Why is SEC basketball so bad, especially compared to SEC football?

Southerners can be a prickly bunch about certain subjects. Attack our various forms of barbecue, and you’re liable to get an earful. Insult the honor or attractiveness of our women, and it’s pistols at dawn. Tell us that we don’t have the best college football teams in the country, and you’ll be inundated with stats, starting with “SEVEN STRAIGHT!!!”

That defensiveness does not, however, extend to basketball. With the exception of the states outside the Deep South that show a strange affection for round, orange balls -- Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia -- Southerners will generally accept that the SEC serves up a less-than-impressive basketball product.

An adopted Southerner coined the term fuzzy math during a Presidential debate in 2000 when he did not feel like rebutting another Southerner’s stats concerning the federal budget, but you won’t find many Texans or Tennesseans disputing KenPom’s conclusions about the league:

In the first five years covered by KenPom’s database, the SEC ranked first or second four times, so it is quite possible for the conference to put out a collection of quality teams. However, that has eroded over time, as each of the last seven years has seen the SEC finish outside of the upper half of major conferences.

This year, the SEC heads into its conference tournament with only two teams assured of bids -- No. 1 Florida and major disappointment Kentucky -- but the league’s sixth-place finish in KenPom’s conference rankings is actually an improvement on a seventh-place finish in 2013.

So, when we are addressing the reasons why SEC basketball is in an extended trough, we ought to keep in mind that the league has been good before. As such, our explanations should either be of a recent vintage or qualified as not reflecting the conference’s destiny.

As he did when addressing national talent distribution in football, Seth from MGoBlog helpfully used his far-superior spreadsheet skills to analyze whether the Southeast produces top college basketball recruits in the same proportions as top college football recruits. Subject to a number of caveats -- the prep school phenomenon complicates analyzing geographical issues with college basketball recruiting, for one; numbers are different in a sport with five starters rather than 22, for another -- the answer is clear that SEC basketball programs do not have the same local advantages as their football brethren.

Since 2003, the Southeast has produced 38 percent of the top 400 college football recruits according to Rivals, but only 25 percent of the top 400 basketball recruits. The Southeast still produces more top basketball recruits than its population would suggest (the Southeast holds 19 percent of the national population, according to the 2010 Census), but the distribution of talent is more even than it is in football.

Additionally, geography matters less in basketball recruiting than in football. As Seth noted, only 54 percent of the top 400 college basketball recruits stayed in their home regions, compared to 72 percent of top football recruits. Thus, we can see that the twin advantages that SEC programs have in football -- proximity to talent in an environment where geography matters greatly in recruiting -- are diluted in basketball.

Kentucky, a member of the SEC, is the all-time winningest program in college basketball history. To find the next SEC program on the list, you have to go all the way down to No. 30 Alabama, a program whose fans have all sorts of creative ways of counting national titles in football, but are stuck on zero when tallying Final Four appearances.

Needless to say, the picture is different in football, where eight of the top 20 programs in terms of total wins are current members of the SEC.

So what came first: SEC fans feeling lukewarm about basketball or SEC programs putting up mediocre results on the court? Does fan apathy prevent winning or does a lack of wins produce fan apathy?

Regardless of the driving force, most SEC programs are in places where they can’t sell a winning tradition and don’t generate the revenue to pay for the top coaches and facilities that would aid in recruiting. SEC athletic departments in general are well into the black because of their football programs, but those departments would have to engage in some Blue State-style redistribution in order for gridiron revenues to bolster the fortunes of roundball programs. And few Southern football fans want to sacrifice football success for anything.

We’ve all heard of the tradition of New York City point guards; have you ever heard of a line of Big Apple high school quarterbacks? The list of great basketball players to come from Chicago is lengthy; good luck finding a similar list for football players from the Windy City.

It’s dangerous to paint with too broad a brush when it comes to urban/rural issues in sports. There are urban areas that produce a good amount of football talent and rural areas that produce basketball talent. On balance, though, basketball does tend to be bigger in cities, if only because a basketball court (or two) takes up much less space than a gridiron.

Additionally, as sports specialization has increased, football has become a warm-weather sport. A high school football prodigy can play year-round in the South, where the winters are relatively mild; the same is not true elsewhere. A basketball prodigy can play year-round in any part of the country.

So how does this affect the SEC? Well, the SEC sits in a region that has a football advantage because of the climate, but it does not have a similar advantage in producing basketball players. Additionally, the South is a bit more rural, certainly compared to the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, so it would tend to produce more top football players than basketball players.

One can take a look at the SEC standings and see this phenomenon play out. What is the most urbanized state in the SEC? Florida. Which program went 18-0 in the SEC this year? Florida. Which states in the South are the least urbanized? Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi.* How did those teams do in the SEC this year? They combined to go 35-55.

* The fly in the ointment with this argument is Kentucky, which is a rural state that contains a pair of notably successful basketball programs, although defending NCAA champs Louisville play in the state’s largest city. Remember what I said about urban/rural arguments being pesky and filled with exceptions?

Is the SEC doomed to continue to put out mediocre basketball teams? The strong epoch from 2003 to 2007 indicates that the conference is capable of someday being where the Big Ten is now in hoops.

Will the SEC dominate in basketball like it does in football? That’s highly unlikely, primarily because the factors that push in the SEC’s favor where football is concerned -- proximity to talent, importance of geography in recruiting, a tradition of success, high levels of revenue and fan support, climate, and a rural orientation -- do not do so for basketball.

The league can be better, certainly, and the creation of the SEC Network will be an impetus, as ESPN will not want to fill hours of programming with unranked basketball teams. However, expecting SEC basketball to ever be like SEC football is an unreasonable expectation. And in SEC country, we prefer to confine our unreasonable expectations to the football field.