Is Winning the SEC Tournament Really Harder than Winning the National Championship?
Yes, the SEC is stacked, but the math doesn’t quite add up.
Note: This story was a collaboration with Jason Lisk of PoolGenius. Subscribe to their free newsletter for data-driven college basketball insights. And for a mathematical edge in your March Madness pools — PoolGenius subscribers win 3x more often than expected — check out their NCAA Bracket Picks for 2025.
Recently, ESPN’s Jay Bilas voiced a thought that we’ll probably hear a lot when the SEC men’s basketball tournament tips off later this week:
“Winning the SEC Tournament is going to be harder than winning the national championship,” he said, “because you’re doing it day after day after day and all of that stuff, and playing better teams throughout the course of it than you would play in the course of the NCAA Tournament.”
The SEC certainly has been a behemoth this college basketball season, boasting the best SRS rating of any conference by far and four of the top seven teams in the most recent AP poll. But putting aside the lack of rest days Bilas nodded to above, is winning a smaller tournament really more difficult than winning a larger one — especially when all of the best teams from the former will also be competing in the latter, joined by additional top-tier teams as well?
One devil's-advocate argument is that sometimes NCAA tournament paths open up because of other upsets, and a team can go to the championship without having to beat a lot of great teams head-to-head. By contrast, a team in a stacked conference tourney is guaranteed to face at least some difficult opponents along the path to the title.
To win the SEC tournament this year, a top-four seed probably needs to beat something like the 20th-best team in the country, then two of the top six or seven teams in the country. (Though that is also not as much of a given as you might expect, if someone like Mississippi, Mississippi State or Kentucky goes to the final or semifinals, and you only have to beat one of the top seven.)
How does that path compare with the NCAAs? Using TeamRankings’ forecast model, we went through and pulled the "at the time" odds of the last four national champs winning the six straight games they actually ended up with in the NCAA tourney:
UConn’s odds were comparatively quite high last season because TeamRankings rated them as much better than the teams they ended up facing en route to the title. But they’re also an exception — none of the other recent champs even had a 20 percent chance to make it through their championship path.
By contrast, the only way Auburn would have as low as a 20 percent chance to win the SEC tournament is if they face three straight opponents where they have under a 60 percent chance to win. That’s impossible, given their extremely high power rating compared with the rest of the conference.
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And we can see the difference in difficulty of winning six straight versus three straight by simply comparing TeamRankings’ odds of winning the SEC title versus the national title for the top teams in the conference:
Based on these numbers, Auburn is about twice as likely to win the SEC tournament as the NCAA tournament. And Florida, Tennessee and Alabama are about three times more likely. (Think back to our UConn example from last year as well: even as a highly rated team, and with the benefit of knowing that they didn’t have to face a seed higher than No. 3 until the final, their national title odds were still lower than Auburn’s SEC odds are right now.)
So why is there a perception that the SEC will be a more difficult gauntlet?
The conference’s overall strength is historic, and imposing. But the notion may also come from the misconception that, for the best team, winning one game against, say, the fourth-best team in the country is more difficult than stringing together three wins against teams you have a 75 percent chance to win against (like the Top 20-to-30 type teams).
To win the SEC, you still only have to win three games if you are a top-seeded team. In the NCAA, you need to win six. Even discounting the 1-vs-16 matchup — which itself isn’t undefeated anymore — you have to make it through five in a row where, even if you are a decent favorite each game, your chances to lose all add up.
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Filed under: College Basketball