When it comes to Southeastern Conference basketball, history is not all that important except to draw comparisons and remind everyone that the league no longer belongs to Kentucky. For the record, the Wildcats have won 50 regular season championships and 32 tournament titles for a total of 82.
There was a time when the Wildcats were the favorite every year and most of the rest of conference members treated basketball as an afterthought.
If fact, a football assistant was often the head basketball coach. If you needed a big man, one with height and muscle, most schools recruited him from the football team.
Teams traveled by bus (in some cases a couple of station wagons) and ate at cafeterias where the players could eat all they wanted, which was the only way the budget could be managed efficiently.
Bernie Shively, at Kentucky, was the only athletic director in the league who was not the football coach. You can imagine how that went over with Bear Bryant when he became the Wildcat football coach who eventually left when he realized that basketball, under Adolph Rupp, would always be the No. 1 sport in Lexington.
Shively organized and made out the league’s basketball schedule as if Kentucky needed any more advantages.
Those days are no more. The SEC has become one of the strongest and best conferences in basketball. Former Georgia coach, Mark Fox, who now is an assistant in Kentucky says the SEC is the best in the country “because we have the best commissioner (Greg Sankey), who promotes all sports with great commitment and passion. He wants basketball to be the best.”
Fox points out that while the league may be the best in football, there is a difference in that it is difficult for the lesser teams in football to move up but that is not the case in basketball. “I don’t see how SEC basketball could be any more competitive, top to bottom.”
This makes it more challenging for Kentucky to dominate as in the past. Fox is enjoying his time in Lexington where he, in an unusual twist, is working as an assistant to Mark Pope, whom he hired at Georgia in 2009-10 as director of basketball operations. Pope was enrolled in medical school at Columbia University at the time.
Mike White will start his fourth season in Athens on November 3 versus Bellarmine University, a small Catholic college in Louisville, Kentucky, but his job has become a year-round routine which is demanding and intense. The person with the highest expectations for Bulldog basketball is the head coach himself. He does not play golf or tennis, for example, and has two basic interests — his family and Georgia basketball.
His pattern has been reminiscent of what it was like for him growing up. His father, Kevin, was a highly regarded athletic director with stops at Loras College, Maine, Tulane, Arizona State, Notre Dame and Duke. Mike has spent time at Jacksonville State and Ole Miss (his alma mater) as an assistant and then became the head coach at Louisiana Tech, Florida, and Georgia.
He is an involved parent along with his wife, Kira, who was an All-SEC volleyball player at Ole Miss. They show up at school functions in support of their five kids Rylee, Maggie, Collin and Keegan (twins) and Dillon.
Mike Mobley, Georgia’s Sports Information Director for basketball, says insightfully that Mike would rather “have dinner with his family than be interviewed on “SportsCenter.”
When he is coaching, he is all in and underscores several principles … one of the most significant is the work ethic which was an underpinning in his own career as an undergraduate at Ole Miss.
He has a harmonious relationship with his staff, yet he wants them to enjoy an opportunity to grow. After all, he once was an assistant with ambition and understands that all assistants think about advancing in the profession.
An efficient organizer and planner, he respects the time of his players whom he constantly encourages to take opportunity of the academic process while they are on campus. It is a point of pride with him that while he was playing professional basketball, he found a way to return to campus and complete degree requirements at Ole Miss.
Supporting his academic philosophy, Georgia basketball players in the fall of 2024 had a cumulative GPA of 3.28 which was the highest in program history and they followed that up with a 3.18 average in the spring which happened to be the second highest in history. This took place while the team was playing its way into the NCAA tournament.