SEC bias, a claim in football that can easily be disproven with facts and records over a long period of time, is now reaching college basketball. The league just set a record with 14 teams making the NCAA Tournament, and conspiracy theories as mad as March Madness itself are running rampant.
At the heart of the issue is the SEC/ESPN tie. I’m not kidding. Just search on X SEC, 14 and ESPN and you’ll see a plethora of posts claiming the league used its influence at the Worldwide Leader in Sports, where it has a 10-year exclusive rights contract, to make sure all but two of its teams will make the Big Dance.
The sheer stupidity of SEC bias accusations reached another level with this one. ESPN doesn’t carry March Madness on the men’s side, every objective formula the Selection Committee uses showed all 14 SEC teams belong, and that ESPN tie wasn’t beneficial in the College Football Playoff, which the network carries.
Somehow, though, those facts are irrelevant to the narrative of the Twitter mob.
Let’s think about this for a second. The CBS and Turner Sports networks carry the NCAA Tournament. CBS is the primary network. ESPN doesn’t carry any of the games. How, then, would the SEC’s connection to ABC/ESPN help them?
Remember, the SEC had a bitter breakup with CBS just last year. That network now shares rights to Big Ten games with the FOX and NBC networks. If anything, wouldn’t there be a bias to getting Big Ten teams into March Madness given the network that carries it?
This is a crucial point because one of the teams left out, which upset many people, was the Indiana Hoosiers. The debate is if the North Carolina Tar Heels, who many believe don’t belong in, stole their spot or if SEC bias stole their spot given its ESPN ties.
To have that conspiracy, you have to be dumb enough to think that the SEC’s contract with a competitor network to the one carrying March Madness would help it against a team from the conference with an exclusive contract with that network that carries March Madness. How in the world could you come up with that logic?
Also, why not look at the actual data. In the NCAA NET Rankings, the primary method the Selection Committee uses to select teams for the NCAA Tournament, 13 of the 14 SEC teams would have qualified. Remember, you either have to win your conference tournament or be deemed one of the 37 best at-large teams by the committee to get in.
Every SEC team in the tourney but the Vanderbilt Commodores met that criteria in the NET. Those 13 teams also met it in the ESPN Basketball Power Index (BPI) and the KenPom rankings. So by objective formulas, the SEC should still have the record for most teams in the Big Dance by at least two teams. They broke the Big East’s record with 11 in 2011.
Okay, so you could make a case about Vandy getting in. However, they were only two spots out of the top 37 at-large teams in the NET and KenPom rankings. Also, since the SEC had the No. 1 conference rating in the NET and RPI, the only two ranking systems that compare conferences, it’s not crazy for just one less deserving SEC team to be thrown a bone.
Only one member of the Selection Committee, Alabama Crimson Tide athletic director Greg Byrne, is from the SEC. Somehow he outweighed everybody else to get the toughest league in the nation by every metric to be overrepresented in Mach Madness this year?
That certainly didn’t happen in last year’s College Football Playoff, which gets to our next point. If the SEC’s ESPN ties lead to it getting preferential treatment, why didn’t Alabama, the South Carolina Gamecocks or the Ole Miss Rebels sneak into last year’s CFP?
Remember, they were left out in favor of the SMU Mustangs and Indiana Hoosiers. Indiana had two fewer losses but a strength of schedule outside of the top 100. SMU had one less loss but still a much worse SOS. Wouldn’t Bama, which was the first team out, have gotten the nod if there was a bias?
See, SEC conspiracy theorists throw out one number and one contract to back up some evidence they think is modern-day investigative journalism, but it falls on its face standing up to the slightest scrutiny. There is no tie to March Madness or action taken by the committee that would suggest this league is pulling the strings.
Look, the SEC actually could be overrated, and often times, the deepest conference in the college basketball regular season has the quickest flameouts in March Madness. That doesn’t mean they didn’t meet the criteria to get in ahead of time, though, and regardless of what happens over the next three weeks, there was no SEC bias at all.
