The Stretch 4: No rest for the winning as Auburn goes to Ole Miss
Trips to Oxford haven't been easy. Now Auburn has to face an Ole Miss team that's older, tougher and better than usual.
(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
BATON ROUGE, La. — Not too long ago, Auburn basketball went nearly six entire years without a single win over Ole Miss — a team it routinely played twice per season.
Since that 10-game losing streak, though, Auburn has won 10 of the last 14 in the series. That includes a current run of three straight season sweeps. The last two Auburn teams to lose to Ole Miss were the COVID-afflicted 2020-21 squad and, strangely enough, the 2018-19 one that ran all the way to the Final Four.
That doesn’t mean things have come easily for Auburn at Ole Miss. The 2021-22 SEC championship team led by Jabari Smith and Walker Kessler had to fight back from a 14-point first-half deficit. A year later, the Tigers got off to a slow start and were down by seven early. And, last year, Auburn was down by a dozen right before halftime.
Now consider that, on KenPom, this season’s Ole Miss team is the highest-rated one for the program since it won the SEC West in 1998. That’s what Auburn will face Saturday afternoon, when it enters The Pavilion on a quick turnaround from a Wednesday night win at LSU.
“Obviously, Oxford on a Saturday is going to be pretty lit up,” Bruce Pearl said on Thursday. “This Ole Miss team is the only team to beat Alabama at Alabama. As Auburn's coach, of course, I have to get that in. In their three losses, they've lost three games by a combined 12 points.
“Their only loss at home was to Texas A&M, where they led the entire game, until the very, very end. … When Jaemyn Brakefield is coming off the bench, that tells you how deep and how talented a roster this Ole Miss team has.”
Brakefield, a former 5-star at Duke who is now in his fourth season at Ole Miss, is now the sixth man for Chris Beard. The Rebels are the third most-experienced team in college basketball, bringing in transfers such as Sean Pedulla and Dre Davis to add what they already had in Matthew Murrell and Jaylen Murray.
Malik Dia, a fourth-year player at his third school, is the only non-senior who plays heavy minutes for Ole Miss. Eduardo Klafke is the only underclassman in the entire rotation.
“They're good, and they're well-coached,” Pearl said. “They got dudes. Like, these guys really invested in the NIL, now. … You used to say that, and it used to have a negative connotation. It doesn’t anymore. The reason why the SEC, top to bottom, is as strong as the league is right now because we've invested in the league’s coaches, facilities, the SEC Network.”
So, if Auburn falls behind in the first half against Ole Miss again, it might have a tougher time coming back.
But this is a team of Tigers that has been able to maintain its No. 1 status in the country and the solo top spot in the SEC by not panicking and playing through adversity, particularly away from home.
Auburn knows it’s going to get everybody’s best shot for 40 minutes. That’s just life as the best squad in college basketball. So, while Ole Miss might be a legitimately tough matchup with its best-looking team in a long time, this shouldn’t be anything Auburn hasn’t experienced already in this record-tying 19-1 start.
“We're going to get everybody's best shot,” forward Chaney Johnson said Thursday. “That's also good for us as well — because we can improve after every single game, because we're getting people's best instead of just playing people that really don't want to come to play.
“And, with the SEC being such a strong conference this year, we keep winning. The game's going to keep on getting tougher.”
For a full preview of Auburn’s ranked vs. ranked matchup away from home against Ole Miss, here is this week’s edition of The Stretch 4 here at The Observer.
(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)