Nowhere did I ever claim the country "had never seen a league like the SEC in 2024-25" with reference to the Pac/8/10/12. No where. The SEC is very good this year. It's up to the NCAA tournament to determine if it is one of the all-time bests. We all heard how good SEC men's basketball was last year, too. Then it fell on its face in the tournament. The PCC/Pac-8/Pac-10/Pac-12 won 514 NCAA championships in its history, probably in every single sport except men's and women's hockey. No other conference comes close. That's why it was known as the Conference of Champions.
I was referring to play before the NCAA tournament— I.e. the body of work that a league’s teams submitted to the selection committee. The SEC’s non conference W% this year is .889. The ACC of 1983-84 holds the record at .893. The Big East of 1984-85 was also outstanding at .820. The reason the committee has never seen anything like the current SEC is twofold: excellence and size.
OK, but how do you select teams on the basis of “Well they’ve been excellent all year but what if they face plant later?” The best teams are wherever they happen to be. Nobody thought the Packers or Broncos should be excluded from the NFL playoffs because it wasn’t fair for their divisions to achieve have three teams in.
There are clear, predetermined criteria for selecting NFL playoff teams. Selection Sunday is totally different. There are 330+ teams in DI men's basketball, and more than 300+ possible at-large selections after the AQs are determined, for about 32 at-large spots. I simply don't think 20 or 22 of those possible at-large picks are in two conferences. No matter how good your league is, if you finish 11th or 12th or 13th you're just not good enough to unseat a team that might have had a superb regular season (like VCU, Drake, UCSD) only to stumble in a one-off conference tournament.
Pretty easy fix. You take the above .500 Q1-2s first for at-larges - I don’t care if they’re 1-0 - and once they’re exhausted, then you consider the next best teams, in order, based on their Q1-2 winning percentages. No bullshit where some team gets an inflated NET ranking for beating their tomato cans or four on their schedule by 40 instead of the predicted 20 only to find their level in conference play where they’re mediocre against their peers. Kenpom/NET, etc., are flawed as fuck in that regard.