Jay Bilas calls back to Big Ten to warn SEC about underperforming in March Madness

The SEC might have broken a record for the most NCAA Tournament bids, but Jay Bilas knows a conference isn’t judged simply by making the tournament. Having covered college basketball for ESPN for 30 years and played the game himself at Duke, Bilas is plenty familiar with how quickly perceptions can change in March Madness.

Speaking on The Paul Finebaum Show on Monday, he recalled the 2022 tournament when the Big Ten got nine teams in. But by the time the Sweet Sixteen came around, only two remained. No schools from the conference ended up making the Elite Eight that year as Purdue lost to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in the Elite Eight. The Big Ten also had nine teams in the year prior in 2021, including two No. 1 seeds, but didn’t get a single team in the Final Four.

Bilas still believes the SEC proved itself as the best league in the country and believes it will succeed in the tournament. However, he also knows there’s going to be plenty of people saying “I told you so” if it doesn’t.

“I think the strength and the numbers probably indicates that the league is gonna do well, but not every one of the 14 teams is gonna win,” he said. “That’s just the nature of the tournament. There’s a random nature of it where you may not be playing well, you may have an injury here against a hot team. You’re gonna get clipped. That’s OK. What you don’t want to have happen is what happened to the Big Ten a few years ago.

“The Big Ten, they were recognized as the best conference in the country. They went into the tournament and basically all their teams kind of laid an egg and underperformed their seed significantly. What that did was allow outsiders to say, ‘See? You weren’t that good’ and to sort of degenerate the strength of the league during the regular season. I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think those two things are necessarily the same thing. But it’s certainly the way people look at it. You’ll have competitors that will come after you.”

Of the 14 teams from the SEC to make the NCAA Tournament, six of them were seeded anywhere from the 1-4 line. Not only that, but every team from the conference ranked inside the top 100 of both the NET Rankings and KenPom.

That’s certainly a recipe for big representation in the later rounds of the tournament, but there’s always a Cinderella or two that sneaks its way in. It’s called March Madness for a reason and if the SEC falls victim to one of those teams, it likely won’t hear the end of it from fans of other conferences as Jay Bilas said.

The success of this season also comes with the SEC adding two new teams to the league this year in Oklahoma and Texas, both of which made the tournament. The Longhorns are part of the “First Four” and will face Xavier on Wednesday to make it in the Round of 64 as an 11 seed.

That will begin the conference’s quest to back up the numbers from the regular season, but it’ll just be getting started. The real action begins Thursday when first round matchups are set to tip off.