There’s little doubt that the Southeastern Conference is the toughest league in men’s college basketball in 2025.

It features 10 teams ranked in the AP Top 25 — including the top two teams — and through the end of nonconference play, doesn’t seem to have any noticeably bad teams.

That landscape creates a tough road for Auburn to continue its dominance into conference play, but it means the Tigers and their counterparts won’t lack any big-game experience going into the postseason.

Speaking of the postseason, the collective strength of the league means there could be more teams with NCAA Tournament-caliber resumes than ever before. Just about every road game in the SEC will be a Quad I opportunity, and so will many home games.

To add context to just how strong the SEC is, here’s a look at how it stacks up in five of the major analytical rankings (KenPom, NET, Torvik, EvanMiya, ESPN BPI):

SEC average team ranking

KenPom: 30.9

NET: 29.8

Torvik: 31.7

EvanMiya: 28.4

ESPN BPI: 29.9

Where Auburn ranks

KenPom: 1

NET: 1

Torvik: 1

EvanMiya: 1

ESPN BPI: 1

What it means

Plenty to break down here, but let’s start with what these metrics and rankings mean for Auburn.

Despite being the No. 2 team in the AP Poll, the Tigers are seen as the best team in the country by each of the five major analytical metrics. While that may something about the AP rankings, it says more about just how dominant Auburn has been to be the near consensus best team in the country.

Auburn has also done this while playing the second-toughest strength of schedule in the SEC, per KenPom, with its only loss coming on the road to Duke, a team ranked No. 2 in KenPom, EvanMiya and ESPN BPI, and No. 3 in the NET and Torvik rankings.

For the SEC as a whole, the numbers are staggering on two different levels.

Not only does the conference have three consensus top 10 teams — Florida also ranks in the top 10 in every metric except ESPN BPI — no metric features an SEC team outside the top 100. KenPom, EvanMiya and ESPN BPI even have the lowest-ranked SEC team inside the top 65.

It’s hard for a league to have multiple national title contenders and balance from top to bottom, but that’s the case in the SEC.

For example, Auburn opens SEC play on Saturday with Missouri. Missouri ranks 50th in the country in KenPom, but that puts Dennis Gates’ team at 14th in the SEC. To give an idea of how unusual that is, Missouri’s KenPom rating would rank it fourth in the Big East and sixth in the ACC, two power conferences that once seemed miles ahead of the SEC.

Another stat that jumps out is that currently, Auburn is slated to play 12 Quad I games in conference play. That means 67% of the Tigers’ remaining games are against Quad I opponents.

Other teams in the SEC will have a similar number of Quad I opportunities, meaning it could only take seven or eight conference wins for a team to make the NCAA Tournament this season. It could also mean a team like Auburn could afford a few slip ups and still be well in contention for a No. 1 seed.

Auburn’s SEC opener against Missouri is scheduled to tip off at 3 p.m. on Saturday. It will be streaming live on SEC Network.

Peter Rauterkus covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @peter_rauterkus or email him at prauterkus@al.com