Asbury’s AD helped start the SEC’s push to become the nation’s best basketball league
When only three SEC teams were selected for the 2013 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, commissioner Mike Slive decided the conference needed to get serious about the sport.
He encouraged league coaches and athletic directors to strengthen their schedules. He hired former NCAA Tournament guru Greg Shaheen as a scheduling consultant. And he charged SEC vice commissioner Mark Whitworth to be specifically responsible for the sport.
Now, over a decade later, Whitworth is the VP for intercollegiate athletics at Asbury University in Wilmore, where he has watched the initiative he helped start blossom to the point where the SEC is possibly the strongest basketball conference in the history of the sport.
“At the time I had been working with our coaches on scheduling and television and that kind of thing, and I was pretty involved in the tournament,” said Whitworth last week. “But we would have conversations and I said, ‘Commissioner, we are the only ‘Power Five’ league that doesn’t have an executive staff member who’s waking up every day thinking about basketball in that conference.’ So, yeah, it was really his vision to change that, and he approached me about that job.”
To carry out Slive’s vision, Whitworth’s job was basically to have league members recommit to men’s basketball.
“One of the things we did was ask the ADs to designate a senior staff member to be the men’s basketball administrator,” Whitworth said. “We would have quarterly meetings, in addition to our coaches meetings, and just trying to cast kind of a wider net, get more people involved. We were really kind of just building that framework.”
Slive brought in former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as an advisor. When Whitworth departed in 2016 before returning to his alma mater at Asbury in 2018, new SEC commissioner Greg Sankey hired Dan Leibovitz as Whitworth’s replacement. When Leibovitz departed for the Big East in 2023, he was replaced by Garth Glissman.
Meanwhile, SEC basketball is experiencing a historic year. It dominated the ACC/SEC Challenge 14-2 last November. Nine SEC teams populate the current AP Top 25, including three of the top four — No. 1 Auburn, No. 3 Alabama and No. 4 Tennessee. Through Sunday’s action, 14 of the league‘s 16 members were in the top 50 of the NCAA NET computer rankings.
When Mark Pope was asked recently to explain the strength of SEC basketball, the new Kentucky coach replied simply, “Everyone wants to be in the SEC.”
That was goal No. 1 for Slive, who died from prostate cancer in 2018 at age 77.
“We wanted to work to become the best option in the country for a student athlete who wants to compete at a high level and be serious about their degree as well” Whitworth said. “We looked at everything from facilities to scheduling. Scheduling was probably one of the key foundational areas and we were behind in that area, quite frankly. And the membership was really supportive. Some of the coaches were not thrilled about playing more difficult, as you can imagine, but they did to a person understand, hey, we’ve got to do this.”
Slive’s push behind the launch of the SEC Network was also a key factor.
“We had another real prominent platform to put the product on,” Whitworth said. “A lot of people watching games and talking about SEC basketball. It just increased awareness. The other thing, I think, was we looked at the SEC Tournament. Are we doing everything we can to make sure the tournament is a first-class experience, the best there is in the country. When you get prominent institutions like those who are in the SEC, and kind of shine a bright light on it like that, you’re going to see, over time, improvement.”
At Asbury, Whitworth is now overseeing the university’s move from NAIA to NCAA Division III athletics.
“We really feel like NCAA D3 is where we need to be,” Whitworth said. “I tell people, ‘We’re a program that’s in a growth mode.’ And, honestly, the work that I did for men’s basketball, just to kind of shine a brighter light on that product and see what we can do to get better, that’s kind of in the same type of work we’ve done here at Asbury.”
Meanwhile, Whitworth has a feeling of pride about the SEC’s success in men’s basketball.
“A lot of credit goes to Mike Slive and certainly Greg Sankey and the ADs,” Whitworth said. “But I think about those early basketball administrators meetings, because we had never had those before, and when you’re committed to those kinds of things and you have the horsepower that these institutions have, you’re going to see progress. And that’s what’s happening.”
