College Basketball Bubble Watch By Eamonn Brennan | ESPN.com Email



How much has the SEC really improved its profile?

Last March, just two days after Selection Sunday, the SEC announced a new hire: Mike Tranghese, former Big East commissioner, would now be a special adviser to the commissioner for men's basketball. The move, SEC head Greg Sankey said, was the effort of a conference that sought "continuing improvement in the national competitive success of our men's basketball programs ... as we accelerate our men's basketball enhancement efforts."

The timing wasn't a coincidence. Earlier that week, the SEC had received just three bids to the NCAA tournament: Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Vanderbilt (the latter of which barely snuck in, went to Dayton for the First Four, and was promptly drilled by Wichita State). This was an embarrassing showing for a conference of the SEC's massive resources. Worse, it continued a trend: The Big 12, Big Ten, ACC, and Pac 12 had racked up an average of 16 combined at-large bids apiece over the previous three seasons. The SEC had eight. A reclamation project was clearly in order.

Did it work?

With three weeks until Selection Sunday, the answer is a resounding "maybe." As of now, the SEC is guaranteed at least two bids (Florida and Kentucky, take a bow). A third, to South Carolina, looks more likely than not. Arkansas -- a good offensive team that doesn't guard, whose best nonconference win came at home over UT Arlington, and has thus completely flown under the radar -- is in decent position to grab a fourth.

A fifth will depend on if Tennessee -- the second team out in Joe Lunardi's current bracket -- can make its own push down the stretch. Alabama and Vanderbilt aren't hopeless, but they're long shots. Five looks like the maxinum number.

In that sense, the answer is yes. If Tranghese's results are measured by bids alone, then, sure, an uptick from three to four (or five) would be a success.

Then again? That one-bid increase could just as easily be attributed to the glorious return of Florida, under second-year coach Mike White, from the NIT to the national elite. In the end, it may result from the generous 2017 landscape, where mid-majors (as well as tweener leagues like the Mountain West, A-10, and American) have opened the bubble door to mediocre high-major teams.

For what it's worth, the SEC's desire to systemically improve its at-large performance didn't begin last March. In 2012, then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive hired former NCAA vice president of basketball operations Greg Shaheen -- who spent 12 years staffing, managing and organizing the NCAA tournament, and specifically the selection committee -- to consult with the league's coaches on how best to optimize their nonconference schedules. Some coaches blanched at the idea of submitting their fiefdoms to centralized oversight, but by last season, SEC teams were playing fewer RPI-deflating cupcakes in November and December than any league not named the Pac-12.

Yet intelligent, collaborative scheduling only goes so far. Only one team in the current SEC, Arkansas, enjoys a genuinely favorable gap between its RPI rank (low-30s) and what performance based metrics like KenPom.com and BPI (low 50s) make of it.

The RPI might be easy to trick. But it can only aid around the margins. Until bubble teams in the middle of the conference do something much harder -- win games against good teams -- it, too, will remain skeptical. And the 2016-17 SEC will look a lot like a league with good teams in Lexington and Gainesville, one or two more potential bids, and not a whole lot else.

In other words, it will look like the SEC.