There can be no debate over who college basketball\u2019s best conference has been this season. From start to the near finish late, the SEC has dominated. Many people believe there might be a power shift in the sport occurring as the ACC has long been thought of as the standard.<\/p>\n
And for the most part, there has not been much pushback according to ESPN\u2019s Joe Lunardi<\/a> \u2014 at least when discussing this season. Lunardi says folks inside ACC country have used \u201ccommon sense\u201d when approaching the subject. After all, the SEC\/ACC Challenge from earlier December was not too long ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t heard, literally, one snide remark all season,\u201d Lunardi said Monday via The Paul Finebaum Show<\/em><\/a>. \u201cI think the ACC actually deserves a little credit here. They were leading the charge a year ago at pointing fingers at the Big 12 and their scheduling and running up the score\u2026 We haven\u2019t heard a peep and some of that is common sense.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you lose 14 out of 16 games against that other league, you\u2019re best not calling a lot of attention to it. I think they also see with their eyes how good these teams are. I\u2019m looking at Texas<\/a><\/strong> with Tre Johnson<\/a><\/strong> being a bubble team. If Texas is the 10th-best team in your league, that\u2019s a really good league.\u201d<\/p>\n The latest projections from Lunardi currently have 13 SEC teams in the field. Georgia<\/a><\/strong> is just on the outside looking in as a member of the \u2018First Four Out\u2019 group. A few wins down the stretch of the regular season and in the SEC Tournament could have Mike White<\/a><\/strong>\u2018s squad dancing. For now, the lone programs not in consideration for at-large bids are LSU<\/a><\/strong> and South Carolina<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Having as many teams earn a one-seed (Auburn<\/a><\/strong>, Alabama<\/a><\/strong>, Florida<\/a><\/strong>, and Tennessee<\/a><\/strong> all in consideration) as they would miss the NCAA Tournament would be quite the accomplishment.<\/p>\n Not too long ago, the SEC was struggling to receive a good handful of bids into the field. Lunardi certainly knows there has been a mind shift within the conference and it\u2019s all come to fruition this season. He is not sure these type of numbers can even be produced ever again.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a long time, a lot of the teams, a lot of the schools in the SEC didn\u2019t care about basketball,\u201d Lunardi said. \u201cBack in the old days of the SEC West when we were divisional, those schedule strength numbers of some of those schools, they weren\u2019t even trying to get an at-large bid. They were killing time for spring practice, I guess. That is not the case\u2026 What we\u2019re seeing in the SEC right now is a one-off because I have a hard time imagining, even the SEC itself, repeating this.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Joe Lunardi credits ACC for \u2018common sense\u2019 approach to SEC\u2019s projected March Madness seeding dominance<\/a> appeared first on On3<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There can be no debate over who college basketball\u2019s best conference has been this season….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.wztzfm.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}