This is an opinion column.

Oakland, meet Yale.

You guys are more alike than you think — a brotherhood of punchy narrative slayers who bagged a few trophies this week. Where Oakland (of Michigan) punked Kentucky on Thursday night, Yale (of the Ivy League) took down the SEC tournament champion Friday.

This is not the time to justify these results. When the final horn sounded in Spokane, the SEC had lost five of its first six NCAA tournament games. Just minutes earlier, Florida’s insane comeback ended in a 102-100 heartbreaker to Colorado. This one isn’t on the Gators.

It’s more about the point the Oaklands and Yales are making when Greg Sankey was beating the drum for more football power conference at-large teams. We wrote Friday about the argument the SEC commissioner made about “giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers” backfiring badly.

Seeing the league champ flop under pressure from … Yale … on Friday only drove it home. That 78-76 loss left the SEC at 1-5 in first-round games until two of its more inconsistent teams salvaged some pride for the league. Texas A&M’s 98-83 rout of Nebraska was followed by a 109-96 Alabama pounding of Charleston.

A 13-point beating (after leading by as many as 31) of a 13-seed is kinda what you’d expect for a 4-seed — something more likely to come from the red-hot SEC champ and not its rival that lost four of its last six entering Friday.

Instead, it was the Auburn team that won its previous six games by an average of 18.3 points that repeated Kentucky’s failure from the night before.

What ended the same took a much different path to disaster.

Kentucky felt like it was on a slow march to the inevitable.

Auburn, on the other hand, traveled a less linear road to the same cold shower. This one started weird, appeared to balance out and then took a nose dive.

Starting junior Chad Baker-Mazara was ejected 3:01 into the game for throwing a flagrant elbow on a day the Tigers stayed in foul trouble. Yale was 21-for-31 from the foul line as Auburn was called for its third most fouls of the season (25).

Still, it looked like they were in control.

A 3-pointer from Denver Jones with 7:27 left put the Tigers up 10 — appearing to survive the early-half surge from the Bulldogs. They’d make just 3 of the last 9 shots from the field though the official stats appeared to miss some of the game-ending opportunities that made this loss so maddening.

The Tigers had four shots at cutting a three-point lead to two with less than a minute to play. Then in the closing ticks, they had two more at the rim and KD Johnson’s 3-pointer for the win that missed the mark.

That’s not the point.

It should’ve never been that close.

That comes from the writer who stuck his neck out saying Auburn got hosed by the NCAA tournament selection committee only to see that group lose to the Ivy League champs. This looked like a team that checked all the boxes for a team capable of a deep March run, but those teams haze Yale like the junior partner in a law firm bullpen.

Do you think Yale has much of an NIL program?

Sure, they’ll run the hedge funds that’ll put us all out of business one day but they have no, well, business competing with the SEC champion on the hardwood. Seriously, this was a deep, veteran and physical Auburn team that had every attribute a Final Four team could want.

Instead, it dropped to 2-3 in NCAA tournament games since making its magical 2019 run to the national semifinal. Yale was the second double-digit seed to show the Tigers the door. In fact, the Bulldogs broke a 40-year-old Auburn record to become the highest-seeded team to beat the Tigers.

Move over 12th-seeded Richmond in 1984.

But seriously, Auburn had legitimate gripes about being sent to Spokane and the unpenalized actions that preceded Baker-Mazara’s flagrant elbow. And of course, the Tigers missed his 10.3 points, 41.8% 3-point shooting and the glue his big personality brings to the floor.

Still, Auburn’s better than that.

Its rabid fans that caravanned to Nashville last Sunday for the SEC title game deserved more.

And Sankey would have liked more because, you know, it just means …

Well, it should mean we leave this beautiful mess of an NCAA tournament and the automatic qualifiers who sprinkle it with flavor alone.

The folk tales that’ll survive the collegiate sports nuclear winter will be Oakland rising up from Michigan, apparently, to beat mighty Kentucky.

Around here, we’ll remember how close Samford came to chalking a Jayhawk in a legendary comeback marred by a phantom foul.

They’ll be telling stories at country club member-guest cocktail hours for decades about Yale beating the SEC champs with a team full of future senators.

James Madison, a 12-seed and Sun Belt champ, handled Wisconsin 72-61 later Friday. This was a Badger team that lost eight of its last 11 regular-season games but got a No. 5 seed by reaching the Big Ten title game.

No. 11 seed Duquesne beating BYU (now of the Big 12) isn’t quite as memorable but probably makes this point better than the others. The Atlantic-10 automatic qualifier eliminated a power conference team that finished the season 23-11.

In the struggle between the elite leagues and everyone else, the big boys want more of its midsection in the tournament. Nobody would argue Auburn or Kentucky’s loss proves they shouldn’t be in the tournament.

Virginia’s 67-42 play-in-round loss to Colorado State does.

But they have a strong ally in Sankey, arguably the top of the college sports pyramid. So it’s fitting the conference he leads poked holes in his advocacy for the powerfully mediocre.

That and iconic performances from peers Yale and Oakland.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.