Only four games to go for every team in the Southeastern Conference.
Greetings, BBN!
It was an action-packed Saturday in the SEC, feeling like a football weekend in September. One of the biggest winners was South Carolina, who picked up their first conference victory of the season with an 84-69 beatdown of Texas that ended their 13-game losing streak. They had come close in a lot of games but made sure in the final minutes of this one that the outcome was securely in hand.
As for Texas, this was an absolutely catastrophic and devastating loss that seriously jeopardized their NCAA Tournament hopes. The Longhorns are still 16-11 overall, but they now have the status of being the only team in the league to lose to the Gamecocks and have much, much less margin for error in the final four games.
Here are your SEC standings as of February 24th:
SEC Basketball Standings
Notes:
- Who will win the SEC? Auburn — unless at least two teams beat them in their final four games. They play Ole Miss, at Kentucky, at Texas A&M, and Alabama. So it could very well happen, and if it does and Florida and/or Alabama win out, we might have a last-minute title snatcher.
- Oklahoma got an absolutely essential win over Mississippi State on Saturday, bumping their putrid SEC record from 3-10 to a marginally better 4-10. Now, they get to host Kentucky on Wednesday night.
- The Kentucky game has changed Arkansas’s entire season. Heading into that game on February 1st, they were 1-6 and 13-8. Now they’re 5-9 and 16-11, pulling out of the nosedive just enough to avoid the gigantic crash they were heading for. With a win over Top 15 Missouri now accompanying the Kentucky win, a once impossible-seeming climb is now almost over — the Razorbacks dug themselves a massive, massive hole, but somehow daylight is visible with just four games left. They very well could finish conference play 9-9 after starting 0-5 and 1-6.
- Vanderbilt is 18-9 with four games left. If they hit 20 wins, that might be enough to go dancing.