SEC can blame itself for basketball slide

In retrospect, after looking at the body of work, the SEC should feel ashamed, not jilted.

Getting only three teams in the NCAA Tournament and seeing the slow decline of basketball in the finest football conference in all the country falls at the feet of two groups.

There is absolutely no excuse for the SEC to have fallen so far that it gets two fewer teams than the Atlantic 10 and Mountain West conferences.

The first finger of blame has to be pointed at the coaches.

Sure, all of them said the SEC deserved more teams.

Have you ever heard a coach say his conference received too many? No. And you won’t.

For the sake of argument,we’ll throw Florida out of this discussion because it is a No. 3 seed. Billy Donovan has won two national championships and is almost always near the top of the SEC.

Kentucky’s John Calipari is beyond reproach as a coach, too, although the method to his madness - recruiting one-and-dones - blew up in his face this season.

Kevin Stallings at Vanderbilt shouldn’t be in this discussion. He’s made his mark.

The jury is out on Texas A&M’s Billy Kennedy, who is struggling with an illness, and LSU’s Johnny Jones, although Jones came from North Texas and the past few coaches who jumped from the Sun Belt Conference to the SEC were canned.

Missouri and Ole Miss get a pass too, but the Tigers were one of the most underachieving teams in the SEC this season, and the Rebels got in by winning the SEC Tournament and still ended up as a No. 12 seed.

It is hard to throw Mike Anderson under this bus because he took over a squad that wasn’t any more ready for the rigors of his Fastest 40 Minutes in Basketball than the team Nolan Richardson inherited for his 40 Minutes of Hell.

The rest of the coaches need to sit up and smell the March Madness coffee and start recruiting better players.

Or perhaps the real blame falls on the second group, the SEC athletic directors.

Understand, the SEC has done everything possible to help the basketball coaches in the league. A big-time contract with ESPN gives the league exposure two or three nights a week, all day Saturday and sometimes Sunday.

Yet the league has slipped, and maybe some of that has to do with how many coaches have been fired in the SEC.

Of the 14, only three have been at their current school five years or longer.

Six have been there two years or less.

You have to wonder whether some of the coaches had ever heard the term “y’all” before getting big bucks to move to the true South. The point being, they had no recruiting contacts when they arrived at their SEC school.

Last season, the Big East Conference had 13 starters from SEC territory.

So the question is: Have the athletic directors hired the right guys?

Were they too determined to fish in the very shallow pool of established head coaches and not look at some up-and-coming top assistants, which is what is happening more and more every day in college football.

Cuonzo Martin may be the greatest thing to happen to Tennessee since the song Rocky Top was penned, but that team definitely underachieved this season, and Athletic Director Dave Hart took over messes that included Bruce Pearl, Lane Kiffin and Derek Dooley.

Trent Johnson, a West Coast guy who should have never been hired, bailed out of LSU for TCU.

Rick Stansbury took a hasty, surprising and tearfilled retirement and Mississippi State hired unproven Rick Ray.

The big picture is SEC basketball has had too much turnover, and some of the guys who have been hired to head up programs can’t say y’all.