By rhis time next week the SEC Tournament will be under way in Nashville.  Hopefully, by then, we’ll have a clear idea of who’s destined to reach the NCAA tourney and who’s not.  As of today, the numbers point us in a certain direction, but the SEC and the overall bubble for this year’s tourney are so weak that it’s still not an open-and-shut case.  Normally by this stage of the season it is.

Below is a look at how all the SEC’s teams’ resumes look as of this morning.  Amazingly, even with Kentucky’s painful loss to Georgia last night, the Wildcats still have hope.  The same is true for three other SEC squads if — big if — they take care of their business, finish the season strong, and get plenty of help from other bubble teams who fall apart late.

At the bottom of this post we’ll give your overall picks for at-large bids as of today.

Notes

*  There are about 50 different sources that try to replicate the NCAA’s official RPI formula.  The vast majority are similar.

*  The information handed out to the NCAA selection committee does not emphasize or list the way a team finishes the season.  Each team’s schedule is listed according to wins and losses, so there’s no way to look at schedule from start to finish and determine who’s hot and who’s not.  This has been done to make sure teams schedule better non-conference games in November and December.  However, the people on that panel must have some knowledge of who is playing well and who isn’t.  So we list each school’s record over its final 10 games.  It might not be a big factor, but it has to be some factor.

*  While the NCAA selection committee says it uses RPI more for seeding than for filling the field, a quick study of the past 10 brackets suggests that just the opposite is true.

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Seventeen days from today — on St. Patrick’s Day — the SEC Tournament champion will be crowned and the NCAA Tournament field will be set and seeded.  When it comes to the league tourney, everyone’s got a shot to cut down the nets and guarantee themselves a little March Madness.

That’s the dream anyway.  Georgia lived it in 2008.  The Bulldogs entered the tourney with a 13-16 record (4-12 in the SEC).  They managed to survive a tornado at the Georgia Dome, a pair of overtime thrillers, and having to play two games in one day to win the whole darn mess and secure an NCAA tourney berth.

Perhaps someone can find a little luck this year, too.  As we said, the tourney ends on St. Patrick’s Day.

But barring miracles and luck in Nashville, the SEC is chugging toward Selection Sunday with just six teams still in the mix.  And that’s being generous.  Very generous.  Below are those six squads, their resumes, and what they still have left on their schedules.

Please remember that with 31 automatic bids being handed out, only 37 at-large bids exist.  So that RPI had better look pretty good come the third Sunday in March.

After five years of correctly predicting the SEC’s number of NCAA tourney bids, we’ve come to realize that it’s all about the math.  Yes, SEC bubble teams have to pray Cinderellas in other leagues don’t win their leagues.  And, sure, there are rare exceptions to the usual math-based rules.  But there’s a reason so many people can come close to predicting the exact field every year — the selection process is math driven.

Keep reading for some interesting facts on just how math-based-centric the process really is…

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If you want proof that new coach Mark Stoops is generating buzz surrounding Kentucky football, look no further.  Going on sale yesterday, ticket orders for the Kentucky spring game have already topped 23,000.  That’s five times the announced attendance at last year’s spring game.

A fired-up Stoops took to Twitter to announce the totals.

More than 23,000 tickets reserved so far for the spring game — way to go #BBN!#WeAreUK #StoopsTroops

— Mark Stoops (@UKCoachStoops) February 28, 2013

The attendance record for a UK spring game is 20,325 – that occurred back in 1987.

SEC Football

1. Ole Miss has offered more than 70 prospects on ESPN’s class of 2014 watch list as the Rebels ride the momentum of a breakthrough signing class earlier this year.  Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze: “Already, we’ve had four or five of the nation’s top 100 kids on campus, and we hope to have more soon.”

2. With offers already from LSU and Alabama, the recruiting of 14-year old Dylan Moses is generating plenty of buzz. The AP’s Jim Litke is not a fan – “It sounds like brainwashing to me.”  You can read the MrSEC viewpoint here.

3. What’s happened to other middle school athlete phenoms who were offered early scholarships?  Jon Solomon goes exploring for some answers.

4. Along with Texas Tech, Auburn offered Mobile, Alabama lineman Josh Casher this week.  Auburn wants him to play center – a position he’s never played but Casher’s high school coach thinks he’ll do just fine.  ”I think he has a chance to be a great lineman in college — an All-SEC or All-ACC performer.” Casher says Auburn, Florida, Florida State and Alabama (which has yet to offer) as his favorites.

5. Nassau (New York) Community College lineman Chad Mavety has received an offer from Alabama.  Crimson Tide face competition from Ohio State – Urban Meyer is recruiting Mavety personally – and Syracuse.  Mavety, a New Jersey native, has called Syracuse his “dream school.”

6. Florida high school principal Bob Jones on defensive end and Kentucky 2014 commitment Denzel Ware: “He is as good as the three players I coached who went to the NFL. He is a legit four-star player with size, speed and strength. I think UK is looking at him as an outside linebacker, and he can play that spot.”

7. The 2014 wide receiver class at South Carolina has the potential to be one of the best in the country.

8. 2014 quarterback prospect Jarrod Heard is a Texas commitment but Texas A&M is reportedly pursuing him.  His high school coach thinks he’ll stick with the Longhorns - “I don’t see him de-committing from Texas.”

9. Alpharetta, Georgia quarterback Josh Dobbs, part of the 2013 class at Tennessee, won the Franklin D. Watkins Memorial Award Saturday night in Los Angeles, which recognizes the “premiere African-American male scholar athlete.”

10. Robbie Andreu thinks six members of Florida’s 2013 class can have an immediate impact – four freshmen and two transfers.

11. Greenwood, Arkansas quarterback Jabe Burgess just wrapped up a visit with the Razorbacks.  He came away impressed with new coach Bret Bielema. “I loved what he had to say and I loved the direction he’s leading the program. He makes you feel at ease while you’re talking to him.”

SEC Basketball

12. For the first time since 2010, Kentucky will have a signee play in the 40th annual Kentucky Derby Festival Basketball Classic.  Derek Willis will play in the game scheduled for April 19th in Louisville’s Freedom Hall.

13. The nation’s No. 1 prep player is visiting Kentucky.  Huntington Prep’s Andrew Wiggins is scheduled to be on hand tonight at Rupp Arena when UK hosts Mississippi State.  His high school coach tells the Lexington Herald-Leader, ”I know it’s probably not the greatest game in the world for Kentucky. But he was at the Carolina game last year, so he’s seen the atmosphere when it’s at its highest.”

Check out Wiggins highlight video below.

In its pre-Vanderbilt walkthrough on Tuesday, John Calipari surprised his team with a new activity — dodgeball.  Following the loss of Nerlens Noel, two beatdowns at the hands of Florida and Tennessee, and plenty of media attention brought on by their coach briefly suggesting some of his players were “uncoachable,” Kentucky’s team certainly needed some stress relief.  An outside-the-box thinker, Calipari opted for a game in which his players and coaches could throw objects at one another.

Thankfully, he didn’t begin by throwing wrenches.

Before putting on a UK football helmet to protect his head and hair, the Wildcats’ coach told his team: “Look, I ain’t dumb.  I know some of you want to throw at me.  Don’t believe I don’t want to throw at some of you dudes, too.”

The game worked, sort of, as Kentucky held off struggling Vanderbilt 74-70 in Lexington last night.  You can watch highlights of last night’s game right here.  You can see highlights from the Cats’ dodgeball game here, complete with Calipari’s take on why the game was necessary:

“People watching my team are saying they look like their tentative.  Well, you feel the weight of the world.  I keep saying, ‘Don’t feel that way.  This isn’t life or death or we’d have died twice already.”

One can only hope that Calipari properly prepared his team for their dodgeball match with this officially-sanctioned how-to video from the American Dodgeball Association of America:

No one has taken better advantage of the NBA’s age limit than John Calipari.  In his first three years in Lexington, Kentucky’s coach took the brightest stars from America’s high schools, coaxed them into playing defense and putting team ahead of self, and led them to Elite Eight, Final Four, and national championship finishes.  If anyone can deal with the so-called one-and-done rule, it’s Calipari.

But eventually, having to recruit a new starting five every season was going to catch up to Cal and his Cats.  Any objective soul knew that to be the case.  Still, UK fans have sent us plenty of emails whenever we’ve written things like this:  “Eventually the coach will land some kids who won’t have the attitude to buy into his team-first philosophy, but he hasn’t yet.”

Now, with its best player out for the year and with a few “uncoachable” players on its team (Calipari’s since reversed field on that), it appears that this day has indeed become someday for Kentucky.  Erase the word “eventually.”  This season has become the season of chickens coming home to roost in the Bluegrass State.  You can bet more than one SEC fan has thought to himself in recent days: “Live by the one-and-doner; Die by the one-and-doner.”

Ah, but Calipari has lived a lot more than he’s died over the past four seasons.  Which means there’s no reason to stop going after recruits who most likely won’t last in the college ranks for more than a season.  We can all say “we told ya so” to UK fans today.  We can correctly state that they’re finally seeing the downside of having to start from scratch every year.  But what Wildcat fan would trade the past four years for a more traditional type of program?

For that matter, what fan of any school wouldn’t trade places with Kentucky fans today?  If your school could go the one-and-done route for four years and reach an Elite Eight, a Final Four, and win a national championship as a result, wouldn’t that be worth one disappointing season?  (Disappointing is a relative term, of course.  This year’s Wildcats are still 17-8 with the third-best RPI in the SEC.)

Hey, we’ll admit it… we weren’t fans of the build-it-up-tear-it-down-build-it-up approach when Calipari launched it.  We still wonder if UK fans 20 years from now will be able to remember what players were on which of Calipari’s teams.  There’s something sad about that.

But Kentucky’s coach has had more success than we ever dreamed possible.  He’s hitting .750 and this season isn’t even over yet (though it must feel like it for Cat fans).  After that much success, one disappointing year is no reason to chuck the Calipari model.  Until the NBA player’s union allows the NBA to raise its age limit, UK should continue to do what UK has been doing.  It’s worked more times than not.  It just can’t be counted on to work every season.

But what system could be?

New Tennessee coach Butch Jones was thrown into the deep end of the SEC recruiting pool when he became the last new SEC coach hired on December 7th of last year.  It didn’t take him long to realize how the search for talent is different in a league that boasts seven BCS championships in a row:

“Everything is accelerated in the SEC.  Every day you have to bring your A game, no matter what you’re doing.  But it’s invigorating.  As a competitor, you want to go up against he best each and every day…

Recruiting is selling.  It’s a people-oriented business.  it’s about establishing relationships.  The big thing is the overall philosophy and the overall intensity on a minute-by-minute basis in recruiting in the SEC.”

With Signing Day 2013 in the books, Jones and the league’s other three new coaches have all given their schools’ fans reasons to be positive about the future.

According to most recruiting services, Auburn’s Gus Malzahn finished with a top 10 class in his first recruiting test.  To be fair, having a BCS title ring from Auburn that’s just a couple of years old gave Malzahn a leg up on his new rivals on the recruiting trail.  While selling a bright future, he was the lone new SEC coach who could also point to his own recent past at his current school.  But he took full advantage of that, er, advantage and landed five-star defensive linemen Montravious Adams and Carl Lawson along with a bevy of four-star prospects.

Tennessee’s Jones had just 31 days of permissible contact to fix the many tattered relationships Derek Dooley and his staff had left behind.  When dismissed from UT, many Vol coaches went about finding new jobs rather than working on the Vols’ signing class in the hopes of being re-hired by Jones.  Still, in a short period, Jones inked 12 players who weren’t committed to Tennessee when he arrived.  Eight of those 12 were committed to other schools.  ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer — who worked with a pair of Vol quarterback signees at Elite 11 camps — texted Jones to tell him he’d signed the best quarterback class in the nation.

Arkansas’ Bret Bielema got off to a slow start but finished strong.  The lure of his smashmouth brand of football helped the Razorbacks land four offensive linemen and three running backs last Wednesday.  Though the recruitment of star tailback Alex Collins from Florida was one of the week’s most bizarre stories, the dominating rusher did ink with the Hogs in the end.  In addition, Bielema and crew signed players from Hawaii to New Jersey including three from California and four from Florida.  Texas will always be a crucial territory for the Hogs, but Bielema’s national success should provide optimism for a program that can’t survive on in-state talent alone.

Kentucky’s Mark Stoops might have done the mostest with the leastest.  UK finished #28 in Rivals’ national recruiting rankings.  For comparison, the Cats’ five previous rankings were 62nd (2012), 61st (2011), 50th (2010), 41st (2009), and 57th (2008).  Stoops’ message to recruits — “we’re combining Florida State’s defense with Texas Tech’s offense” — resonated.  And Big Blue fans have reacted with excitement to Stoops’ first class.  The fact that UK’s new coach could use his personal ties in Ohio and Florida to reel in three prospects from the former and nine from the latter is a good sign moving forward as well.

There will be naysayers and nitpickers at every school, but considering the situations they inherited and the time constraints they had to work with, Malzhan, Jones, Bielema and Stoops all did solid work in their first SEC go-round.  Fans at Auburn, Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky who are inclined to seek out the positive in life have been given enough reasons by their new coaches to crack a smile when considering the future.

Kentucky added 22 players from 10 different states on Wednesday and Thursday.  A breakdown of the Wildcats’ “target zone” is below:

Florida = 9 recruits

Kentucky = 3

Ohio = 3

Alabama = 1

Arizona = 1

Kansas = 1

Mississippi = 1

South Carolina = 1

Tennessee = 1

Texas = 1

In-State Signees = 13.6%

Out-Of-State Signees = 86.3%

Observation:

The state of Kentucky lacks a deep recruiting pool which makes keeping the stars that are produced at home a priority.  Stoops signed three of the Commonwealth’s top 10 players while Louisville nabbed just two.  But Louisville inked the state’s top player.  And Notre Dame made off with the state’s #2 ranked player.  Helping to make up for that fact — and helping to add some excitement for Cat fans — was Stoops’ ability to go back into Florida and return with nine prospects.  While UK’s Joker Phillips-led pipeline into Georgia dried up, Stoops’ connections in Ohio yielded three signees.  Readers of this site know that we believe Ohio, Virginia, and even Pennsylvania should be prime targets for UK.  If AD Mitch Barnhart has found a man who can recruit Florida and Ohio, that’s a mighty big step in the right direction.

Kentucky’s day of good news started with a commitment from wide receiver Ryan Timmons from Franklin County High School in Frankfort, Ky.

Timmons chose Kentucky over offers from Florida, Ohio State and Illinois. It was the chance to play for offensive coordinator Neal Brown that gave Kentucky the edge.

“Coach Brown wants to score touchdowns, wants to score points,” Timmons told CatsIllustrated.com. “That’s what I like to do. I like to score touchdowns. He wants to score every time he gets a chance. Me and Coach Brown have a good relationship. We hit it off the first day we talked.”

Timmons displayed plenty of emotion throughout his press conference at Franklin County on Tuesday. Ultimately, he decided to play for the in-state school rather than join a higher profile program like Florida, where he visited last weekend.

“I think it would mean more for me to help build something instead of something already being built and following along in their success,” Timmons said.

It looks like Jason Hatcher will join Timmons in the attempt to build Kentucky’s program.

Hatcher, a defensive end from Louisville (Ky.) Trinity, decommitted from Southern California with the intention of signing with Kentucky, according to ESPN RecruitingNation. It was again Kentucky’s coaching staff that made the difference.

“He really liked the coaches,” Hatcher’s mother, Donna Hatcher, told ESPN. “They’re really passionate to turn things around at that program.”

Jason Hatcher’s opinion of the Kentucky program appears to have improved greatly since he committed to USC in July.

At the time, Hatcher chose USC over Louisville and Tennessee. It was actually Tennessee’s loss to Kentucky in 2011 that hurt the Vols in their attempt to land Hatcher, who called Kentucky a “bottom of the barrel” program.

“I told (Tennessee’s coaching staff), ‘You lost to the University of Kentucky. You lose to UK, you lose to everybody because UK finishes last in the SEC every year,’” Hatcher told ESPN in July.

Here’s guessing Hatcher no longer expects Kentucky to finish last in the SEC — at least while he’s on campus.

One of disappointing by-products of super-fandom is the wont to believe in conspiracy theories.  Running a website that covers all 14 SEC schools in football and men’s basketball, we’ve seen the following plots and schemes pointed to many times over the past few years:

*  Many non-Kentucky fans believe the SEC provides UK with a favorable basketball schedule in order to help UK win championships.

*  Many non-Alabama fans believe the SEC provides UA with a favorable football schedule in order to help UA win championships.

*  Many believe the SEC instructs the league’s officials to make calls favoring Kentucky (in basketball) and Alabama (in football).

*  The same holds true for any other team leading the SEC in basketball or football in a given year.  If Team X is winning, it has to be the result of a favorable schedule or friendly officials.

Having heard these same theories time and again about multiple teams, it all seems pretty silly from where we sit.  Mainly because the folks making such claims pick and choose their “evidence.”  Alabama, for example, is believed by many to get break after break after break from SEC officials and the SEC office — that Pac-12 crew really took care of them in the BCS title game, too! — but you never hear the conspiracy theorists mention the fact that Auburn’s Cam Newton was cleared to play in the Iron Bowl in 2010, even though the league had to redefine its own by-laws to clear him.  You never heard one of the conspiracy theorists mention that the league office handed Bama a 2010 schedule that included a whopping six games against foes coming off bye weeks.  That’s because those facts don’t fit the “everything’s handed to the Tide” narrative.  (On the flipside, many Alabama fans looked at those issues as proof that the SEC is always out to get them.)

Why bring this up now?  Because for the last two years the top conspiracy theory during hoops season has been that Kentucky never has to play a Thursday-Saturday turnaround.  Even Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings fueled that fire last year with his complaints.  Yet none of the people who’ve complained about UK’s lack of turnaround games is coming forth to admit that the Wildcats just suffered through one.

Kentucky won at Vanderbilt on Thursday.  Lost at home to Texas A&M on Saturday.  And they next face Tennessee tomorrow at home.  That’s three games in six days with two of the three set-up to get the Cats on ESPN.

At MrSEC.com, we’ve noted every time this comes up that it’s a television issue.  ESPN wants Kentucky more than any other team in the league because they’re a national brand.  In the past, that’s meant more Tuesday games.  This year, the SEC and ESPN will be playing more Thursday contests.  And Kentucky became the first league team to face the Thursday/Saturday/Tuesday challenge in 2013.

We know, we know.  The league got Kentucky’s out of the way just to cover up all the aid they’re going to be giving the Wildcats the rest of the way.

Sorry, but we’re not into conspiracies around here.  If you believe that the Southern Conference commissioner — a man employed by all 14 member institutions — has been given the green light by 13 schools to help a single rival school then you need a tinfoil hat to help keep those loose screws from falling out yer head.

Now we didn’t expect anyone who’s cried foul about UK’s hoops schedule in the past to suddenly admit, “Oh, they’ve not only got a Thursday/Saturday turn-around, but theirs is a Thursday/Saturday/Tuesday gauntlet.”  But someone needed to say it.