How Lady Vols writer Cora Hall voted in the AP Top 25: It's time to talk about the SEC
It hasn't sat right with me that only two SEC teams have been ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 for most of this season.
As someone covering this league very closely, I'm not buying the "SEC is down this season" narrative anymore. Yes, the league lost some individual talent, but it also gained players like Angel Reese, Kierra Fletcher and others. The SEC has eight teams in the top 50 of the NCAA NET rankings, just like the ACC, Pac-12 and Big Ten, which has nine.
The SEC, ACC and Pac-12 all have eight projected NCAA Tournament teams in ESPN's latest bracketology. Not even the Big Ten, one of the top conferences this season, has eight projected tournament teams anymore.
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But the ACC, Pac-12 and Big Ten have five teams ranked in the AP Top 25, and the Pac-12 had six last week. The SEC has two teams ranked.
But teams like Duke were rewarded for winning in ACC play. The Blue Devils entered the rankings after conference play started and climbed all the way to the top 10 for winning ACC games. You can't convince me the ACC is that much better than the SEC, to the point we're not weighing those wins and losses comparably.
If Duke had to play South Carolina this week, I wouldn't bet any money it's taking the No. 1 team in the country to overtime like Ole Miss did on Sunday.
Winning in conference is hard if you're in one of the top four conferences. So if we're rewarding teams like UNLV for winning in the Mountain West, we should be rewarding teams for winning in the SEC.
There is obviously a lot of nuance to rankings at this point. But we have to stop treating every other conference as more legitimate than the SEC when weighing conference wins and losses. The top five teams in the SEC have 20-plus wins, just like the ACC, Pac-12 and Big Ten.
So, this week Tennessee and Ole Miss are back on my ballot. They probably should have been earlier, because both teams have more than proven they're a top 25 team in the country right now. Especially if AP voters are going to rank UNLV and give votes to Middle Tennessee State, Rhode Island and Cleveland State. People might argue Tennessee and Ole Miss don't have "signature wins" – where is UNLV's signature win that got it ranked last week?
Alabama has a case, too, since it beat Ole Miss and has the same record. But when you look at both team's performances against the top three SEC teams, the Rebels fared much better than the Crimson Tide, nearly taking down LSU and South Carolina in one week.
Tennessee's only bad loss is to Mississippi State in overtime on the road. Ole Miss' only bad loss is to Auburn in overtime on the road. But other ranked teams took worse losses in conference play.
Virginia Tech's best win is a three-point victory against Tennessee without Rickea Jackson and Jillian Hollingshead – and two of its three other good nonconference wins are against SEC teams. The rest are ranked ACC wins we're letting cancel out unranked losses to Clemson and Miami. All of Arizona's quality wins are in Pac-12 play, and it lost to Kansas and Washington State.
Besides crushing Oklahoma, Utah's best nonconference wins are against Ole Miss and Alabama, and the Utes are in the top 10. Her Hoop Stats actually ranks those SEC wins as stronger than Oklahoma and all of Utah's Pac-12 wins. I haven't even touched the fact that every single win that had LSU ranked at No. 5 last week is in SEC play.
So, is the SEC good, or is it not? At a certain point, we have to pick a lane.
You can disagree with me, but I'm going with the SEC is good, and those conference wins mean something.
Cora Hall's AP Top 25 ballot for Week 15
South Carolina
Indiana
Stanford
Iowa
UConn
Maryland
Utah
Michigan
LSU
Virginia Tech
Duke
Notre Dame
Ohio State
Oklahoma
Arizona
Villanova
Colorado
Florida State
Illinois
UCLA
Gonzaga
North Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Ole Miss
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Why Lady Vols writer Cora Hall voted for more SEC teams in AP Top 25
