Is the 2024-25 SEC the greatest conference in modern history?
You may or may not like the answer
FYI: For whatever reason this isn’t showing up correctly via email. Who knows. I’d click onto the actual Substack link. -WW
They played the SEC/ACC Challenge this week and the SEC won it, 14-2. You may have heard about it, because people are freaking out about the fallout for the ACC, which currently has as many top 20 KenPom teams as the WCC. In looking for examples of this, I didn’t have to go far: here’s pieces from the Field of 68, Kevin Sweeney, ESPN, Mike DeCourcy, Matt Norlander. Here’s posts blaming the ACC’s woes on NIL, people laughing at the ACC’s propaganda ads, etc. The one thing I didn’t find was someone blaming Woke for the ACC’s woes.
Lost in this, save for some, is awe and admiration of how ridiculous the SEC appears to be. Here’s how the conference looks as of 7:51 PM on a Thursday evening:
This is a 16-team conference where every single team is inside the top-70 nationally. This is a thing that has happened just five times before (Big 12 3x, Big Ten once, ACC once), but the most teams any of those conferences bore at their collective highs were 11 teams, not 16. For a conference to have 16 teams and for all 16 to at least be NIT quality is unheard of. We’ve also never seen a conference where 12 or 13 teams, depending on where you’d make an at-large cutoff, play like Tournament-level teams.
The better measurement would be the average conference strength, which KenPom helpfully has tracked from 1997 to now using the average Net Rating of a team in a given conference. The 2024-25 SEC, at least a month in, is tracking to be the third-best conference of the last 30 or so years.
But these are season-long numbers, and while I’m uncertain of how these wax or wane over the course of a given year, it’s perhaps most informative to look at a conference’s first-month performance. Bart Torvik has numbers for these dating back to 2008, and, well:
By pretty much any measure you can choose to look at, the 2024-25 edition of the SEC is tracking towards being one of the greatest collections of basketball talent ever seen. It might be the best in 20 years, if not further back. If you’re my age (31) and you can remember a time where the SEC regularly sent three of their 12 or 14 teams to the NCAA Tournament, barely, this is a pretty stunning development. Even more so when the two newest additions, Texas and Oklahoma, are both trending as bottom-half SEC teams.
So: could anyone have really seen this coming? In some sense, yes, considering the SEC has risen fairly steadily over the last few years from being firmly planted among the 4th-6th best conferences into a 2nd-place finish in 2021-22. Still, just last year, 8 bids and a Final Four participant overshadowed a conference that finished fourth-best nationally and had three teams finish outside the KenPom top 100. But: in the portal era, this conference did get more powerful than you might’ve guessed.
A look at the preseason top 70 at KenPom would’ve sold this to some extent. Ken’s numbers had the SEC as the best conference in the sport, with 15 of the conference’s 16 teams inside the top 70 of his rankings. Considering last year’s had 12 of 14, this might’ve been seen as a little hasty, as the conference saw five teams finish below that rank. So far this year, though, they’ve made it look like a very wise projection.
Rare is it that so many teams overachieve at once, too, but through the first month, three of the nation’s top ten preseason overachievers all come from the same conference. As someone who has spent far too much time flipping through these archives: this almost never happens.
My other favorite factor for explaining these overachievers: this conference is old. Of the 79 high-major teams in the sport this year, the SEC has the three oldest rosters (Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Auburn) and five of the eight oldest. On the other side of things, they’ve only got two of the 15 youngest rosters (Georgia and Arkansas). Talent still matters, of course, but having older-than-ever rosters heavily built upon portal talent has helped close the gap in a way standard recruiting hasn’t. It’s the oldest Power Five conference, closer to the SWAC and MEAC than the actual high-majors.
There are other fun stats to showcase the dominance. As such:
The lowest offensive TO% in basketball at 15.6%.
The highest OREB% in basketball at 34.6%, and therefore, the highest offensive Shot Volume at an astonishing 119.
A combined +9.5 TO/OREB margin per 100 possessions, bested only by the Big 12 thus far.
#1 in eFG%, both offensive and defensive.
#1 in 2PT% by 2.8%, with a greater difference from #1 to #2 than from #2 to #10.
Only #2 in 2PT% defense and #5 in 3PT%.
The lowest Assist% allowed in the country at 46.2%.
The actual on-court results have been unreal, too, but those are things you knew already. The SEC is collectively 38-17 against top-100 competition, an insane thing to say given that NO OTHER CONFERENCE IN THE NATION is above .500. Think about that for a second! The second-best record in the nation, by win percentage, is the Big East’s 16-16. They’re outshooting these teams from two by 3.7%, a full 2.8% ahead of anyone else.
The other key factor here is probably pretty simple: better coaches. In 2015, Kentucky was the only nationally-relevant program in the conference. No one else even finished inside that year’s KenPom top 25. The best coaches that weren’t John Calipari were a leaving-for-NBA Billy Donovan, Year Zero Bruce Pearl, and either Andy Kennedy or Mike Anderson. They were pretty rough times. Now, the SEC’s coaching list is so stacked that Chris Jans - a really, really good coach - may be the seventh or eighth-best coach in terms of track record in his own conference.
I think the point is pretty clear: this is a very good conference, one tracking for a historic status the likes of which we perhaps haven’t seen before based on one tremendous month of performances. But: I had to ask the question, because it should be the question on everyone’s mind. Can the SEC sustain this incredible month of play for three, or even four, more months?
The answer: maybe. Based on the above charting, the previous five best conferences all fell from their first-month BARTHAG (which is Bart Torvik’s version of a Net Rating, more or less explained as what percentage of teams an average team would beat) to their rest-of-season. If the SEC does the same, they’ll go from the best conference on record to…well, probably still the best conference on record, at least in Torvik’s 18-season database. They just might not be as perfect-looking.
There are other plausible-enough signs of regression that may hit. SEC opponents are shooting 30% from three, the lowest rate in the nation. Last year’s lowest rates allowed over a full season were 31.6% and 32.7%. The conference’s gigantic +10% eFG% delta would be almost 7% higher than anyone else in the post-COVID era. Conference play tightens some of this up for obvious reasons, but the SEC has been extremely good and probably a little lucky to be as extremely good as they’ve shown.
Whatever may come of it is a fascinating thing. This is a conference built entirely on football, one who realigned to get more football championships and more football money, yet inarguably has a much more interesting basketball conference than a football one right now. (Also, the Big Ten has a better TV contract. Not important to the story, just funny.) Who would’ve thought? Certainly not anyone watching SEC basketball 10 years ago.