Now 20 games in, what does Auburn's NCAA Tournament résumé look like?
Even after an 0-2 week and with a 0-3 record in Quad 1 games, the Tigers are still a top-10 NET team. But they'll have to improve to stay there.
HC Bruce Pearl (Jamie Holt/Auburn Tigers)
Selection Sunday for the 2024 NCAA Tournament is now less than seven weeks away. To illustrate just how long of a time span that is for a college basketball team, Auburn’s blowout win over Indiana in Atlanta was seven weeks ago.
That win over Indiana started what would become an 11-game winning streak for the Tigers. Every single one of those wins came by double-digits.
The streak turned Auburn into the hottest team in major college basketball. In a season when it felt like everybody was falling in upsets, the Tigers were avoiding them — and beating their opponents by more than expected in the majority of those wins.
Then came last week, when Auburn was an underdog for the first time in a while and lost by four to Alabama on the road. Three days later, it lost to Mississippi State by six.
With seven weeks left to go until Selection Sunday, there really isn’t a team with the same type of résumé as Auburn. That’s both a good thing and a not-so-good thing.
Even with back-to-back losses to “unranked” teams on the road, Auburn is still viewed as a top-10 team by almost every major computer metric.
KenPom, the most widely-known of those ratings systems, has Auburn at No. 7. T-Rank is the highest on the Tigers, still putting them at No. 3 nationally. EvanMiya puts Auburn at No. 5, while ESPN’s BPI had the Tigers at No. 6 heading into Sunday.
Then there’s NET, which is a major tool used by the NCAA’s Selection Committee for tournament seeding purposes. Auburn entered Sunday at No. 9, still hanging onto a top-10 spot despite the road losses to Alabama (No. 6) and Mississippi State (No. 38).
That might come as a surprise to Auburn fans who are down on the team after the 0-2 week. And, while the Tigers had major struggles with shooting, rebounding and ball security in those games, they don’t wipe away what they did in the previous 18 games — or what they could do in the remaining 11, before the SEC Tournament in Nashville.
There’s plenty of value in winning frequently as a favorite, especially when you win by double-digits. While the App State and Mississippi State losses are two examples of Auburn falling as a favorite, there are a dozen-plus examples of the Tigers taking care of business, and then some. That helps with the metrics quite a bit.
“There's something to be said for beating the people you're supposed to beat,” Bruce Pearl said Saturday. “We've done that.”
But the rebuttal of Auburn’s critics, both inside and outside the fan base, is an obvious one: Despite being 20 games into the season, the Tigers have yet to secure one of the coveted Quadrant 1 victories for their tournament résumé.
And that’s why Auburn is unlike any other team in the top 10 — or any other contender in a major conference, for that matter.