It could be an elevator, a hallway or a corridor this weekend at one of the Final Fours, the men’s in Arizona or the women’s in Cleveland. Greg Sankey, commissioner of the SEC, has a team in each, so doubtless he will be at both. Len Perna, meanwhile, has an idea, and if he sees Sankey he may do everything in his power to get a minute.

At most, Sankey will smile politely, nod and keep the conversation short. For now, the chances of Sankey and his conference wanting any part of Perna’s idea are about as good as the SEC giving up football as a varsity sport.

Because that’s essentially what it would be doing here.

The notion of a college football “Super League” has been percolating for a while, and one idea finally went public on Wednesday, when The Athletic reported that a number of power brokers, including the presidents at Syracuse and West Virginia and Perna, the CEO of TurnkeyZRG, were pushing for a 70-team permanent group, employing athletes as players, making its own rules and leaving non-football sports to the existing conferences, as is.

Publicly, the reaction among SEC power brokers was crickets: Sankey and the presidents at…

April showers might bring May flowers, but Selection Sunday brings Transfer Portal Monday. … That’s what they say, right?

Welcome to transfer portal season, where the action in the portal somehow manages to rival the action we see on the floor. In each of the past two seasons, more than 1,000 women’s basketball players entered the portal in hopes of finding a new landing spot.

As we have in the past, we’ll be tracking the biggest names and most impactful players who enter their names over the next month and a half.

We’re only a day in, and it’s already hot. Here’s a ranking of the top prospects who are available in the transfer portal.

Arkansas freshman guard

Key stats: 22.1 points per game (PPG), 3.3 rebounds per game (RPG), 41 percent field goal percentage (FG%)

Scott will be one of the most highly coveted portal players given her offensive ability and three years of eligibility remaining. Among freshmen nationally, only USC’s JuJu Watkins and Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo scored more points per game than Scott this season. Her 3-point shot needs a bit of work (she shot only 30 percent from beyond the arc), but she’s a three-level scorer regardless. At 5 feet 9, she’s still a threat in getting to the bucket, and she drew more than four fouls per game this…

(Editor’s note: This is part of the Bracket Central Series, an inside look at the run-up to the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournaments, along with analysis and picks during the tournaments.)

Power conferences understandably dominate discussion, particularly Bubble Watch talk, this time of year. All the teams fighting in the middle, yearning for resume-supplementing wins, provide some of the most notable matchups and storylines.

However, it’s worth pausing and noting some of the more under-the-radar seasons in the country, especially the programs that we are trending toward hearing about in March. I can think of few teams more deserving of that mention than Marshall.

The Thundering Herd are 20-6, a standout record on its own but even more notable when recognizing this is the first time since the 2016 season they have eclipsed the 20-win mark and just the second time since they left the Southern Conference in 1997. This is West Virginia native Kim Caldwell’s first season at the helm in Huntington. She led her alma mater, DII Glenville State, for seven seasons, including a national championship in 2022. In her first foray as a head coach at the highest level of collegiate basketball, something special is brewing.

Find it your local newspaper #WeAreMarshall

The SEC is closing in on being a billion-dollar conference: Revenues continued to go up in the most recent fiscal year and are expected to keep climbing amid a new TV deal, College Football Playoff expansion and the addition of Texas and Oklahoma.

The SEC announced Thursday that it distributed $741 million to its 14 schools in the 2022-23 fiscal year, meaning an average payout of $51.2 million. That’s up from the average payout of $49.9 million during the previous fiscal year.

That revenue comes mainly from television deals (CBS and ESPN up until this year),  football bowl games, the Playoff, the SEC Championship Game, the SEC men’s basketball tournament and NCAA championships.

The current fiscal year largely will feature the same sources of revenue, so the average payout may only go up slightly. But starting with the 2024-25 fiscal year, the new TV deal with ESPN will kick in, and it’s expected to be worth around $811 million. There will be the 12-team Playoff, which will pay out more in television and other revenue to all conferences. And the addition of the Longhorns and Sooners should help attendance and other revenue.

The SEC still would be short of the Big Ten, with its new $1.1 billion TV deal and addition of four schools (USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington). But the…

With the advent of the transfer portal, it’d be fair to assume there are fewer opportunities for freshmen these days. And that might be true. But when I sat down to put together my list of the 10 freshmen I’m most excited to see play this season, the group quickly expanded to 15 … and then 20. Some of these players will have opportunities to impress because of the roster churn at their program and others are going to be good enough to leapfrog over older, more established players.

These 20 players — for a variety of reasons — are the 20 I’m most intrigued to see this season as they make the jump from high school (or international) ball to the NCAA.

1. JuJu Watkins

USC guard, 6-2
Sierra Canyon High School, Los Angeles

In working on this story, I talked with a bunch of college coaches. At first, my question was: “Which freshmen are going to have freshman all-American-type seasons?” I quickly needed to add: “Other than JuJu.” There seems to be a solid consensus that Watkins — the No. 1 player in the 2023 class — has the potential to live up to the hype, and many expect her to do just that. Coach Lindsay Gottlieb can, and should, give Watkins the keys to the car as they work to rebuild the Trojans into a West Coast (soon to be Big Ten?) powerhouse. Watkins will…

Nick Saban, Greg Sankey and a host of other dignitaries from the Southeastern Conference are in Washington, D.C., this week to convince legislators to address what is undeniably one of the most pressing crises in our country right now: NIL collectives.

It’s not that commissioners, athletic directors and coaches are against athletes finally earning money for their name, image and likeness. It’s that in many cases they’re being paid too much money, and that sometimes the money is not being used as it was intended, and it’s not being regulated, so man, do we have ourselves some problems.

Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek, a member of the aforementioned D.C. convoy, explained one of those problems at a Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce event this week.

“Young men and women are making decisions not to go to Major League Baseball or the WNBA or the NBA because they can make more money in college,” Yurachek said, according to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “Does that make any sense, that you can make more money by staying in college than you can by going and being a professional athlete? That’s where we have some issues in college athletics.”

Upon reading this, you may be asking yourself: Wait, isn’t it a good thing for college athletics if the star athletes want to stay in…

Most SEC teams are a few weeks into spring practice, and Auburn has its A-game this week. The future scheduling format is closer to being announced (presumably) and the SEC just claimed its second consecutive NCAA women’s basketball title. So, it’s a good time for an SEC mailbag: Post your submissions below and selected ones will be answered later this week. Fire away!

I don’t envy the NCAA Tournament selection committee’s job. Not one bit. While increased parity has been such a good thing overall for women’s college basketball over the past five years or so, it makes fielding the NCAA Tournament a lot more difficult.

While the regular season has come to a close for some teams and others are finishing up, being on the bubble means there’s still a fighting chance to make it into March Madness. But it also means that strength of schedules, wins and losses are under that much more scrutiny.

When it comes to tournament seeding, there’s such a small gap between having a shot and not having one at all. Enter, St. John’s. The Red Storm were previously out, but an upset of UConn got them back in. One ranked win here, one bad loss there — for bubble teams, it can all come down to that.

Sitting pretty

Miami (18-11, 11-7 ACC; NET: 49, SOS: 56)

Despite recent sanctions levied by the NCAA due to NIL/player recruitment infractions, Miami has to be feeling good about its chances of making the tournament. Key wins against North Carolina (NET: 23), Virginia Tech (11) and Florida State (20), along with a close loss to ACC regular-season champion Notre Dame, have boosted the Hurricanes’ resume. Right now, Miami is projected as a No. 9 or 10 seed in…