The SEC's basketball standings will look different next year

It seems that the SEC is finally fed up with the balance -- or lack there of -- of power in their basketball divisions.

Starting next year, the league will no longer be broken up by divisions. SEC basketball is scrapping the football-style setup, going from two six-team divisions to one 12 team league. The change will also mean that the SEC Tournament will switch to a standard 12 team tournament, meaning that the top four teams overall will get first round byes instead of the top two teams from each division. This was a point of contention last year when Mississippi State, who was 9-7 in the Western division, got a first-round bye while Georgia and Vanderbilt, who went 9-7 with a much tougher league schedule, had to play a first round game.

For the past two seasons, it hasn't been a secret that the SEC East was much more powerful than the SEC West. Last year, the East sent five teams to the NCAA Tournament, including Tennessee, who was 8-8 in conference play. The West didn't send any. Alabama, who was 12-4 in the league, was one of the teams that was NIT bound.

Part of the issue was with the way that the schedule was set up. Each team played their divisional rivals twice while playing each cross-division team once. This means that teams in the East played twice as many games against NCAA Tournament teams. This hurt Alabama, who needed all the schedule strength they could muster in SEC play after struggling in the non-conference portion of their schedule.

"Our goal is to have eight teams in the discussion for the NCAA tournament and we don't want to hurt the top teams from winning the national title,'' John Calipari told ESPN.com in response to tweaking the format for the SEC tournament and protecting the top teams with byes.

One thing to note -- the SEC schedule won't change until 2012-2013. Next year they will have the same imbalanced schedule, using the football divisions to determine which teams play a home-and-home and which teams play once. No decision has been made yet regarding the future scheduling.