quote:
Someone posted a ranking the other day of total program wins, with Alabama now coming in at 30th.

What you might not realize is that some of us are quite proud of that.

To be quite honest, the entire original SEC is mostly penalized in these rankings because in olden times, most conferences received just one NCAA Tournament bid… and for much of the Tournamenr history, it had more to do with geographical region than it did conference.

If you were in a very competitive league, this didn’t hurt as much. But if you had a powerhouse program (like Kentucky) that blocked your chance from getting a tournament bid.

Through 1984, here were the number of NCAA bids by SEC school:

29- Kentucky
8- Tennessee
6- LSU
5- Alabama
2- Vanderbilt
1- Georgia, Miss St, Auburn, Ole Miss

…and most all of these were between 1976 and 1984. In ‘76 the tournament expanded to 32 teams which typically allowed for Kentucky and a second SEC team to get a bid.

Up through 1975, Kentucky had 22 NCAA Tournament appearances and the rest of the then-SEC had a combined 7.

This hurt programs like Bama who were winning lots of games but weren’t good enough to overtake Kentucky and make the Tournament.

This is why Bama fans are so hell bent on counting other factors but the truth is, no one outside of Alabama cared about the program CM Newton had put together because they were irrelevant at the National level.

I think to balance this out, you still stick with just NCAA Tournament success, but you discount everything prior to ‘85 and you discount even more heavily everything before ‘76, and you really discount everything before 1951 when only 8 teams made the field.

This post was edited on 4/9/24 at 12:05 pm