Even as the conference conquered the gridiron over the last two decades, its basketball teams resembled a bunch of tackling dummies. They did next to nothing and were easy to take down.

The low point for SEC basketball came in 2016, when just three of the conference’s 14 teams qualified for the NCAA tournament. Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, describes it as “one of the more miserable days” of his professional career.

“We had only three of our teams selected,” he says. “One of those teams was assigned to the first round in Dayton—and lost.”

Yet nearly a decade later, the country’s foremost football conference is in danger of being recast as a basketball league. For the second straight year, the SEC was forced to watch college football’s national championship from home. At the same time, Selection Sunday is shaping up to be one of the best in SEC history, with as many as 14 teams slated to earn bids to the NCAA tournament—the most by any single conference in March Madness history.

And this isn’t simply a case of a handful of SEC teams sneaking into the Big Dance to make up the numbers. Rather, several of the conference’s teams appear to have a legitimate shot at cutting down the nets in San Antonio next month. The SEC boasts four of the top six teams in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings—Auburn, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama.

Alabama’s Chris Youngblood dribbles past Florida’s Alex Condon. Photo: steve roberts/Reuters

“This is the best league in the history of college basketball,” South Carolina coach Lamont Paris said, “by any metric you would like to choose, including your eyeballs.”

How the SEC went from basketball backwater to March Madness mainstay isn’t hard to understand. The league simply copied what was working in one sport and applied it to another.

The only surprising thing is that the blueprint wasn’t the conference’s all-powerful football teams, but a sport with a slightly lower profile.

“I want you to perform like our softball teams do,” Sankey told the SEC basketball coaches at a leaguewide meeting in 2017.

His message was greeted by stunned silence. When he explained that he wanted them to replicate college softball’s 2017 postseason, in which all 13 SEC teams were invited to compete in the NCAA championship, the confused looks turned to awkward laughter.

“I told them you’re right to laugh,” Sankey said. “If you go back 10 years in softball and somebody said the same thing to our softball coaches, they would have laughed too.”

As far as Sankey was concerned, it started with a mindset shift. That process began when Sankey hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese to serve as a basketball adviser. Veteran coach Dan Leibovitz was also hired to facilitate relationships with SEC coaches.

“I remember telling the athletic directors and the coaches, ‘What do you think you’re missing?’ People just looked at me,” Tranghese said. “I couldn’t understand why they weren’t better.”

What Tranghese soon came to understand was that the conference’s pigskin-worshipping reputation was part of the problem. Basketball coaches were frustrated with playing second fiddle to football. Tranghese encouraged them to use it to their advantage. “I’d argue that being good at football can only help you in basketball,” he said.

Tennessee coach Rick Barnes, who arrived in the SEC in 2015 after 17 seasons at Texas, agreed. “If you’re at Texas and you don’t use football to help you recruit basketball,” he told Tranghese, “you’re out of your mind.”

That practice is now commonplace—Alabama coach Nate Oats even brought Nick Saban in to speak to his team before the Sweet 16 in 2023 and again last year.

The standard of coaching also needed to improve. Athletic directors were making bad hires and cycling through coaches like gym socks. So Tranghese inserted himself into the hiring process, suggesting candidates from beyond the SEC’s traditional geographic footprint.

Texas guard Tre Johnson shoots the ball while defended by Henry Coleman III of Texas A&M. Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Alabama hired Oats, a former high school math teacher who had only coached at Buffalo. Since 2019, he’s taken the Crimson Tide to two Elite Eights and the 2024 Final Four. When Florida had a vacancy in 2022, it was filled by San Francisco coach Todd Golden. The Gators look set to earn a No. 1 seed for the first time since 2014.

“If you don’t hire good coaches, you ain’t winning,” Tranghese says.

Once they had hired good coaches, the schools also needed to keep them. That meant paying up once they started winning.

By and large, the conference has done just that: SEC basketball coaches earned 14.4% more than the national average in 2024, according to data from USA Today.

Before long, the sideline wasn’t the only place where the SEC’s deep pockets could make a difference. When the sport was turned upside down in 2021 by an NCAA ruling that permitted athletes to make money from endorsements, the SEC was well positioned to capitalize.

If SEC schools had once struggled to convince McDonald’s All Americans to sign with them on the strength of their coaches and facilities alone, now they could tap in to the largess of their rabid alumni bases by offering them lucrative deals.

“The SEC is going to win most of those battles,” Tranghese said.

As much progress as SEC hoops have made this decade, a national championship has remained frustratingly out of reach—for now. Winning March Madness takes a healthy dose of luck. But Sankey has no doubt that his teams finally have everything else it takes.

“Everyone is talking about the beast of a league we have,” Sankey said.