DESTIN, Fla. — When the SEC’s men’s basketball coaches gathered at the league’s annual spring meetings a year ago, commissioner Mike Slive delivered a not-too-subtle message to teams hoping to coast through their non-conference slate: The SEC’s schedules needed to get tougher.
The message was heard by many programs, and the SEC’s RPI improved accordingly during the 2009-10 season, but this week the debate over non-conference scheduling remained a hot topic.
“We’ve got to go just one more steps,” Tennessee head coach Bruce Pearl said. “If everybody plays one bottom team, we all play that team. It affects all of our RPI. The way to get our league RPI up is for us all to schedule aggressively.”
The notion, however, is easier said than done.
While Georgia managed to play one of the tougher schedules in the country a year ago — including non-conference games against NCAA tournament foes like Missouri, Illinois and Georgia Tech — head coach Mark Fox wondered if his team might have shouldered an unfair burden for doing so.
“We played one of the top 15 schedules in America. Was that the most advantageous thing for us to do?” Fox said. “If we played a little bit lighter schedule and had a winning record, might we have gone to the NIT? We had more quality wins than some at-large teams in the (NCAA) tournament. But our schedule with a young team and a team with no depth got the best of us. But I do think scheduling up like we’re doing is the right move, but you have to have the right balance.”
In Georgia’s case, the tougher slate proved a major hurdle, but also gave a rebuilding team a bigger stage to develop upon. For Pearl, however, the problems rested more with teams like Mississippi and Mississippi State that largely ignored Slive’s edict from a year ago.
“It’s about how the whole league schedules, because we’re all tied together,” Pearl said. “In the SEC, there were three of us (in the top 50 RPI) and if you didn’t play one of those three teams, you didn’t play a top-50 RPI team.”
After placing just three teams into the NCAA tournament field in 2009, the SEC had four bids in 2010 — still far below what Pearl said is acceptable.
Calipari mum on controversy
A horde of media waited to hear from Kentucky head coach John Calipari for the second straight day Wednesday, hoping to get some comment on the controversy surrounding former Wildcats player Eric Bledsoe, who is the subject of an NCAA investigation surrounding his high school transcripts, according to the New York Times.
When Calipari finally did speak, he didn’t offer much closure.
Asked if he had spoken to Bledsoe, Calipari said, “We’re good on that,” then scolded a reporter who inquired if Kentucky would change the way it evaluates admissions transcripts.
Calipari said Kentucky had already commented on the investigation and offered no further clarification of the issue, but said as coach of the high-profile Wildcats, he expects to be at the center of controversy.
“One thing I will say is coaching at Kentucky is like being in politics,” he said. “You’ve got your core group that absolutely loves you and the others are trying to unseat you. That’s just how it is if you’re at Kentucky.”
Boling recovering nicely
Georgia head football coach Mark Richt said offensive lineman Clint Boling had undergone arthroscopic surgery on his ankle last month, but he expects the senior to be fine within a few weeks.
Richt said Boling had sprained the ankle twice this spring and in each case it was slow to fully heal, so team trainer Ron Courson determined a minor “clean up” was in order.
“He just wasn’t 100 percent from a sprain here and there,” Richt said. “It wasn’t responding as well as it should have, and we just wanted to clean it up. It’s a two-to-three week thing.”
Richt said no other players have had surgery since the end of spring practice.
Up all night
Part of Wednesday’s morning’s meetings with athletics directors involved a briefing by ESPN on the status of the league’s television package with the network. One issue brought up by Georgia athletics director Damon Evans was the number of late kickoffs the Bulldogs had on their schedule last season.
Five of Georgia’s 12 regular-season games kicked off at 7 p.m. or later, including three games in Athens. The late home kickoffs were each plagued by a large number of inebriated fans and large quantities of garbage left in North Campus tailgating areas, requiring the school to stiffen its rules for pre-game parties in 2010.
“All games are televised, and there are only so many windows during the day, so of course we’re going to have some evening and night games,” Evans said. “But at the same time I’d like to see a little bit of balance to where we can get some early noon games and some 3:30 games because we have different fans who like different things and there’s less pressure on the campus when it’s an early game.”
