Men’s basketball SEC Power Rankings for Jan. 15: Vols move up

The Tennessee Volunteers moved up after two more wins in our men’s basketball SEC Power Rankings for the week of Jan. 15, 2018.

Talk about another crazy week in the conference! SEC basketball has taken fans on a wilder ride than they’ve seen in years. And it has completely thrown our SEC Power Rankings for a loop. We seriously had a very hard time ranking these teams.

After all, six teams split this past week, with one win and one loss. On top of that, one of the teams near the bottom of our rankings last week won both games. And that has completely mixed up everything.

In this week’s version of our SEC Power Rankings, we had to really put emphasis on record and recency. Head to head and even schedule strength still matter along with margin of victory and where games were won.

But it became extremely hard to figure out how to weigh each of those things. Still, the middle is the hardest part, as anybody could have predicted.

The top four of our rankings are pretty clear and were easy to figure out. It was actually easy to rank them as well. The same holds true for the bottom three at this point. But No. 11 to No. 5 are a complete cluster.

There are currently eight SEC teams who would be in the NCAA Tournament for sure if the season ended today, and another three would be on the bubble. But overall, 13 of the 14 teams in the conference all have a legitimate shot to make it. That’s how deep things are.

Let’s show you just how crazy the conference is as we break everything down. These are our men’s basketball SEC Power Rankings for the middle of January in 2018.