The Kentucky Wildcats beat the Tennessee Volunteers 75-64 during a game at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025.

Perhaps you’ve already heard: men’s basketball in the SEC is a pretty big deal this season.

The league is as good as it’s ever been maybe as good as any league has ever been and the latest example of the ridiculous wealth of talent in the conference was on display in this week’s Associated Press Top 25 rankings.

Four of the teams in the top five No. 1 Auburn, No. 2 Alabama, No. 3 Florida and No. 5 Tennessee are members of the SEC, which also had No. 8 Texas A&M, No. 15 Kentucky and three other schools in the Top 25.

The sheer number of SEC teams in the national rankings isn’t new there were 10 in the preseason AP Top 25 poll and every member school except for LSU and South Carolina has been ranked at some point this season.

But the number at the very top in this week’s rankings was eye-popping.

Most notably, the new rankings produced the first No. 1 vs. No. 2 battle in league history, with Auburn heading to Tuscaloosa to play Alabama on Saturday (4 p.m. EST on ESPN). If the Crimson Tide were to win that one, they’d become the third different SEC team to be ranked No. 1 this season, joining the Tigers and Tennessee.

This was to be the 45th matchup of the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the history of the game, the first such meeting in more than three years, the first intraconference battle in more than nine years, and the first 1 vs. 2 game featuring two teams from the same state since 2008.

The combatants for that one were No. 1 Memphis coached by John Calipari and No. 2 Tennessee, then led by Bruce Pearl, who’s now the head coach at Auburn. That was 17 years ago.

The strides the SEC has made over the past decade have been well-chronicled, but this week’s amazing rankings achievement four of the AP top five drives home the point of just how far the league has come.

And it’s perhaps the most potent reminder yet of the difference between the league competition that Calipari faced as he led Kentucky’s quick turnaround 15 years ago and the challenge that Mark Pope faces as he begins a new era of UK basketball.

The SEC basketball evolution

Over Calipari’s first three seasons, Kentucky was the only team from the SEC that was ever ranked in the top five in the AP poll. Each of those three seasons ended with only three schools from the league UK and two others in the final Top 25 poll. Vanderbilt did it all three seasons, Florida did it twice, and Tennessee achieved it once, but none were ever top-five material.

The Gators finally broke into the top five in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons, becoming the first non-Kentucky team from the SEC to hit that range since Tennessee did it five years earlier.

The league was atrocious in both of those seasons, however. Florida was the only SEC team anywhere in the Top 25 rankings by the end of each of them.

The next season featured Kentucky’s celebrated 38-1 team, the Calipari “platoon” squad with Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker, Willie Cauley-Stein, Tyler Ulis, the Harrison twins and all the rest.

Once again, Kentucky was the only SEC team that made it into the top five that season the Cats were ranked No. 1 in every poll, in fact and the league, as a whole, was terrible. Florida started at No. 7 in the preseason rankings, dropped from the Top 25 completely after just two weeks and ended up with a losing record. Starting with the Dec. 1 poll, UK and Arkansas were the only two SEC teams that were ever ranked, and the Hogs finished at No. 21.

Calipari’s Cats went to the Final Four that season their fourth trip there in his first six seasons and they were the only SEC team to advance beyond the first week of the NCAA Tournament that year.

And that was Calipari’s last Final Four appearance at Kentucky, even though the league still took a little while longer to really get going.

The next year, Texas A&M cracked the top five in one poll, but no one else from the conference other than UK was ever ranked higher than 17th. Ultimately, Vanderbilt was the only other SEC team to make the NCAA Tournament, and those Commodores lost in a “First Four” game in Dayton.

The year after that, Kentucky was the only SEC team ranked in the top 10 at any point all season, and Florida at No. 20 in the final AP poll was the only other team in the rankings by the end of the season.

The SEC started on its path to improvement with the 2017-18 season. Kentucky won the league tournament that year and the regular-season title two seasons later, but as the SEC’s success has exploded more recently the Cats haven’t claimed a championship since then.

Ten of the last 11 SEC trophies have gone to someone else, with Alabama, Auburn and Tennessee combining to win each of the past eight, with one of those first two teams appearing likely to take home the regular-season title this year.

As Pope tries to build the UK basketball program in his vision, that’s the reality of the situation. And this appears to be a new normal for the league.

Tennessee coach Rick Barnes has been with the Vols since 2015 spending time in the Big 12, ACC and Big East before that and the 70-year-old college basketball veteran isn’t one for hyperbole. His assessment after Kentucky completed a regular-season sweep of his program Tuesday night said it all.

“It’s the best league in the country, maybe ever. I mean, it’s ridiculous, to be honest with you. … It’s an incredible league, and I’m proud of it. Ten years ago, it was awful. And where we are today is amazing, and I think it’s a compliment to a lot of different people to get it to this point.