Jay Bilas: Winning the SEC Tournament will be harder than winning the national title

A whopping 13 SEC teams are currently projected to make the NCAA Tournament, potentially shattering the all-time record of schools within a single conference (11) getting in. As things stand today, 15 of 16 teams are in the top 68 of the NET (sorry, South Carolina), meaning almost everybody in the league could be deemed worthy of consideration to join the field. They’re not there for a participation trophy, either, as nine SEC teams sit inside the top 25 of the NET — plenty of legitimate contenders to hang some sort of banner in their respective venues.

What if I told you, though, stringing together anywhere between three and five wins in Nashville will be more difficult than six during March Madness? That’s how ESPN’s Jay Bilas views it.

“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,” Bilas said on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning.

There’s a give and take with that, though, as the absolute slugfest set inside Bridgestone Arena is going to take quite a bit out of everyone who succeeds and proceeds through the tournament. Winning in Nashville could put you at a disadvantage during March Madness with teams running on fumes.

On the flip side, you’ll be more physically prepared taking on, for lack of a better word, softer teams from weaker conferences in the NCAA Tournament. You’ll be tired, but you’ll also be used to going to war every night in the best league in basketball. Would you rather have fresh legs used to taking on cupcakes or tired legs but built for battle? There’s an argument for both.

“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. “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. 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.”

To put it simply, Bilas — who has been around the block a time or three — has never seen a conference this strong. Never played in one or against teams from others, never coached against it, never analyzed it from a media perspective.

“There’s never been a conference like this. So the SEC has put up numbers, both non-conference 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.”

There’s a reason Mark Pope had this to say about the league this year: “If you don’t get to play in the SEC this year, I feel sad for you because this is where you want to be. It’s where the best teams are and the best players are.”

It just means more.