NASHVILLE, Tenn. — On Saturday and Sunday, a Final Four happened here. Not the Final Four. That’s slotted for three weeks from now in a city a thousand miles southwest. But you might’ve been forgiven for believing it was the real thing: A quartet of men’s college basketball teams, all among the country’s top six programs by almost every measure, all with legitimate aspirations for a national championship, converging in one spot to play a couple games.
And all belonging to one league.
The last two days of the SEC tournament in March, in sum, did a good impression of what everyone usually sees in early April.
“Whether it was Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, us — all four of those teams have a very realistic shot to make it to San Antonio,” Florida coach Todd Golden told The Athletic on Sunday, standing on a Bridgestone Arena floor blanketed in confetti, with a tournament championship T-shirt slung over his shoulder. “Depending on the bracket, it could be what the Final Four looks like in a month and a half.”
The actual 2025 NCAA Tournament is indeed upon us, bringing with it a new standard for single-league dominance and maybe a paradigm shift for a sport. The SEC put 14 teams into the field of 68 announced Sunday. No conference ever has received that many bids. (The previous record? The Big East’s 11 in 2011.) There are two No. 1 seeds and two No. 2 seeds. A league historically known for and obsessed with the games that happen (mostly) in September, October and November is now the hulking bellwether for March.
This year, the NCAA Tournament runs through football country.
“We spent a lot of time on that (Sunday),” Selection Committee chairman Bubba Cunningham said during CBS’ reveal of the field. “We didn’t move anybody off of a seed line, but we had to move people around to minimize the conflict early. … Fourteen teams out of one league in a 68-team bracket is a real challenge.”
In fact, 31 teams from the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 collectively earned spots. It’s enough to prompt some questions about what the future of this event will look like, because the drive to get bigger and take up all the space in the room is undefeated in college athletics. The SEC, at the risk of oversimplifying, effectively decided a few years ago to invest in being good at men’s basketball, be it through smart and cunning coaching hires and/or sheer volume of resources infused into its programs.
And this is what happens when actions follow intent. Muscles grow muscles.
Same goes for the Big Ten and Big 12, actually, though the strategy for both leagues revolved more around strength in sheer numbers. Houston and BYU are in their second seasons in the Big 12. Arizona is in its first. That’s some serious added mass; the 2025 league tournament final pitted Kelvin Sampson’s Cougars against Tommy Lloyd’s Wildcats. The Big Ten, meanwhile, looks less like a cool, somewhat parochial Midwest basketball beacon … and more like someone threw 18 darts at a map and then tied a string to them. But that nets you Maryland, UCLA and Oregon over the years, too, bolstering the depth of hoops threats.
None of these entities intend to cut weight. Conferences known for one thing — mostly, historically, generally — worked to be known for everything. Dominance of both football fields and the NCAA Tournament field was, in a lot of ways, simply a math problem to solve.
No one is concerned about the remainders around the rest of the country, either.
A few days spent in Nashville confirmed that the SEC, at any rate, is not shy about its preeminence. The league is, in fact, happy to scream about it at the top of its lungs.
The WiFi password for the league’s proprietary SEC tournament network was #MakingHistory!. The digital scroll on the Bridgestone Arena scorer’s table pounded attendees with superlatives.
BEST NON CONFERENCE WIN PERCENTAGE (89%) OF ANY CONFERENCE IN 4 DECADES
BEST REGULAR SEASON BY A CONFERENCE IN MORE THAN 40 YEARS
BEST CONFERENCE KENPOM RATING IN HISTORY
This while Auburn and Ole Miss kicked off the quarterfinals on Friday afternoon. Combined Final Four appearances: one.
Historic!
But, then, the numbers are what they are. The SEC began Saturday with four of the top six teams in the NCAA’s NET rankings. All four semifinalists had a path to a No. 1 seed; Auburn was basically locked into one, to the point that a semifinal loss to Tennessee didn’t matter. It led to people making statements previously thought to be absurd but totally in line with reality this spring.
“I’ll say it,” Volunteers coach Rick Barnes declared after his team’s taut victory over the Tigers on Saturday. “I’ll be disappointed if we don’t have 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament.”
And so it went.
But it’s a feature, not a glitch, that any number of tournament bids doesn’t guarantee a single thing.
One catch is one exceedingly college basketball place – Duke – standing in everyone’s way. What hilarious irony, that the school of Mike Krzyzewski and the Cameron Crazies and five national championships has to insist upon its clout and viability thanks to an ACC gone limp despite its own annexations of SMU, Cal and Stanford. That after a lifetime of everyone complaining about the Blue Devils, it’s maybe the Blue Devils with a tiny bone to pick with everyone.
Having a NET ranking of No. 1 as of Selection Sunday is very good. Being the only team in the country with a top 5 offense and defense, adjusted for competition level per KenPom.com, is very good. Having Cooper Flagg, an 18-year-old freshman who will be the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft and who invents awesome stuff to do on a game-to-game basis, is really good – assuming the ankle Flagg badly sprained during the ACC tournament doesn’t hinder his production over the next few weeks. (Duke, wisely, sat its first-year phenom for the last two games of that event.)
If for some reason you prefer your champions to come from schools where college hoops has forever meant more, you’re … rooting for Duke?
Have things changed that much?
Perhaps not. But they’ll keep changing.
This event will expand, maybe as soon as next year. And that expansion almost inevitably will create more bids for more conferences built like the aforementioned beefy trio. Those with power and control and money will make decisions to create more power and control and money. The charm of the NCAA Tournament stands no chance against the precedent of all of human history.
Still, it’s only an erosion of enchantment, not an erasure.
Because there is always a chance to make moments.
Yes, even the goliaths can create those. On Sunday, it was Florida grinding down Tennessee in front of a hostile and partisan crowd of 19,000-plus, winning its first league tournament title since 2014 and then dipping the whole endeavor in hot sauce. Guard Walter Clayton Jr. goaded on the throngs of Volunteers fans once the game was in hand. Forward Thomas Haugh waved goodbye with both hands, smirking. Forward Alex Condon went with the crybaby signal. Incensed Tennessee fans screamed that the Gators had no class. It’s the good stuff, and it usually only comes around once a year.
But people don’t come to just see the big schools do big moments. They come for Yale taking down Auburn. Or Jack Gohlke shooting Oakland past Kentucky. Or UMBC and Fairleigh Dickinson slaying top-seeded giants. Or Princeton and Dunk City and Saint Peter’s.
This year? The bracket features four teams from the rugged Mountain West conference, all of whom ranked in the top 52 of the NET as of Sunday. Drake — with a coach (Ben McCollum) and a star guard (Bennett Stirtz) who were in Division II this time last year — is good enough to catch no one off-guard. UC-San Diego features one of the best all-around players (Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones) and one of the best on-ball defenders (Hayden Gray) in the country. Conference champions such as Grand Canyon, Akron and UNC-Wilmington all compiled KenPom.com ratings better than multiple power-league teams.
Maybe there’s a universe where greed and hubris completely block the road and the carriage never gets to Cinderella, where the people with the most influence are happy to ignore a great thing when they see it.
But it won’t happen soon.
So there’s always a chance. In March, that part never changes.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos of Cooper Flagg, Walter Clayton Jr: Jared C. Tilton, James Gilbert / Getty Images)
