The Stretch 4 (and more) from Auburn basketball at SEC Media Days
The Tigers won't sneak up on anybody this season. Even if they weren't picked to win the SEC, they're in the spotlight as true contenders.
C Johni Broome and PG/SG Denver Jones (Auburn Basketbal/Instagram)
MOUNTAIN BROOK — Auburn basketball won’t sneak up on anyone this season.
Even though the Tigers weren’t picked to be the best team in the SEC — or even a top-10 squad in the Associated Press preseason poll — they will enter the upcoming campaign with the college basketball world knowing they’re true contenders.
Auburn is No. 2 in the annual SEC media preseason poll, behind rival Alabama. That’s the second-highest mark in program history, only trailing the 1999-2000 squad led by Chris Porter and Doc Robinson that was picked to win the league. It’s the highest under head coach Bruce Pearl, who previously had teams at No. 3 and No. 4.
Auburn basketball is no longer a feel-good story that’s just happy to be in the spotlight. Pearl is now the longest-tenured head coach in the SEC, and high expectations naturally come with that level of continuity.
“It's what we built,” Pearl said Tuesday at SEC Basketball Media Days. “It's what we worked for. It's easier to get someplace than it is to stay someplace. So to try to stay competitive at Auburn has been a great, great challenge, and we've managed to win four championships in the last seven years — two regular season and two tournament — with four different teams.”
Last season, Pearl got that fourth SEC championship at Auburn, delivering a memorable tournament title run with a team that was an analytics darling.
The Tigers entered the NCAA Tournament with some dark-horse national championship buzz, even if they were under-seeded as a No. 4. But they quickly exited, with an early-game ejection for Chad Baker-Mazara drastically impacting what would become a 2-point loss to Ivy League champion Yale.
And, don’t worry: The memories of that upset aren’t going anywhere.
“Nobody's satisfied with how the season ended,” All-American center Johni Broome said Tuesday. “We won the SEC Tournament championship, but we lost in the first round to Yale. We have it on our board: 78-76.
“We look at it all the time. … Everybody knows that it's still a sour taste in our mouth.”
Broome decided to come back to settle unfinished business on the Plains. So did Denver Jones, who joined him as Auburn’s player representatives at SEC Media Days.
They’re key members of a roster that’s loaded with returning experience, yet still made necessary offseason additions to round out what it hopes will be a better team in 2024-25.
“We're very resilient, mature,” Jones said. “We're gonna get after it. I love this team, because this team loves the work.”
There’s still a lot that must be determined between now and March. There’s a lot that has to be determined between now and the start of the season, which opens in a few weeks with two exhibition games and then rolls into a huge non-conference slate.
Basketball season will get rolling before you know it, and a Media Days trip up to the Birmingham area is always proof of that.
Here’s a special edition of The Stretch 4 — along with a handful of bonus buzzer-beater notes — on what we heard from Pearl, Broome and Jones on Tuesday.
PG/SG Denver Jones (David Gray/Auburn Tigers)