Jay Bilas: SEC Tournament will be more difficult than NCAA Tournament

The SEC has dominated college basketball so far this season and has proven time and time again that it has the best league in the sport. ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas believes that the SEC is so good that it will be harder to win the SEC Tournament than the NCAA Tournament this year.

Bilas explained his reasoning Monday morning when speaking on the McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning show.

“Winning the SEC Tournament is going to be harder than winning the national championship, because you’re doing it day after day after day and all of that stuff, and playing better teams throughout the course of it than you would play in the course of the NCAA Tournament,” Jay Bilas said.

He added that because of the gauntlet that you will have to go through to win the SEC Tournament, whichever team does win it could be at a disadvantage as the NCAA Tournament begins.

“The one concern I’d have in the SEC, there’s two things — if you win the SEC Tournament, how much gas are you going to have left in the tank after that?” Bilas said.

His other concern is that SEC teams will have to adjust to different types of officiating once the NCAA Tournament begins. Bilas has watched numerous SEC games this year and said that officials are letting teams be more physical in that league than in other conferences around the country.

“The other thing is the SEC has been officiated as football this year. Some of those games are football games. … And that’s not going to be the same whistle they get in the NCAA Tournament,” Jay Bilas said. “But I tend to think that the gauntlet they’re going through is going to make them tougher than some of the other conferences are going to be when they get to the tournament.”

The SEC has 10 teams ranked in the latest AP Top 25 Poll, led by Auburn at No. 1. The league also won the SEC/ACC Challenge 14-2 earlier this season. Bilas believes that the conference is having a historically good year.

“There’s never been a conference like this. So the SEC has put up numbers, both nonconference and up to now, that haven’t been matched in close to 40 years,” Bilas said. “And the last time any conference put up numbers like this, as far as success against the rest of the country, was when I was playing in the ACC in 1984. You know, Michael Jordan was at North Carolina, Len Bias was at Maryland, and that was the dominant conference.

“But the difference is that the ACC was eight teams. The SEC’s doing this with 16. … It’s hard to have 16 teams this good. I’ve never seen anything like it.”