Darn near the entire conference. The SEC will comprise 20% of the entire field of 64.
If someone told you before the start of the season that the SEC would send 13 of its 16 teams to the NCAAT, how confident would you have been that we would be one of those teams?
Anybody that paid attention would’ve known we likely weren’t going to be in the top 13. Fans are always optimistic, but heading into the season the conference was loaded and we lost a ton off of last year’s team.
Entering conference play “the experts” predicted we’d do well to win 4-6 games. We didn’t do well obviously. This team didn’t have the players to be successful this season. Have to recruit better. And many will point out we were in a lot of close games, but that’s when the cream rises to the top and our worst basketball was always played when the game was on the line.
No way around it, the season was a failure. Did the strength of the conference contribute to it? Sure. Could we have been a bubble team in another conference? Possibly. But we don’t play in those other conferences and the real bottom line is if we want to win championships, we have to build a better team anyway.
Not sure where to go from here. This program is historically pitiful. If not for one magical run in 2017 it would probably be the worst major basketball program in the country over the past 20-25 years. It continues to amaze me how bad we’ve been. Paris has to win next season. Hoping our new AD is able to hire a good coach. We should’ve hired Bob Richey from Furman…he’s the one that has built a consistent winner. Paris just had a good run over 2-3 weeks.