Paul Finebaum warns SEC of letdown in the NCAA Tournament

With arguably the best year of basketball coming to a close in the Southeastern Conference, Paul Finebaum feels the league now has to justify it with a national title for someone.

Finebaum spoke about the SEC Tournament coming up in two weeks while on ‘McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning’ on Monday. That event will be the biggest of any conference tournament in the sport that weekend, and maybe the biggest in league history, but it also could set up disappointment for the other bracket later in March.

“Yeah, I mean, I think there is going to be unbelievable expectations and, with unbelievable expectations, often we can be led to a possible letdown,” Finebaum said.

That doesn’t have much of anything to do with how many teams expect to be in the 2025 NCAA Tournament from the SEC. The conference tied their record for berths for the second straight year and the third time in the past seven seasons with eight selections in the field in 2024 as well as 2023 and 2018. They’ll now far surpass that number this season with a chance, depending on the bubble over the next three weeks, at a total that could tie or break the record of 11 teams, held by the Big East from 2011, in the history of March Madness.

“Oh, I think anywhere above ten or eleven, I think, would be considered a tremendous success considering we’re in record territory right there,” Finebaum said. “I remember years where seven or eight was considered unbelievable because I believe it was about ten years ago or maybe eleven when the SEC only had three. That’s when everybody went into meltdown mode in downtown Birmingham. But, I mean, there’s no way that’s not going to happen.”

“I think, really, now, it’s just a matter of how many can squeeze in,” continued Finebaum. “Every weekend, you get another contender with Arkansas pulling off a win and somebody else. There’s so many teams on that bubble. Unfortunately, the schedule is going to cannibalize some and the SEC Tournament probably could help one or two of those but it also can kill them off, I mean, because the competition is going to be relentless in Nashville.”

However, postseason success is what Finebaum is talking about. For example, of the eight teams that made it last season from the SEC, five lost their first game and six were out in the first weekend with Tennessee making it to the Elite Eight and Alabama reaching their first-ever trip to the Final Four. The Tide are the only team from the conference to even reach the Final Four since 2020 despite the league’s overall improvement.

That’s why 2025 is so important now for the SEC. Assuming double-digit berths for them as a conference with several projected to be very much in contention, Finebaum says it’d be disappointing to see none of them win it all, let alone not make it to the Final Four. Those are the expectations, though, for a league that has continued to improve over the past decade or so.

“I almost feel like that, if the SEC does not win the national championship this year in college basketball, it is going to be considered a disappointment. Nowhere other than perhaps 2015 could you ever make that statement when the University of Kentucky was undefeated and trying to go wire-to-wire. But that’s how great this league is,” said Finebaum. “I think it’s good. I think, instead of in many year’s past hoping to get three teams or four in the NCAA Tournament – maybe one from Alabama if we were lucky, possibly a Final Four team with Kentucky or, in recent years, we’ve seen Alabama and Auburn? But, I mean, we’ve never been at this precipice before and, quite frankly, nobody ever has.”

The SEC Tournament is going to be the first look, in the context of the postseason, at several teams who fully expect to be in contention in the second weekend, if not the third with a chance to win a national title, in the NCAA Tournament. That’s what they’ll be playing for in hopes of one of them being a champion in San Antonio.

“I don’t want to say it’s national championship or bust but it is about time that the SEC won a national championship in college basketball considering it hasn’t happened in twelve years,” Finebaum said.