SEC hoops coming of age

• By PERRYN KEYS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jun 30, 2009 - Page: 1C

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Only three men’s basketball teams in the NCAA tournament.

Only two teams with an RPI in the top 50.

None in the Sweet 16.

Did the Southeastern Conference get a bum rap last season? And did those teams get a bad draw because of the bum rap?

“That was totally blown out of proportion last year,” Mississippi State coach Rick Stansbury said. “LSU and Tennessee (were) just as good as anybody last year. ... The SEC’s always going to be one of the top leagues in the country.”

Or was the bad rap, in reality, a fair assessment of the SEC in a down year?

“It was fair. It was accurate,” Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl said. “The league was young.”

Not anymore.

Thanks to graduation, the NBA draft, attrition and injuries, most SEC teams found themselves young and green last season (except for LSU, which won the conference title with the help of five seniors).

The overall result: No teams in the Sweet 16, and no lottery picks in the NBA draft.

Only three SEC players — Florida’s Nick Calathes, Kentucky’s Jodie Meeks and LSU’s Marcus Thornton — were taken in last week’s draft at all. All three players lasted into the second round.

But the very things that slowed down the SEC last season — namely, youth and naiveté — should, in theory, vault the league back toward the top of the charts (in eight of the last 10 years, the conference has sent at least five teams to the NCAA tournament).

As many of the SEC’s coaches noted during a summer teleconference Monday, most of those young players from last year decided to stay in college.