Calipari predicts SEC hoops resurgence

Five teams return five starters. Three more return four starters. Four of the six players named to the Associated Press All-SEC team are back. After missing the tournament and then firing coach Billy Gillispie, Kentucky reeled in the nation's top recruiting class and is the preseason favorite to win the conference.

Said LSU coach Trent Johnson, "I think we've got a chance to be again what the SEC has always been, one of the best leagues in the country."

Teams that Calipari pushed: South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi State, Florida, Arkansas, Ole Miss and his own team. The conference has advanced six teams to the tournament many times, but never seven.

Said Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl, "I think we'll get at least seven."

The last time the SEC had only three NCAA teams was 1990, which preceded the conference expansion. It could have been two had Mississippi State not earned the automatic bid as the conference tournament champion.

Coaches framed last season as an aberration. As Pearl put it, coaches saw that their teams were young and arranged relatively light non-conference schedules in accordance.

"You combine those two things and all of a sudden, our league RPI is what it was," Pearl said, referring to the league's ranking index. "It was a double-edged sword that hurt us."

According to the Web site realtimerpi.com, the SEC's league RPI, based in part on strength of schedule, was sixth last season after ranking third in 2008, first in 2007 and fourth in 2006.

"When you're going to be down, if you want to dumb [the schedule] down, dumb it down a little bit," Pearl said. "There's ways to do it, and we overreacted a little bit last year."

C.M. Newton, the former coach who now consults SEC commissioner Mike Slive on basketball matters, believes coaches have followed the league's encouragement to toughen their non-conference schedules, naming Kentucky and Florida among others.

"What we've got to do and what we've continued to emphasize is if we want to be a real national conference and really be recognized nationally, we've got to play a national schedule," said Newton, a past chairman of the NCAA tournament selection committee. "That not only gets the attention of the committee members when they're voting on at-large [teams], but it also gets our fan base excited as well."

For this season, however, the rising tide might not rise high enough to lift Georgia, which finished 12-20 and fired coach Dennis Felton midway through the season. Thursday, Johnson spoke on behalf of new coach Mark Fox, who assisted Johnson for four seasons at Nevada and succeeded him when Johnson went to Stanford.

"He's going to win," Johnson said, "with time."