SEC sets NCAA Tournament record with 14 March Madness bids as league embraces national title expectations

NASHVILLE — Ole Miss coach Chris Beard called it “the gauntlet,” while Texas coach Rodney Terry referred to the SEC as “NCAA Tournament basketball every night.”

Arkansas coach John Calipari, who once inhabited the SEC during the league’s dark ages, offered a more blunt assessment.

“Meat grinder,” Calipari said

“Best league in the history of college basketball,” Georgia coach Mike White added in a statement that was proven true in one historically important metric on Sunday.

The SEC set a new record by placing 14 of its 16 teams in the NCAA Tournament bracket, besting the previous mark of 11 set by the Big East in 2011 when it also had 16 members. By percentage (87.5%), the SEC’s NCAA Tournament haul is also the best ever, topping the 77.7% mark posted when the nine-team Big East put seven schools in the 1991 bracket.

But for all the talk about how the 2025 version of the SEC was the best conference in college basketball history — and for all supporting evidence supplied by the selection committee — the true prize now lies ahead.

NCAA Tournament play will begin Tuesday with the First Four, and the SEC will be under the microscope as it seeks to validate what, so far, has been the most dominant season by any conference in modern college basketball.

“Our regular season speaks for itself,” Garth Glissman, the SEC’s associate commissioner for men’s basketball, told CBS Sports. “But that doesn’t guarantee any particular set of outcomes in the postseason, and so we’ve got to take care of business in the postseason.”

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What does taking care of business in the postseason look like for the SEC? Is there a certain number of teams that must escape the first weekend to mute the critics from other leagues who are waiting to pounce? Must the conference produce a couple of Final Four representatives to demonstrate it deserved all the hype?

As it turns out, the standards of the SEC itself are higher than that.

“Over this next period of time, we need to win national championships,” said Glissman, who left a vice president position at the NBA league office in 2023 to help spur the SEC to new basketball heights. “Whether that happens this year or not, this season has still been a success, but in the near term, we need to win some national championships.”

Glissman acknowledged that the randomness associated with March Madness and its single-elimination format will keep him from placing too great an emphasis on the league’s NCAA Tournament performance in any one year.

The 2024-25 season won’t be a failure for the SEC if a team from another conference cuts down the nets in San Antonio on April 7. But in a league that boasts 13 of college football’s past 19 national champions, the past three women’s basketball national champions and the past five NCAA baseball national champions, the absence of recent men’s basketball titles is glaring.

The last to do it was Kentucky in 2012.

“I’ll be the first to admit that in the SEC, ultimately we’re measured by national championships,” Glissman said.

The league has four serious candidates in Auburn, Alabama, Florida and Tennessee, and a few long shot contenders who could realistically crash the Final Four.

$tanding above the pack

National championship or not, there’s no denying the SEC ran college basketball’s regular season. A 14-2 mark in the ACC-SEC Challenge and a 59-19 mark against all high-major opposition stand out, but there are even more nuanced ways to quantify its dominance as well.

College basketball talk leading up to Selection Sunday features a lot of discussion about where teams and leagues stand in certain metrics. Sure, the SEC is a great conference because Ken Pomeroy says it has seven of the nation’s top-17 teams. 

Yes, the league owns four of the top-six spots in Evan Miyakawa’s team ratings. 

Oh, and how could we forget Bart Torvik, who places 14 SEC teams in the top 50?

How will NCAA Tournament selection committee handle seeding as many as 12, 13 or 14 teams from the SEC?

Matt Norlander

While Pomeroy, Miyakawa, Torvik and others can use advanced analytics to explain the SEC’s greatness, there’s another metric that more simply explains the SEC’s rise in men’s basketball: money.

Six Final Four coaches don’t inhabit the SEC out of charity. Nor do some of the nation’s most talented players.

That’s why Glissman zooms way out to assess how the SEC got here, pointing to economic factors such as the booming population, rising GDP and elevated enrollments in the SEC’s geographic footprint during the post-COVID years.

To illustrate his point on the latter fact, he points to a 2024 Wall Street Journal article headlined, “Sorry, Harvard. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now.”

“You’ve got macroeconomic momentum,” Glissman said.

Coaching talent has followed as a result.

“The SEC, its commitment in basketball, I believe, has manifested most clearly in the quality of head coaches,” Glissman said. “Because like any labor market, to attract and retain the top talent, the compensation has to be there.”

In a four-season span from 2013-16, the SEC placed just three teams in the NCAA Tournament three times. The general consensus was that this conference was a football league. That has begun to change in recent years. The SEC placed eight of its 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament in 2023 and 2024, paving the way for this season’s historic tally.

“I want to help create a product for SEC men’s basketball where SEC fans, their fandom, does not have to stop when football season is over,” Glissman said. “I want to channel that passion that we all know and love from SEC football, and then just carry it right over into the winter.”

Part of that, Glissman says, is winning national championships. 

“You got a few who could do it this year. I think we have multiple teams this year who are capable.”