SEC BASKETBALL

Proposal would end divisions

— Arkansas Coach Mike Anderson is glad he’s back in an SEC that appears will no longer have separate divisions for men’s basketball, beginning in the 2011-2012 season.

Anderson, the former Razorbacks assistant who returned to Arkansas as head coach in April, supports a proposal by conference basketball coaches to combine what have been two six-team divisions since the SEC expanded in 1991 and merge them into one 12-team race.

The proposal is expected to be approved by the SEC school presidents today when the conference’s annual spring meetings close in Destin, Fla.

With a 12-team race rather than divisions, SEC basketball will now mirror a format used by the Big 12, where Anderson coached at Missouri the previous five seasons.

“Divisional play has gone in cycles, and right now there’s a trend where the East is better than the West,” Anderson told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis. “In the Big 12, I thought it was good to have one big league instead of divisions because you had the best teams seeded at the top going into the conference tournament.

“That’s what you want for your league heading into postseason play.”

Ending divisional play became a hot topic in the SEC in recent years when the East Division basketball teams dominated regular-season play against the West, but West teams with worse conference records got first-round byes at the SEC Tournament by virtue of finishing first or second in the division.

Under the new proposal, the top four teams in the SEC will have first-round byes in the conference tournament.

The SEC West champions the past two seasons have missed the NCAA Tournament - Mississippi State in 2010 and Alabama in 2011 - and coaches believe the conference may be able to get more NCAA bids if divisions are eliminated.

The 16-game conference schedule won’t change for the 2010-2011 season - teams will continue to play opponents from their old division twice and those from the other division once - but the SEC may expand the schedule in the future.

There have been discussions of a 22-game SEC schedule with every team playing the other conference foes home-and-home, but that seems unlikely because too many nonconference home games would be lost. An 18-game SEC schedule also is being studied.

“We want to do a thorough due diligence moving forward on what is in the best interest of the league,” Ole Miss Coach Andy Kennedy said. “Everything is on the table.”

Kentucky Coach John Calipari said the key to changing the SEC’s basketball structure is making sure the conference gets more NCAA bids and higher seeds.

“We will do whatever we have to do that makes this league better,” Calipari said. “We just have to get eight teams in the [NCAA] discussion. And if all eight are in, we’ll be jumping for joy.”

The SEC is the only conference in the big six - along with the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pacific-10 - that has divisions for basketball.

“The one thing we’re trying to get away from is that it’s almost two different conferences,” Florida Coach Billy Donovan said. “There is an East and a West. As coaches, we felt like we needed to represent the conference as one.”

The Associated Press contributed information for this article.

Sports, Pages 17 on 06/03/2011