Before Auburn ever took the court this past season, Bruce Pearl had visions of New Orleans.
Despite a retooled roster that included five newcomers — four transfers and the highest-rated recruit in program history — Pearl believed this iteration of the Tigers had the potential to make a Final Four run. Those aren’t easy to come by; Auburn’s lone Final Four appearance in program history was just three years ago, in 2019. That’s how highly Pearl thought of this assembled collection of talent.
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Pearl spent the final weekend of the season in New Orleans, though not as he once envisioned. He was there, in part, to celebrate Walker Kessler as the sophomore took home the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year award, not to compete for a national title on the sport’s biggest stage. Those Final Four aspirations never came to fruition.
Auburn enjoyed one of the most successful seasons in program history, but the Tigers’ dream season experienced a rude awakening in the second round of the NCAA Tournament with a 79-61 loss to Miami — the team’s first double-digit loss of the year coming in its final game of the season.
“We never quite got a huge second wind that I know we got in ‘19 after we finished fifth in the regular season and won our last four regular-season games, got hot in the tournament, got hot at the end and made our run,” Pearl said Wednesday.
As Pearl reflected on his eighth season on the Plains, he showed appreciation for his players — specifically taking time to thank Kessler and Jabari Smith, the two nationally recognized frontcourt players who declared for the NBA Draft this week, as well as Devan Cambridge, who recently transferred after three seasons with the program — and everything the Tigers accomplished. That included a 28-6 overall record (the third-most wins in a season in school history), the Tigers’ first-ever No. 1 ranking in the AP poll, an outright regular-season SEC championship and a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
But he also addressed the question that many have wondered about this team: Did Auburn peak too early?
The Tigers won 22 of their first 23 games, their lone loss during the first three months of the season coming in double-overtime to UConn in the Battle 4 Atlantis. That stretch included a 19-game winning streak that catapulted the Tigers to the top of the AP poll for three weeks. During that streak, Auburn had seven wins against NCAA Tournament teams: Loyola Chicago, Yale, Murray State, LSU, Alabama (twice) and Kentucky — with an average margin of victory of 13 points.
That streak ended Feb. 8 in overtime at Arkansas. It was the start of a 6-5 finish to the season for Auburn. Even before that loss to the Razorbacks — who ultimately advanced to the Elite Eight — the Tigers showed some cracks in their veneer, specifically away from home in narrow escapes at Georgia and Missouri, two of the bottom-three teams in the league.
“You could certainly make a very strong case that we weren’t playing our best basketball at the end,” Pearl said. “There’s no doubt about it.”
While some will undoubtedly argue that Auburn peaked too early in its campaign, Pearl took a step back and looked at the bigger picture: If Auburn didn’t play at the level it did early in the SEC schedule, when it opened with a tough slate that included LSU, Florida and Alabama in its first four games, his team wouldn’t have been in position to win an SEC regular-season title. The Tigers, despite those late-season struggles, went 15-3 in the conference and were atop the league standings from start to finish.
“At some point during the season, whether it was the Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky (games), on the road at a couple places where we were playing great basketball — if this team did peak then, did it peak too soon or did it peak in time to be able to win those games?” Pearl said. “And then you don’t win those games and you don’t peak, then you find yourself in a different situation.”
The situation Auburn found itself in at the end of the regular season was one that will result in a banner being raised at Neville Arena this fall. It also earned the team a coveted double-bye in the SEC Tournament and ultimately the top No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The Tigers were unable to take advantage of those earned perks, though. Auburn lost to a hot Texas A&M team in the quarterfinals of the SEC Tournament, and then following an opening-round win against 15th-seeded Jacksonville State, Auburn saw its season end in a second-round blowout at the hands of 10th-seeded Miami. Both teams provided matchup issues for Auburn that the Tigers couldn’t overcome.
“I think Texas A&M and Miami both proved to be buzzsaws,” Pearl said.
Texas A&M, which won eight of its last nine games before falling to Tennessee in the SEC title game, jumped on Auburn early in the SEC Tournament. The Aggies led by 16 at halftime and by as many as 20 in the second half before the Tigers’ comeback efforts down the stretch fell short. Texas A&M went on to miss the cut for the NCAA Tournament but finished as runner-up in the NIT.
Miami, meanwhile, throttled Auburn. Jim Larranaga’s signature defense scrambled Auburn’s chances, as Pearl was admittedly outcoached, and the Tigers’ best players didn’t perform anywhere near their best. Smith shot 3-of-16 from the field and 1-of-8 from deep, while Kessler was held to two points on 0-of-6 shooting and was saddled by early foul trouble that took him out of a rhythm and made him a nonfactor.
Pearl didn’t want to make excuses for his team’s shortcomings, but he acknowledged the grind of the season and the quest for an SEC title may have caught up to his team in the end, the Tigers’ spectacular rise precipitating an abrupt fall and unceremonious end to an otherwise historic season.
“(We thought) this team better get better in a hurry, and it did,” Pearl said. “I think we worked so hard to get good enough early to win, yeah, that I would say we wound up peaking sometime at the end of January, early February.”
Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.
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