Greg Sankey and Ben Howland received new jobs within two weeks of each other in March 2015.
On March 12, Sankey was named the next Southeastern Conference commissioner after 13 years working for the SEC. On March 24, Howland was hired as Mississippi State’s head men’s basketball coach.
Almost seven years later, both men remain in their positions. And for Howland, Sankey’s presence at the head of the country’s foremost college sports conference has been crucial to the growth of SEC basketball.
“The people they’ve hired to run the league have been excellent, but it starts with the commissioner,” Howland said Monday.
The man Howland called “Coach Sankey” for his long-ago experience coaching basketball in upstate New York has emphasized the sport in a league where another sport quite obviously springs to mind.
“Of course football is always going to be king in the SEC, but they’ve emphasized men’s basketball a lot more since his reign here as our commissioner,” Howland said.
This season, SEC men’s basketball is in as good a shape as it has ever been. The conference boasts eight teams in the top 50 of the KenPom rankings. Seven SEC schools are projected by ESPN’s Joe Lunardi to make the NCAA tournament, including No. 1 overall seed Auburn. The SEC came out on top in last week’s Big 12/SEC Challenge, too.
“Based on the 6-4 win, we’re the best conference in the country, and I think that will actually prove out in the tournament,” Howland said.
Waxed by No. 14 Texas Tech on Saturday in Lubbock, Mississippi State wasn’t part of that victory but has still contributed to the league’s success this season. The Bulldogs are 13-7 overall and 4-3 in conference play, No. 46 in KenPom and just outside the tournament field with plenty of games to play.
Rising to the top
MSU is just one of the SEC programs that have made strides over recent years, particularly with Sankey in charge. MSU finished toward the bottom of the conference in Howland’s first two seasons but improved since then, making the NCAA tournament as a No. 5 seed in 2019 and being in contention for the event the next year before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the season to a premature halt.
Eight of the conference’s 14 teams have a better KenPom ranking than they did in the 2015-16 season. The SEC’s average team ranking has improved nearly 12 spots since then.
Additionally, more and more teams from the league are cracking the top 50. The league is up from four in Howland’s and Sankey’s first season to eight this year, a mark the SEC has never reached in KenPom data going back to the 2001-02 season. (The league expanded from 12 to 14 teams in 2012-13.)
“Our league is really good — and especially at the top when you look at some of these teams that are capable of making deep runs,” Howland said.
Making a mark in March
No conference has more projected NCAA tournament teams than the SEC, with the Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East all tied with Sankey’s conference at seven apiece. The ACC, West Coast Conference and Mountain West Conference each have four schools slated to get into the 68-team field.
If current results hold, it would be a continuation of a recent trend seeing the SEC better represented in March.
In the three seasons before Howland took over at Mississippi State, the league got just 11 teams into the NCAA tournament — three in 2013, three in 2014 and five in 2015.
While postseason berths vary from year to year, the SEC is on an unmistakable upward trend. After three bids again in 2016, the league has never sent fewer than five teams to the tournament. Eight SEC teams made the 2018 field, seven went in 2019, and six qualified for the 2021 event.
Kentucky held things down with Final Four appearances in 2012, 2014 and 2015, but new teams are getting deep into March Madness. South Carolina reached the Final Four in 2017, and Auburn did the same in 2019.
Hiring smart
Another reason for the SEC’s success, Howland said, has to do with who’s standing on the sidelines.
Howland himself won plenty of games between Pittsburgh and UCLA before being fired by the Bruins after the 2012-13 season, including a Pac-12 regular-season title that year.
He’s one of several SEC coaches who came to the conference with plenty of wins and plenty of experience at established programs. Seven of the league’s 14 head coaches, including Howland, last coached at another Power Five program; Arkansas’ Eric Musselman and Alabama’s Nate Oats are among those who found success at mid-majors, namely Nevada and Buffalo.
“I knew that there was a real push to improve men’s basketball from the conference level pushing all the way through in the hiring of a lot of experienced and distinguished coaches who had won big at other places before coming to the league,” Howland said.
It’s not just coaching hires that have helped the SEC succeed. Howland pointed to the hires of conference staffers like Mike Tranghese, the Big East commissioner when Howland was at Pittsburgh. In 2016, Sankey hired Tranghese as a consultant on men’s basketball.
And ever since, the sport has continued to grow in the SEC. Howland thinks that will continue.
“The league has steadily improved each and every year,” Howland said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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