CECIL HURT: Gators likely pick, but SEC title is up for grabs

The Southeastern Conference Tournament is about to begin in Atlanta. It’s great fun, eye-catching pageantry and a good time for all.

There is only one problem this season.

No team in the SEC can actually win it.

Take a look at the field. The good teams are coming in with little or no momentum. The mediocre teams are, well, mediocre. It is a very good league, but no team seems poised to do great things -- like winning the SEC Tournament.

The logical answer to that argument would be simple: the Florida Gators.

After all, Florida has essentially all the players back from the NCAA championship team of 2006. The Gators ran rough-shod over the SEC for much of the year. But as the season wound down, the Gators kicked off their hob-nailed boots and, in the best Gainesville tradition, ran in flip-flops down the stretch. Florida went 2-3 over its last five SEC games and didn’t look overly impressive in some of its wins from mid-February on, either. (See the Alabama game for an example.) Given the fact that the Gators had wrapped up the league title at about the halfway point, couple that with the natural distractions of Gainesville when the temperature starts to rise just a little and it’s perfectly understandable. But, having flipped the cool switch on over the last couple of weeks, will the Gators flip it off in Atlanta, or wait until the NCAA Tournament?

If it isn’t going to be Florida, then who is it going to be?

Alabama? Are you kidding? The league’s most soft-hearted team? Not since the Dionne quintuplets were infants have five individuals spent as much time curled in the fetal position as the Crimson Tide basketball team. (See the Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Auburn and Mississippi State road games.) The only way the Tide could get excited about going to Atlanta is if the SEC Tournament happened to coincide with the opening of the First Annual Georgia International Chick-Flick Festival.

Anyone else in the West? Well, you are talking about a division whose championship was shared by Mississippi State and Ole Miss. Any time those two schools share anything except the fraternal misery of being in Mississippi, it is not a good situation.

Auburn has the toughness Alabama lacks, but not the talent to go on a four-game win streak. Arkansas, according to at least some rumors, is one loss away from sending Stan Heath back to his original vocation as Montel Williams’ stunt double.

LSU went from the Final Four to last place, thanks to terrible guard play, and won’t suddenly get Darrell Mitchell (or Tyrus Thomas) back for this event, either.

Kentucky is always a safe choice, but if you listen to Wildcat fans the similarity between this Wildcat team and those of the past extends only to the blue jerseys and the legion of fans sipping bourbon whiskey in the team hotel lobby. Tubby Smith’s recruiting, they will tell you, has left the Wildcats with a roster that would only be exciting if you were at Wright State. (Or at South Carolina, which says a lot about the Gamecocks’ chances as well.)

Georgia is playing close to home. That’s never made a difference before.

Tennessee doesn’t have the inside game to make a four-game run. Vanderbilt has good perimeter shooting and the league’s best overall grasp of quantum mechanics but no history of doing well in the renewed SEC Tournament.

Having exhausted all the possibilities (in admittedly over-the-top fashion), it’s now time to admit that someone actually will end up winning the event. It’s inevitable. And for all the above grousing in a topsy-turvy year in which surprising overacheivers collided with grouchy underachievers in a vast, parity-filled middle ground, there are some good basketball teams that could catch fire in the Georgia Dome.

Florida remains the likeliest candidate. But if it isn’t the Gators, then some players are going to be hoisting a trophy on Sunday afternoon with an NCAA automatic bid in hand -- and a look of surprise on their faces.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of the Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0225.