AUBURN | For so very, very long in men’s basketball, the SEC was Kentucky and everybody else.

Occasionally, other teams would pop up and flex their muscles like Florida in the mid-2000’s. But while the Wildcats usually took a backseat on the gridiron, they almost alway owned the hardwood.

Kentucky has won 49 SEC regular season championships and the rest of the league has combined for 62. UK has won 31 SEC Tournament championships. The rest of the league has combined for 32.

That’s domination. But that era is over.

UK has won just one SEC regular season and one SEC Tournament title in the last seven seasons.

But what’s happened to the Wildcats isn’t about the deterioration of their program. They’re still one of the top teams in the country.

It’s about the ascension of every other program in the SEC including Auburn.

There are nine SEC teams in the current AP Top 25, which will be updated Monday afternoon, including five in the top 10. There are two more receiving votes.

Just 10 years ago, in Bruce Pearl’s first season at Auburn, the SEC had one team in the Top 25 and just two others receiving votes.

It’s a stunning turnaround, and it’s beginnings go back a dozen years to former commissioner Mike Slive. It was his mandate to the league’s athletic directors in 2014 to invest more money into men’s basketball that jumpstarted the process.

His successor, Greg Sankey, took it another step two years later when he hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as a consultant and former NBA and college coach Dan Leibovitz as an associate commissioner of men’s basketball.

Under their direction, SEC schools have invested more in their programs, hired better coaches and taken big steps forward on the court.

Auburn is a perfect example, although its ascension started nearly a decade earlier when President Jay Gogue, athletic director Jay Jacobs and the Board of Trustees began the process of acquiring financing and planning the construction of Neville Arena, which was completed in 2010.

Of course, they also erred in hiring Tony Barbee, but rectified that by replacing him four years later with Bruce Pearl in 2014, which came within days of Slive's mandate.

Pearl has built Auburn into a national powerhouse, which has benefitted the SEC, while many teams in the conference have experienced similar growth, which has benefitted Auburn.

Saturday, the top-ranked Tigers beat No. 6 Tennessee in only the second top 10 matchup in Auburn in program history. And it’s quite possible AU could host two more top 10 matchups before the season ends with No. 6 Florida visiting Feb. 8 and No. 4 Alabama March 8.

I’m not sure there’s an achievement that better encapsulates the growth of Auburn and the SEC than that.

And it all came about because of Slive, Sankey, Tranghese, Leibovitz, Gogue, Jacobs, the BOT, Pearl and many other boosters and stakeholders at Auburn and throughout the SEC.

Slive, who passed away in 2018, saw the opportunity to boost the SEC’s revenue and prestige by investing more in men’s basketball. The payout has been immense.

And no program better exemplifies Slive’s vision than Auburn. It was there for all the world to see Saturday night.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 34 years to one of the greatest ever performances of the national anthem. On Jan. 27, 1991, Whitney Houston performed the national anthem along with the Florida Orchestra before Super Bowl XXV in Tampa, Fla. It comes as U.S. troops are fighting in the first Gulf War. It reaches No. 20 on the Billboard 100 after being released as a single, and it’s released again after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Houston sang live on the field but the version heard on the T.V. broadcast was previously taped. The Florida Orchestra recorded its part in early January and Houston added her vocals a week later in just one take. It was arranged by jazz musician John Clayton. Houston and Clayton purposely slowed down their recording, which NFL executives didn’t like. They asked them to re-record it at a faster tempo but were turned down. The Super Bowl featured the Buffalo Bills making the first of four consecutive appearances, all losses, against the N.Y. Giants. This was the most heartbreaking after Scott Norwood missed a 47-yard field goal with eight seconds left in a 20-19 loss.

Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born in Newark, N.J., in 1963. Her mother, Cissy Houston, was a Grammy winning gospel and soul singer and she was a cousin of six-time Grammy winner Dionne Warwick. Houston was active at New Hope Baptist church where she joined the choir at age five and learned to play piano. She started out as a background singer in her mother’s band while she was in high school. She also became one of the first black models to appear on the cover of Seventeen magazine in 1981, the year she graduated from Mount Saint Dominic, a Catholic girl’s high school. Houston’s big break came when Clive Davis of Arista Records saw her perform at a nightclub and signed her to a recording contract in 1983. She released her first album, Whitney Houston, in 1985, which was a smashing success with three No. 1 singles in “Saving All My Love,” “How Will I Know” and “Greatest Love of All.” She went on to release six more albums and have eight more No. 1 singles including 1987’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and “Didn’t We Almost Have it All,” 1990’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight” and 1992’s “I Will Always Love You” from the soundtrack of The Bodyguard, which she starred in along with Kevin Costner. She is the only artist to have seven consecutive No. 1 singles on the Billboard 100. She starred in eight films and produced four more including 2001’s The Princess Diaries and 2003’s The Cheetah Girls. She won six Grammy Awards and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. Houston had a tumultuous and abusive 15-year marriage with musical artist Bobby Brown that was made worse with alcohol and drug abuse. She went through rehab at least three times but passed away at the age of 48 in 2012 after drowning in a bathtub due to heart disease and cocaine use. Houston sold over 220 million records, which ranks in the top 15 of all time.