How No. 1 Auburn can take care of business vs. 16-seed Alabama State
The Tigers now know they'll be playing their friends from right down the road. Here's how they can avoid a real scare in Lexington.
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LEXINGTON, Ky. — It only takes a 50-minute drive up Interstate 85 to get from Alabama State to Auburn.
It’s a trip that the Hornets have taken many times in many different sports. They literally did it Tuesday, facing the Tigers in a high-scoring midweek baseball game. It’s just what happens when you have another Division I program — and one that prefers keeping that paycheck game money in their home state — right down the road.
In men’s basketball, Auburn has played Alabama State six times. But the seventh meeting won’t happen at Neville Arena or inside the Acadome. (Yes, Auburn made the trip to Montgomery to play at Alabama State in 2007.)
Instead, it will be played nearly 500 miles away at the famous Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. And Alabama State had to take a quick detour in Dayton, Ohio to get there.
As the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, Auburn got to play the winner of the play-in game between the two lowest-rated teams in the field: KenPom No. 275 Alabama State and KenPom No. 311 Saint Francis of Pennsylvania.
While Saint Francis led for most of the first game of the Big Dance on Tuesday evening, Alabama State took the lead in the final minutes and pulled off a game-winning, last-second layup on a full-court pass.
For the first time in school history, Alabama State — a program whose most famous former player is 2 Chainz — can say it has won a game in the NCAA Tournament.
Tony Madlock, who was an assistant coach at Auburn under Tony Barbee in the early 2010s, can say he has won a game in the NCAA Tournament. (As a head coach, Barbee cannot.)
“Congratulations also to all the teams in the state of Alabama that made the NCAA Tournament, made some of their conference championship games, so on and so forth,” Bruce Pearl said Sunday night. “Happy for Tony, proud of Alabama State.”
To say that Pearl and this Auburn team has some familiarity with this Alabama State team would be an understatement. Auburn beat Alabama State by a score of 82-62 in a pre-Christmas home game last season.
“Of course, we know a little bit about Alabama State because of playing Coach Madlock’s team a year ago,” Pearl said. “As I recall, it was a pretty up-and-down game. They're really good athletes and play an attractive style of play. We'll go back and take a look at that, obviously.”
Auburn arrived in Lexington on Tuesday, several hours before Alabama State even tipped off in Dayton. The Tigers spent all day Monday and most of the day Tuesday without knowing who they’ll play Thursday afternoon.
That caused Pearl to go with a different kind of scouting strategy this week.
“What we'll do is we'll have two different groups of my coaching staff working on each time like we're playing them,” Pearl said Sunday. “So, I got some of my staff working Alabama State like that's gonna be the team. I've got some other guys on my staff working on St. Francis like that's gonna be the team we're gonna be playing against.
“That's why, right now, I'll probably spend my first day or two taking a look at Creighton and Louisville. And then, once we know who we're playing, it'll have to be a quick study Tuesday night, Wednesday to be able to get ready to go.”
Speaking of a quick study on Alabama State…