Mike Bianchi: SEC has gone from football factory to basketball beast

ORLANDO, Fla. — Somewhere up there in Hoops Heaven, Stormin’ Norman Sloan is one giddy Gator who is almost certainly feeling validated and vindicated about the SEC’s basketball awakening.

Stormin’ Norman, the turbulent, temperamental former basketball coach at the University of Florida, was once asked at an SEC preseason press briefing in the 1980s what it would take for the conference’s basketball teams to get the exposure and resources they needed to create a dominant league.

Sloan, surveying a room filled with the good ol’ boy network of football-fanatical sports writers and helmet-headed SEC league officials, blurted out: “A few timely funerals would be a great start.”

The translation was bluntly honest and callously clear: The only way the SEC could build itself into a powerhouse basketball league like the ACC or the Big East would be if the old guard died off and new blood was infused into the league.

Sloan originally coached the Gators in the early 1960s, left and returned after winning the national title at North Carolina State in ’74. Like many SEC coaches before and after him, he felt the league and most of the individual member schools didn’t do nearly enough to promote the basketball product, and, consequently, the media and the fans didn’t care about it either. Sloan rightfully believed that the SEC’s heart and soul belonged to football, and basketball was nothing more than an afterthought and a sideshow.

Sloan found that there was more than just a little truth to the old joke: “The three biggest sports in the SEC are football, spring football and football recruiting.”

It took a few decades, but the SEC, at long last, finally got Sloan’s message in recent years, evidenced by the record 14 out of its 16 teams getting into the 68-team NCAA Tournament Field on Selection Sunday, breaking the old record of 11 set by the Big East in 2011.

Not only that but Florida and Auburn earned No. 1 seeds, while Tennessee and Alabama were No. 2s. Six SEC teams earned top-four seeds in a season in which conference teams won 89% of their non-league games.

“It’s the deepest, most talented, most competitive conference in the history of college basketball,” Florida coach Todd Golden said recently.

Said ESPN analyst Jay Bilas: “The SEC is the most powerful league, top to bottom, that there has ever been.”

Those are the types of glowing descriptions we’re used to hearing about football in the SEC, which once won seven straight national championships from 2006-12. The SEC’s official mantra: “It Just Means More” is traditionally associated with the league’s football fanaticism, but now the sleeping giant that is basketball has not only been awakened, it has had eight shots of espresso while marching through the country shattering backboards, throwing down windmill dunks and stealing the ACC’s lunch money.

In the 1990s, I used to refer to SEC basketball as “Kentucky and its 11 little bubbas,” but those little bubbas have gone through a massive growth spurt and are now big and strong and no longer content to be in Kentucky’s shadow.

Late, great SEC commissioner Mike Slive led the initial push to upgrade the league’s basketball programs before he stepped down in 2015. Successor Greg Sankey, the current commissioner, took it to the next level the following year when the league embarrassingly had only three teams in the tournament field and only one made it past the second round.

Sankey told league ADs and presidents to start spending more money, allocating more resources and building better facilities for basketball. And he almost immediately hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as a consultant to improve the league’s basketball product.

“They were just totally beaten down,” Tranghese told ESPN. “The coaches felt nobody cared. I’m not certain if all the ADs in that room believed they could win. I found it ludicrous, to be honest with you. I told the ADs, ‘This is the most unbelievably nonsensical thing I’ve ever heard.’ I even had one AD tell me that you couldn’t win in basketball because the league was so good in football.

“My response: ‘Why not? You have the resources, the fan bases, great athletes in your backyards. Use football to your advantage.’ Most of all, I told them to quit whining and quit making excuses.”

Suddenly, with the influx of resources, came an influx of better players and better coaches. It’s also no coincidence that SEC basketball began taking off about the same time as the ESPN-backed SEC Network started hitting its stride.

The launch of the network in 2014 was a watershed moment. While initially established to further boost the conference’s football dominance, it also provided basketball with a much-needed national platform. Games that were once relegated to regional broadcasts were now available to millions. And with ESPN’s marketing muscle, marquee SEC matchups weren’t just opening acts on the college basketball landscape; they were headliners on national broadcasts.

“It’s an incredible example of growth and a league taking the bull by the horns and doing what it needed to do,” Golden says.

Quite a difference from all those years ago when another Gators basketball coach fumed at the SEC and its member institutions about the lack of commitment to basketball.

Sloan used to like to tell the story about first coming to UF to replace a basketball coach who doubled as an assistant football coach. Sloan’s office was an abandoned classroom in a dank, dilapidated old gym. Basketball was so unimportant and the school was so chintzy that the athletic director, who also was the head football coach, made Sloan pay $107 out of his own pocket to have carpet installed in his dingy office.

Somewhere up there in Hoops Heaven, Stormin’ Norman is loudly and proudly filling out his NCAA Tournament bracket, penciling in an All-SEC Final Four and getting ready to watch the conference he once dreamed of come to life.