The Stretch 4: It's a must-win rematch with Ole Miss for Auburn
The Tigers *need* back-to-back victories to stay in the NCAA Tournament picture. It starts with trying to hand Ole Miss an 11th straight loss.
AUBURN — The month of February 2026 will be one to forget for Auburn basketball.
It started with an off date, immediately following a road loss at Tennessee on January 31 that ended a resurgent four-game winning streak. Auburn then proceeded to lose its next four in a row. A last-second home win over Kentucky led right into a brutal road loss by double-digits at Oklahoma.
The Tigers entered the month widely projected to be in the top half of a bracket in the NCAA Tournament. They will exit it as a bubble team with more projections to be in the First Four play-in games in Dayton than anything else on the Bracket Matrix.
And those projections, of course, hinge on not losing a Quad 3 game to Ole Miss.
It’s been a damaging slide for Auburn, going from a projected 6 or 7 seed to losing six of its last seven. But, even through all the frustration, the Tigers still have a chance to go to the NCAA Tournament for a fifth straight year.
Not everyone can say that, as head coach Steven Pearl noted Friday afternoon:
“I told the guys yesterday, ‘There’s 323 teams in college basketball that wish they were us right now. Think about that. There’s really only 42 teams right now that are really in contention for 37 at-large bids. … You understand how fortunate you are to be in this situation? Like, people would die to be in our shoes right now. So let’s take advantage of it.’
“We’ve put ourselves in position to be in position. We’ve gotta go win some games now. That’s on us as a coaching staff and as a team to go out there and perform and finish this thing off the right way.”
The response to the 12-point road loss at Oklahoma this week was “rather spirited,” as Pearl called it. A more vocal-than-usual Thursday film room session led straight into one of the Tigers’ best-looking and most energetic practices of the season.
But, as guard Kevin Overton said Friday, Auburn has had practices like that throughout the season. The Tigers’ resiliency has been well-documented throughout a long and challenging campaign. While that hasn’t always translated into wins, it’s something this team absolutely has to have at this make-or-break time.
“It definitely feels different,” Overton said. “To have hope with a team like this, after everything we've been through, it's huge. That's all you can ask for at this point.”
Having great practices and saying the right things to the media don’t guarantee anything. Any Auburn fan can tell you how much they’ve heard that over the years from underachieving football teams. All of that doesn’t really matter unless it translates into actual wins on game days.
“Play for play, it just takes everybody,” Overton said. “It’s not the thought of it: It’s actually going to do it. I learned that from a coach I had. It’s not about talking about it. It’s about literally going out and giving your all to the job that needs to be done.
“That’s just what we’ve struggled with this year. With whatever we've had going on — our approach to the game or whatever's going on with everybody — it's consistency and it's togetherness. And that's just not where we are right now.”
The good news is that Auburn has direct, firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to beat this Ole Miss team with that type of intensity.
When the Tigers knocked off the Rebels on the road back on January 20, they only hit two 3-pointers. But they only allowed 66 points, which still stands as their fewest against a high-major team this season.
“We’re watching film of that game, and our guys are sitting there, like, making noises, because they’re watching how we’re moving, and they’re watching how we’re flying around,” Pearl said. “They’re watching the intent of which we’re executing things. And I told the guys after the Oklahoma game, ‘It’s not what we’re doing. It’s how we’re doing it.’ And I thought, for the first time in a while, they watched the film of the Ole Miss game, and they’re like, ‘Oh, he might be right.’
“We were connected. We were playing with a purpose, and we were flying around, and we were playing desperate. And it was great for them to see what that looked like. Because, in order for us to beat anyone in this league, that’s how we have to play for 40 minutes. I thought we did that against Kentucky, which was, obviously, very encouraging because that was the first we’d really done that in a while. … Watching the Oklahoma film, that didn’t look anything like what we did in Oxford.”
And there’s no sugarcoating it: A failure to repeat a win over Ole Miss would be catastrophic for Auburn’s NCAA Tournament chances. Ole Miss has lost 10 straight games, a streak that started with the last game against Auburn.
It would be a Quad 3 defeat for a team whose best case for making the Big Dance has been grinding through college basketball’s toughest schedule with several prominent wins and not taking any terrible losses, particularly at home.
But, for an Auburn squad that has lost back-to-back matchups to SEC teams that aren’t projected to make the NCAA Tournament, there is absolutely nothing you can take for granted about this one on Saturday night.
“You look at those 10 games, and they're in every single game,” Pearl said of Ole Miss. “They're up seven with four minutes left against LSU, and — kind of similar to what we did against Mississippi State — just weren't able to finish it. They've been in one- or two-possession games on the road. They've won in two environments that we weren't able to this year. They're very capable.”
There are no more wakeup calls. There is no more margin for error. If Auburn wants to avoid a major step backwards for the program and still make the NCAA Tournament, it has to actually play desperately the rest of the way — and, again, not just talk about it.
“The coaches can't want it more than we do,” Overton said. “That was the big message. All these games have happened, and we've let a lot of opportunities slip. We can't allow that to happen anymore.”
For a full breakdown of this must-win game for Auburn against Ole Miss on Saturday night, here is the latest edition of The Stretch 4 preview.
Once again: Defend — or die
If you’ve ready anything from The Observer this week, you probably already know what’s coming next. If you haven’t, let us introduce you to The Stat™.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Auburn Observer to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.