FAYETTEVILLE -- To a point, the SEC craves to improve its men's basketball and is taking an administrative step in that direction.
The conference now has a Special Advisor to the Commissioner for men's basketball.
The hiring of Mike Tranghese was announced by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey two days after the NCAA included only SEC co-champions Kentucky and Texas A&M plus Vanderbilt in its Tournament field on the March 13 Selection Sunday.
Tranghese is a former commissioner of the formerly basketball powerful Big East.
"We are not meeting our own expectations," Sankey said of present day SEC basketball.
And that was before Vanderbilt lost its play-in game by 20 while Kentucky went two and through. Texas A&M, eliminated last Thursday by Oklahoma, was the SEC's lone team in the Sweet Sixteen.
The SEC wants better basketball than that, as long as the basketball boosting doesn't detract one iota from football.
Even with a league boasting perennial basketball blueblood Kentucky and Florida's two national championships in 2006 and 2007 and Arkansas' Nolan Richardson coached three Final Fours with one national championship in the 1990s and some great Vanderbilt, Tennessee, LSU and Mississippi State teams past, the SEC always is football first. It always will be other than Kentucky.
That's not just because football reigns the athletic king in the South with the SEC customarily king of college football.
For big-time conference viability, football is the economic essential.
Despite basketball excellence, the post Tranghese Big East crumbled as its football fell.
Look at the Big 12, now regarded a better basketball than football league. Nobody in the SEC is so maddened by March madness to wish they could trade places with the Big 12. Not even with six Big 12 teams included in basketball's Big Dance.
Take Kansas, the Big 12's basketball blueblood along the lines of Kentucky, UCLA, North Carolina or Duke.
During years of what-if discussions should the dysfunctional Big 12 fold, Kansas, the basketball beacon but football flop, and Iowa State, traditionally with good basketball but losing football, inevitably were conjectured the orphans not apt to be adopted by a power conference.
Meanwhile football stronger Texas A&M and Missouri bolted the Big 12 to the SEC after Nebraska's flight to the Big Ten and Colorado joining the now Pac 12.
The good basketball news for the SEC is strong football and strong basketball don't have to be mutually exclusive. Florida certainly proved it with its same academic year national football and basketball championships under Urban Meyer and Billy Donovan. Arkansas was among the mutually football-basketball national elite during the Lou Holtz and Eddie Sutton Southwest Conference peaks from 1977-79.
Hired by Athletic Director-Football Coach Frank Broyles back in 1974 to make dormant Arkansas basketball first-class, Sutton asserted the program couldn't be first class until treated and promoted first class.
That's Tranghese's mission conference wide. Somehow promote SEC basketball as first class even with football filling most of the first-class seats.
Sports on 03/28/2016