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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — It’s 30 minutes before a Wednesday night tipoff at Vanderbilt, and Bruce Pearl has just finished scribbling the game plan in remarkable detail on a whiteboard inside the visitors’ locker room. His Auburn players return from their warm-up routine on the court and take a seat for Pearl’s pregame speech. “Good energy out there?” Pearl asks.
Fifth-year senior Jaylin Williams shakes his head. The Commodores are the worst team in the league, and several inches of snow are on the ground outside so, no, there’s no magic inside Memorial Gymnasium. “Gonna have to create our own,” Williams tells his coach. Pearl loves that idea. He begins thunder-clapping, bobbing his head, clenching his jaws, pacing in front of the players like a man who just lit a stick of dynamite and planned to hold on until the last possible second. He is the Henry Ford of manufacturing tension.
The night before, he’d ended practice by huddling his team and barking, “Let’s hit these guys in the mouth … and let’s run them out of the building.” Doing exactly that, over and over, for six straight weeks and 11 consecutive victories by double-digit margins, has turned the No. 8 Tigers into contenders. They’re 16-2 overall, 5-0 in SEC play, alone atop the conference standings as they head to rival Alabama on Wednesday night.
Computers love Auburn — ranked top-six by all of the metrics-based sites, top-three by some — and humans are coming around, despite a glaring lack of marquee victories. While there are zero Quad 1 wins, which might hurt the Tigers come Selection Sunday, there are just so many beatdowns. They’ve won their last 11 games by an average of 21.8 points, including a 28-point rout of Indiana and a 32-point humiliation of Arkansas that represented the worst defeat in Bud Walton Arena history. All of their wins have come by double digits.
Not bad for a team picked to finish sixth in the SEC.
But that wasn’t a wild notion at the time. Auburn finished seventh last season and, other than five-star freshman guard Aden Holloway, did not reload the roster with flashy additions. The Tigers lack star power — former Morehead State transfer Johni Broome is probably their best and most recognizable player — but Pearl believed all along that the sum of this squad would be greater than its parts.
“The bad thing is, when the ball gets tossed, our five guys may not be that much better than anybody else’s five guys,” Pearl said at SEC media day on Oct. 18. “But when I go to the bench, I’m not dropping off.”
He was exactly right. The Tigers have 10 players averaging at least 15 minutes per game but none averaging more than 23. They’re third in the country, first among high-majors, in bench scoring at 37.7 points per game. Most mind-boggling of all, via EvanMiya.com: Among five-man lineups that have played at least 90 possessions together this season, the most efficient quintet in college basketball is … Auburn’s first five guys off the bench.
That is a demoralizing kind of depth. Opponents are left wondering when they get to catch their breath, while Pearl just keeps pressing the gas pedal. With a top-10 offense and defense, there are no breaks — or brakes — against Auburn. The Tigers will tell you there’s something extremely satisfying about crushing the other team’s will.
“Just seeing that look in their eye and knowing they’re about to give up, they’re about to break,” junior guard Denver Jones says, “and then we step on their neck.”
The secret sauce in Auburn’s success so far has been a collective sacrifice that is especially rare in the transfer portal era, when the pursuit of more minutes and shot attempts — not to mention name, image and likeness paydays — drives constant roster churn. Yet somehow Pearl’s team is humming along while seven of his 10 rotational players are getting fewer minutes than they did last year with the Tigers or their previous team.
“In recruiting, I tell them, ‘I’m going to bring guys in that you’re going to want to play with, that you’re going to want to be friends with, that you’re going to want to make history with,’” Pearl says. “But, look, when you get in the transfer portal, there’s a bunch of guys who only care about the wrong things. So you know what? We took guys from junior college, Division II, mid-major. Guys who go, ‘You mean I get to be at Auburn?’”
Last night was special 🔥 pic.twitter.com/dkSNNjuv29
— Auburn Basketball (@AuburnMBB) January 22, 2024
Broome, a preseason All-SEC pick, is averaging just 23.3 minutes — down from 26.5 last season and 28.3 as a sophomore at Morehead — but his scoring is up (15.3) and rebounding is the same (8.4). His backup, 6-foot-11, 250-pound Dylan Cardwell, would start for plenty of high-major programs but gets just 15.3 minutes per game for the Tigers. Cardwell’s per-40 numbers: 15.9 points, 11.7 boards, 3.6 blocks, 2.9 assists, 2.0 steals.
“He’s a handful down there,” Broome says. “That would definitely be a hassle having to deal with both of us. There’s a little fatigue you see start to set in, when the other team’s five man plays the whole game, and we’re just rotating in and out, always fresh. The starters sit down and maybe we’re up four and the other team feels like, ‘OK, we got to their bench and we’re in good shape.’ Four minutes later, they’re down 10 and here come the starters back in.
“A lot of guys, including myself, could go somewhere else and play 35 minutes, but you’re probably not going to win as much.”
Williams, a former top-100 recruit who has waited patiently for his time to shine, is also averaging 23.3 minutes — down from 27.8 last season — but enjoying career highs in points (12.5), rebounds (5.1) and field-goal percentage (.634). Auburn’s 11-game winning streak has coincided with the best stretch of his career: 15.5 points per game on 70 percent shooting. Pearl says Williams represents “exactly what I want Auburn basketball to look like.” As well as he’s playing, he still cedes an average of 15.4 minutes at the four spot to Division II transfer Chaney Johnson, an Alabama native who plays exactly like someone who is now living a dream.
“It’s so much fun, knowing Chaney is going to come in behind me playing just as hard and as physical as I am,” Williams says. “Not many teams play this way, this unselfishly, and it’s really an amazing thing. Our strength is in numbers. I felt that most at Arkansas.They probably have more talented players than us, but we have more depth and we just don’t stop, and in the second half, they were tired and their bodies were shutting down, and they couldn’t keep up with us. Then they started getting a little frustrated, because when guys get tired, they blame other people. That’s when you know it’s over.”
Holloway is just the fifth McDonald’s All-American ever to sign with Auburn, but he’s averaging only 21.8 minutes in a point-guard timeshare with sophomore Tre Donaldson (18.6 minutes), a former four-star football recruit who is built like one. Combined, they average 17.3 points, 6.7 assists, and only 2.4 turnovers.
“It takes some pressure off,” says Holloway, who turned 19 in September. “I’ve been on great teams my whole career, but I’ve never been on one where I can rely on all my teammates this way. It really allows me to play the game freely. You don’t have to overthink or press, just play, and if it’s not going your way, someone else will pick it up.”
Jones was a first-team All-Conference USA selection last season at Florida International, where he averaged 33.4 minutes, 14 field-goal attempts and 20.1 points, second-most in the league. He’s a starter for the Tigers now, but his minutes (20.4), shots (5.5) and points (6.9) have all plummeted. Pearl told him that might happen, but he also promised to make Jones a much better defender, and he has. Jones might be Auburn’s best perimeter defender these days.
“I really wanted to be part of a winning culture,” he says. “I wanted to win a natty, and I feel like we’ve got a team to go in March Madness and win it all. There are times I wish my role was bigger, but I fight the temptation, because I’ve got great players around me and that’s what I wanted, to be part of a great team.”
His fellow two-guard, K.D. Johnson, has similarly sacrificed. Johnson started for the Tigers two years ago when they won 28 games and an SEC championship. He averaged 27.8 minutes that season, and now it’s down to 17.4 minutes and a career-low 6.1 shots per game coming off the bench. Broome describes him as “a Tasmanian devil who flies around and brings energy,” and there was at least some concern about how Johnson, Auburn’s wild-eyed gunner, might handle a shrinking role.
“A couple years ago, K.D. would’ve been checked out, just not mature enough to step up and take that on,” Williams says. “But K.D. is a whole different cat now. He sees the bigger picture now. He knows how he can help us win, and he wants to do those things.”
Nine times in the Tigers’ last 11 wins, Johnson has made at least one impactful play — a steal, a runout dunk or layup, an offensive rebound, a momentum-swinging 3 — within his first three minutes off the bench. Five times this season, he’s done that within his first 106 seconds on the floor. He enters every game as if shot out of a cannon.
“It’s probably the most fun I’ve had here,” Johnson says. “We’re doing great right now, so I’m rocking with it.”
Pearl has always played a lot of guys, nine or 10 of them getting 10-plus minutes per game on most of his teams, because it mitigates the effects of untimely injury or foul trouble. When first-round pick Chuma Okeke tore his ACL in the 2019 Sweet 16, Auburn still had enough to beat Kentucky in the Elite Eight. Pearl believes in constantly developing his bench, “but you gotta be willing to play that many guys and trust them,” he says. “I tell kids if you come play for me, you’re going to play for me, not sit on the bench.” This season has taken that idea to another level.
Chad Baker-Mazara, a junior-college transfer who was at San Diego State before that, has scored in double figures eight times this season, including 19 against LSU and 16 at Arkansas — but senior Chris Moore, averaging 2.8 points, has started every game over him. Keeping 10 starter-level players happy in a timeshare might be a precarious proposition if it weren’t already baked into the program’s DNA.
“Trust me, they’re hearing it,” Pearl says. “Some of their families, some of the parents, don’t really understand. They don’t have to. They’ve just got to trust me and trust their sons.”
That’s why he has such a soft spot for these Tigers. An involuntary grin creeps across his face when he talks about them. But he’s also a realist. He knows Auburn lost its only two Quad 1 games so far, an 88-82 thriller against Baylor on a neutral court in November and a 69-64 stunner at Appalachian State. It’s not his fault but it is his problem that Notre Dame, USC and Indiana all stink this season, which diminishes those nonconference victories. The Tigers, therefore, still don’t have a single KenPom top-35 win.
“We’re still untested. We are,” Pearl says. His team also hasn’t been in many close games, “so we don’t have a lot of experience in those situations. But we’re fixin’ to get some.”
Auburn has seven games left against top-40 teams — Alabama home and away, Mississippi State home and away, Kentucky at home, Tennessee and Florida on the road — and it’ll need to make hay in most of those if the Tigers want their NCAA Tournament seed to reflect their gaudy record. It’s why Pearl can’t let up, won’t let his team let up. Since that loss in Boone, N.C., where few power-conference programs would even dare to play, by the way, there’s been no real resistance. So Pearl has to keep manufacturing tension.
Bruce Pearl addresses his team before last Wednesday’s game at Vanderbilt. (Kyle Tucker / The Athletic)
He’s built the Auburn program to such a level of success that finding an underdog card to play has been surprisingly difficult lately. Before 2018, the Tigers missed 14 straight NCAA Tournaments and failed to even finish above .500 in 11 of those seasons. They hadn’t produced a 25-win season since Cliff Ellis’ electric 1999 team, had just eight all-time NCAA Tournament appearances before Pearl and never made a Final Four.
But then Auburn won 26 games in 2018, 30 in 2019, 25 in 2020 and 28 in 2022. The Tigers won an SEC regular-season or tournament title in three of those seasons. They made the program’s first Final Four in 2019. Pearl is 159-59 over the last six and a half years, during which time he produced seven NBA Draft picks, including five first-rounders and No. 3 overall Jabari Smith. So it was a relatively new experience this fall when there wasn’t much buzz about Pearl’s team.
He hinted that his starless squad was still going to be a very tough out, but he was also happy to let doubts linger. Because you never know when you’ll find yourself in a lifeless gym on a snowy night in January searching for the right button to push to avoid a faceplant and keep this 10-man platoon marching on.
Just before he sends his team out to pummel Vanderbilt in its gym — where Tigers fans outnumbered Commodores — Pearl rattles off his meticulously scrawled game plan like he was speed-reading the unfortunate side effects of a new prescription drug. This is all just a preamble for the pro wrestling promo portion of his pregame remarks.
“Who picked you?” he asks them.
“Anybody?” he says, a little louder.
“Anybody?” he repeats, now shouting it.
“Anybody pick us first, second, third, fourth, fifth?” Pearl screams, increasing his volume with every number. “Anybody?”
“Let’s win this game!” he concludes, at maximum volume, as the players bound up off the bench. “Let’s goooooo!” the howl, storming out of the locker room, on their way to lead for 37 of 40 minutes, by as many as 22 points, and coast to another never-in-doubt victory.
(Top photo of K.D. Johnson and the Auburn bench: Wesley Hitt / Getty Images)
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