As frustration continues to mount over the football-centric SEC West lagging behind the East on the basketball floor, Florida's Billy Donovan floated an unconventional proposal Tuesday to address complaints.
Donovan suggested the SEC tournament be seeded 1 to 12 by the team's season-ending RPI rather than by how each finishes in their respective divisions. He argued such a format would reward teams who played challenging non-league schedules and penalize those who didn't.
The debate over the fairness of the SEC tournament's current format comes in the wake of two years in which the lack of balance between the East and West has been striking.
Teams from the East went 27-9 against the West in the 2009-10 regular season, yet Ole Miss and Mississippi State received two of the four first-round conference tournament byes for finishing first and second in the West at 9-7. This past season, all five of the SEC's NCAA tournament bids came from the East and the West was so weak that Alabama didn't make it despite finishing 12-4 in conference play.
It's possible the imbalance may diminish in the future with Alabama and perhaps Arkansas on the upswing and Tennessee headed for a rough patch, but the East still looks like it will be more formidable next season. The SEC's three highest ranked teams in the preseason will likely be East division powers Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Florida, though West favorite Alabama may also merit some votes.
The push for change is strong enough that the SEC will surely consider all proposals, but Donovan's idea of seeding based on the RPI also has some inherent flaws too.
First of all, the RPI is a somewhat flawed metric because it doesn't take into account margin of victory the way other computerized rankings systems do. Secondly, using the RPI would invite scenarios where teams could be seeded behind an opponent they beat in the regular season and finished ahead of in the conference standings.
The most obvious solution would be scrapping the two-division format for men's basketball and seeding teams one through 12 based on conference record rather than by finish in a respective division.
There's a reason the other 12-team conferences have adopted that format. It's not perfect but it's the most fair.
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