The SEC is...average?

True story:  I was traveling to Detroit for work, and the hotel I booked sent out an email to welcome me.  In the note, the manager said their motto was, "Detroit:  it's not as bad as you thought!"

I went to check on the SEC's conference ranking tonight, and I expected to find bad news.  The conference has seemed less-than-stellar thusfar.  The answer, though, is that the SEC is not as bad as I thought.

Here are the conference RPI rankings from realtimerpi.com:

Rank		Conference	Avg. RPI	Avg. SOS	SOS Rank	Teams
	1	Big 12	0.6221	0.5597	2	10
	2	Big Ten	0.6031	0.5522	3	14
	3	Big East	0.5852	0.5228	7	10
	4	Atlantic Coast	0.5808	0.5471	5	15
	5	Southeastern	0.5753	0.5615	1	14
	6	Atlantic 10	0.5491	0.5398	6	14
	7	Pacific-12	0.5482	0.4876	19	12
	8	West Coast	0.5454	0.5149	12	10
	9	Missouri Valley	0.5442	0.5495	4	10
	10	American Athletic	0.5274	0.5060	14	11

Last year the SEC finished 7th, so that's a tick up.  You'll notice the strength of schedule is helping quite a bit.

The caveat, of course, is that it's very, very early, and there could still be some wild swings (Green Bay is currently 4th in team RPI).  However, it's an encouraging start, because a strong SEC is good for Georgia, who is going to need three or four quality wins to get into the tournament.

A couple can certainly come out of conference (Colorado and Seton Hall would be a great start), but Georgia will need some SEC teams with high RPI's on the schedule, and they'll have to beat those teams.  So plug your nose and root for Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, and LSU.  Then hope we can get at least three wins out of that group when conference play rolls around.