Can Auburn get back right at a place where things often go wrong?
Auburn knows it can never overlook Vanderbilt. The Florida loss — and Vanderbilt's big wins in Memorial — only reinforced that.
(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
AUBURN — For the first time ever, four teams from a single conference make up the top five of the Associated Press Top 25.
If that doesn’t illustrate that this season’s version of the SEC is the toughest in men’s college basketball history, perhaps nothing will.
On Monday, Auburn learned that it is still the nation’s No. 1 team, despite a nine-point home loss to Florida on Saturday. Duke, the only other team that has beaten Auburn, lost as well. The vote was close, but Auburn remained in front of rival Alabama heading into a week that will end with a historic 1 vs. 2 showdown.
But before the Tigers get to that marquee matchup, they have to go to Nashville.
Vanderbilt isn’t ranked in the new AP poll and currently sits outside the top 40 in the NET rankings. Still, the Commodores have exceeded expectations season — already collecting an impressive list of big-name wins at Memorial Gymnasium.
“We go to Vanderbilt and a place where they're 12-1,” Bruce Pearl said Monday, hours before Auburn left for its Tuesday game at Vanderbilt. “Beaten Tennessee, then they beat Kentucky. Tennessee was 6, Kentucky was 9. And they're 12-1 there.
“We've won seven out of eight to Vanderbilt, and prior to that, we lost 13 in a row. So, Vanderbilt has been a tough place for us to play historically.”
In 2018, Auburn ended its long losing skid to Vanderbilt with a home win that would prove to be critical in its surprise run to the SEC regular-season title. A year later, a Tigers team that would run all the way to the Final Four went on the road and beat a Commodores squad that would go 0-18 in league play.
Auburn has won four of its last five games at Memorial Gymnasium, with the lone loss coming in 2023 on a buzzer-beating layup. But you never quite get used to life inside Vanderbilt’s peculiar home, where the floor is elevated, the architecture is bizarre and the benches are on the baselines instead of the sidelines.
“It'd be like if we asked Coach (Hugh) Freeze to coach our football team from the end zone,” Pearl said. “That's what it'd be like. It's very different for the players. It's very different for the coaches. But if Coach Freeze coached half of the season from the end zone, like Vanderbilt does, he'd get used to it. Big advantage.”
In a beyond-loaded SEC this season, Auburn has already had several instances where it’s played arguably the best version of a team in recent history. That will continue to be the case with Vanderbilt, which is currently rocking its highest KenPom rating since its last NCAA Tournament appearance in 2017.
While Vanderbilt has gone 0-4 on the road in SEC play with an average margin of defeat of 16.5 points — including a 30-point rout by Oklahoma just 10 days ago — it’s punched above its weight class at home.
After dropping a loss to Mississippi State by 12 in early January, Vanderbilt has beaten South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas at home. It put up 76 against a vaunted Tennessee defense and rallied from down seven with 8:39 left to beat Kentucky, getting several crucial stops down the stretch.
So, even though Auburn has done much better than history would suggest in Nashville over the last several seasons, it will enter this game against Vanderbilt on Tuesday night needing to take care of business to remain on top of the SEC standings before the highly anticipated trip across the state on Saturday.
Finding motivation and focus to stay in the moment shouldn’t be difficult.