? We've had some stumbles, but we have a bunch of teams in here who are young.
"I said early on that this is going to be a six-, seven- or eight-bid league, and that's what we've become. You can win any game you play, but you can lose any game you play."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.