Midway through SEC play, where does Auburn sit in Bracketology?

The Tigers are decently above the bubble and have plenty of opportunities to boost a solid NCAA Tournament resume down the stretch.

(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)

AUBURN — Steven Pearl and his Auburn team probably could not have asked for a better time to get their off date in the gauntlet that is SEC basketball season.

After seeing its four-game winning streak come to an end last Saturday in a road loss at Tennessee, Auburn doesn’t have to play again until this Saturday — its first showdown of the season against rival Alabama.

“We’ve got to learn from it, because we can't change our approach now that we've lost a game,” Pearl said Saturday night after the loss. “Told the guys, I was like, ‘It's easy to be good when you're winning, right? Winners are the ones that are good when you're losing. Losers are the guys that are only good when things are going their way.’

“So we can't do that. We're going to stay consistent with what we do. We're going to break it down. We'll be back to work tomorrow to get ready for a bit of an off week and obviously get ready for Alabama on Saturday.”

While Alabama has to host SEC leader Texas A&M on Wednesday, Auburn gets all that extra time to reset and prepare. (It might be worth noting that SEC teams this season are 1-6 immediately after playing A&M. Auburn is the only one that has won.)

The midweek break comes at the exact middle point of SEC play for the Tigers. They went 5-4 in the first half, rallying from 0-2 and 1-3 starts to put themselves in the top half of the league. Now they’ll enter a second half that, while challenging, currently has six games in which they will be projected favorites.

If Auburn was able to pull that 6-3 second half off, they would finish the regular season at 20-11 overall and 11-7 in the SEC.

KenPom projections show that an 11-7 record would be in the mix for a top-4 spot and a double-bye in the SEC Tournament, depending on tiebreakers. A 10-8 mark should be enough for a single bye. Anything better could mean a shot at a championship.

Getting to a 20-win regular season would be quite significant in Year 1 under Pearl for Auburn, which has done that in four straight campaigns and eight of its last nine.

While Auburn won’t reach the regular season success of last year’s historic campaign — or the 24-7 and 13-5 one the year before that — the Tigers are still sitting in a good spot to return to the NCAA Tournament and hit March with momentum.

Keep in mind that the first Final Four team at Auburn shook off a 2-4 start in SEC play to finish with an 11-7 league record, capped with six wins in its final seven. It’s something that Pearl noted back on January 8, after Auburn fell to 0-2 in the SEC.

“That team had its warts, had its issues, and found a way to figure things out,” Pearl said. “We figured out our roles and we had a great year. … The past is entirely contained in your head, right? It's nowhere else and for us the present is all that can exist. That's gotta be the message.”

The Tigers shook off a blowout loss to Michigan to get back-to-back Quad 1 wins over St. John’s and NC State.

They went from that 0-2 start to routing Arkansas at home.

They responded to a lackluster defeat at Missouri with gotta-have-it wins over South Carolina and Ole Miss, followed by a massive upset at Florida and a huge comeback win over Texas.

By being able to fight through that adversity — something it will need over these next few games — Auburn has put itself in position decently above the dreaded bubble and with a chance to make some real noise in February.

Let’s take advantage of this quick pause in the schedule for Auburn basketball to take a look at where it stands in the early NCAA Tournament projections.