Bruce Pearl on SEC: ‘We’re the best conference in America, and whoever’s second is a long shot’
The 2022-23 school year was a strong one for the SEC. Eight teams won national titles, headlined by Georgia in football and LSU in women’s basketball and baseball, while Alabama came in as the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Those numbers, according to Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl, are what make the SEC the top conference in the country — and he said it’s not close.
“We’re the best conference in America, and whoever is second is second by a long shot,” Pearl said at SEC men’s basketball media day. “I’m talking about men and women’s sports, I’m talking about all sports. Just look at the championships.”
The SEC had an impressive year from a men’s basketball standpoint. The league saw eight teams make the NCAA Tournament and six teams finish in the top 40 of the final KenPom rankings.
As a conference, the SEC ranked No. 4 in the nation, according to KenPom, after ranking No. 2 in 2021-22. Dating back to 2016, the conference has been in the top five six times, and that year is when Bruce Pearl said things started to change.
Former Charlotte Bobcats assistant coach Dan Leibovitz joined the league as an associate commissioner starting in 2016 and remained in the role until this past season, when he left for the Big East. By creating that position — which was just a couple years after the SEC Network went on the air — Pearl said the SEC was starting to invest more in basketball, and it’s paying off.
“In men’s basketball, it just hadn’t evolved that way. And they really made a commitment to it,” Pearl said. “Great coaches, better facilities, we’re recruiting better players. We got a commissioner now of basketball, when Dan came in, now Garth [Glissman] is here. We hired people that were involved in the Big East. Mike Tranghese was an adviser for a while. We would get advisors on officiating from NBA officials.
“In other words, the league went ahead and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to figure this out.’ So they brought in really good administrators to help Commissioner Sankey figure out how do you schedule, what tournaments do we need to play in, what do we need to do to elevate our brand? They’ve done it. And the SEC Network. The SEC Network also kind of came in about the same time that basketball started to improve. I think there’s a direct correlation to our contract with ABC, ESPN and the SEC Network.”
The SEC is going to get even better next year. Oklahoma and Texas are set to join the conference next year. The Longhorns are a major addition after making a run to the Elite Eight last year, while Oklahoma ranked No. 54 in KenPom.
On3’s James Fletcher III contributed to this report.