Elite Eight Observations: Auburn 70, Michigan State 64
The Tigers booked their trip to the Final Four the old-fashioned way: Suffocating defense, timely shots and plenty of Johni Broome.
ATLANTA — Dylan Cardwell had something to say to his teammates.
The last time he did that — nine days earlier, up in Lexington — he said he cussed them out. Auburn was the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament but not playing like it. If the Tigers did that again, they would be going home early once more.
The fire-and-brimstone message worked. Auburn rallied to beat Creighton in the second round, then showed even more fight a week later to erase a 9-point second-half deficit and beat Michigan in the Sweet 16.
But the spiritual leader of this Auburn basketball team had a much sunnier sermon on this particular Sunday morning in his home state of Georgia, hours before the Tigers would face Michigan State in the Elite Eight.
“I just woke up feeling confident,” Cardwell said. “That’s the most confident I’ve ever felt in a game. Even though everything was against us: Tom Izzo was 10-0 against SEC teams in the NCAA Tournament, Tom Izzo being 8-2 in the Elite Eight. For me, I woke up confident, and I wanted to share that with the team.
“I just told them if we execute the game plan, we can run Michigan State out of the gym.”
Later that evening, down the street at State Farm Arena, Cardwell sprinted onto the floor as his fellow center — National Player of the Year winner Johni Broome — drilled a 3-pointer that forced Izzo to burn a timeout less than 10 minutes into the game.
Auburn had scored 17 unanswered and, just as the 6-foot-11 prophet foretold, was running Michigan State out of the gym.
“That speech did a lot for us,” Chaney Johnson, the third member of Auburn’s dominant frontcourt, would later say with a piece of a freshly cut net knotted into the strap of a backwards Final Four hat. “We call him Cap, because he’s built like Captain America and he’s the captain of our team. He just told us to have courage and go out there and have fun tonight.”
Cardwell and Johnson had to be courageous for Auburn, even in a game that never saw Michigan State come within five points for the final 33:34 of regulation.
When Broome suffered a scary-looking elbow injury with 10:37 left to play, the most dominant player on the floor was out. Suddenly, Auburn’s biggest advantage was in the locker room, and a Michigan State team filled with comeback artists and led by one of college basketball’s most decorated March architects saw an opportunity.
Johnson stepped up with back-to-back buckets. Cardwell commanded an Auburn defense that allowed just one made field goal with Broome sidelined.
“Johni is such a great player — the National Player of the Year,” Johnson said. “But, honestly, we’ve got a deep team. We trust each other.”
Then, in a sequence straight out of a movie, Broome emerged from the locker room to a deafening roar from the massively pro-Auburn crowd in Atlanta. He told his coaches that he could play if they needed him.
Cardwell turned to the bench and asked for a sub. Broome stuck his thumb up.
“At that moment, I just wanted to help my teammates,” Broome said.
With just one healthy arm, Broome grabbed a defensive rebound. On the other end of the floor, he knocked down another 3-pointer to put Auburn back up by 12 with 4:40 to play.
Michigan State wouldn’t cut Auburn’s lead to less than three possessions until there was 13 seconds left on the clock. For all intents and purposes, it was beyond over.
Auburn was back in the Final Four after only trailing in the Elite Eight for 22 seconds.
For only the second time in the history of the NCAA Tournament, all four No. 1 seeds have made it to the final destination. There were no Cinderellas at this Big Dance. The huge upsets only happened early. There was hardly anything but chalk on the board.
So that means Auburn — yes, Auburn — is one of the very last teams standing.
“I felt going in that we were better,” Bruce Pearl said after Auburn’s 70-64 victory over Michigan State. “I felt like I had better players. That's not a criticism at all. I told our guys, right now, we haven't beaten a team yet that I thought was better than us. That's why we're the overall Number 1 seed.
“We're going to the Final Four with our four 1 seeds. The four teams that advanced, I think they're the four best teams in the country. That doesn't obviously always happen.”
It’s happening this year, and it’s partially because Auburn lived up to the enormous hype that it built during a historic regular season. Nobody had been more battle-tested. Nobody had more quality wins. Nobody had been through the same grind.
Auburn could have crumbled under that pressure. It could have been another Pearl team that had tremendous, even championship-winning success and still couldn’t find a way out of the first weekend. There were plenty of their fans who thought they were on that track after the way they finished the regular season.
But the best team in the history of Auburn men’s basketball is going to get to hang multiple banners and flash multiple championship rings from this season. And it no longer has to be compared to the underdog story that got this far six years ago.
This was a season-long contender that snuck up on absolutely no one and still won.
“I just got tired of hearing about the 2019 team,” Cardwell said. “That’s all you hear about. I’ve been here five years and the password to the arena is 2019, and the password to the Bluetooth and the wifi is 2019. They’ve got a 2019 banner outside of the arena.
“I mean, we can’t get 2019 out of our heads. … The 2019 team, we wouldn’t be here without them. They put Auburn on the map. They’re the cornerstone of the program. But it was time for us to make our own history.”
Here are four Observations from Auburn’s historic Elite Eight win over Michigan State, along with the Rotation Charts, Nerd Stats and the Quote of the Night.
