How Tennessee basketball or Alabama can take Greg Sankey back to his roots | Toppmeyer

Long before Greg Sankey became boss of the nation’s supreme college football conference, the SEC commissioner was a boys basketball assistant coach at Auburn High School, his alma mater, in central New York.

“It was the 1986-87 season, the year after they were really good,” Sankey recalled years ago to the Auburn Citizen newspaper.

Basketball matters to Sankey, even as he rules from college football's mecca.

SEC schools have won national championships in 15 sports since Sankey became commissioner in 2015. That includes six football titles. But the 2012 Kentucky Wildcats are the SEC’s last team to win a men’s hoops title.

“As a person who came from a basketball background in my younger days, I look forward to celebrating a national championship in men’s basketball just like we have in our other sports,” Sankey told me two weeks ago.

SEC basketball has strengthened in recent years, and it has a real opportunity to end its title drought thanks to a Sweet 16 field that includes top-seeded Alabama, No. 4 Tennessee and No. 8 Arkansas.

It’s as if Sankey saw this coming.

When we spoke earlier this month about the championship drought, Sankey recalled that he’d faced similar questions about women’s basketball in 2017. The SEC hadn’t produced a women's champion since the 2008 Tennessee Lady Vols won the last of Pat Summitt’s eight titles. Tennessee's grip eased after Summitt retired, and UConn, Baylor and Notre Dame seized control – until 2017, when South Carolina beat Mississippi State in an all-SEC national championship.

“My observation then was much the same as it is now: Everything is in place for that achievement,” Sankey said.

Only that achievement – cutting down a championship net – can secure the SEC's place as a men's basketball force.

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A conference's Sweet 16 head count is a celebrated accomplishment for one weekend in March, before fading into the trivia books like a conference's football bowl game record.

National champions are remembered.

I wouldn’t know how many Big 12 teams reached the Sweet 16 last year, but I know Kansas won the national championship. KU and Baylor winning titles in consecutive seasons bolstered the Big 12's image as a basketball-forward conference. Similarly, I cannot cite the SEC's bowl game record in any recent year, but I can rattle off the conference's numerous champions during its rule of the BCS and now College Football Playoff era.

To punctuate its hoops ascent, the SEC needs at least one team to keep winning into April.

That’s not to disparage what SEC teams achieved so far. The first two rounds reaffirmed the SEC’s hoops improvement. This is now a robust league that will only improve upon Texas’ 2024 arrival.

This SEC men’s basketball emergence didn’t happen overnight, and although March Madness embodies a certain amount of luck and unpredictability, this is no fluke.

The conference increased its commitment to men’s basketball after qualifying just three teams for the 2016 NCAA Tournament. It wasn’t just one bad season, either. SEC men’s basketball had been mired in a years-long crater before conference members strengthened their nonconference scheduling and invested in better coaches, who in turn are recruiting better players.

Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee signed top-10 2022 recruiting classes, according to the 247Sports Composite. No other conference put more than two teams in the recruiting top 10.

In hoops, recruiting dividends can be immediate, especially when talent meets a skilled coach.

Eric Musselman peeled off his shirt and called the Hogs in the afterglow of Arkansas upsetting Kansas, but his histrionics shouldn’t obfuscate that Musselman ranks among the nation’s best sideline coaches, in addition to being a premier recruiter.

This is Musselman’s fourth Sweet 16 in six NCAA Tournament appearances. The Razorbacks, armed with a loaded freshman class, are one win away from advancing to a third straight Elite Eight for the first time in program history.

Tennessee’s Sweet 16 advancement was surprising, when you consider how hot second-round opponent Duke had been, combined with Rick Barnes’ historical March Madness struggles. Barnes usually builds hard-nosed teams that defend relentlessly before fizzling in March, but Tennessee successfully dragged the Dukies into the mud, and the Vols thrive in the muck and mire.

The East Region eased after the elimination of No. 1 Purdue, and Tennessee enjoys a navigable path to its first Final Four in program history.

Guards often rule March, and Alabama’s combination of freshman superstar Brandon Miller with veteran point guard Jahvon Quinerly make the Crimson Tide the SEC’s top candidate to win this tournament.

Three Sweet 16 teams are the SEC's most since 2019. One of those teams becoming the national champion would more powerfully assert that hoops are no afterthought in Sankey’s SEC.

Blake Toppmeyer is an SEC Columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Tennessee, Alabama basketball in Sweet 16 can assert SEC clout