How does Auburn avoid a Yale upset? It all starts on defense.
The Tigers are coming off of an incredible stretch of defense at the SEC Tournament. And that's the key to launching an NCAA Tournament run.
(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
On Monday, after the crowds cleared out from Toomer’s Corner and the SEC Tournament championship celebrated died down, Auburn basketball went back to work inside Neville Arena.
The Tigers got together and stretched, which was particularly important after playing three high-level games in three days, along with all the travel.
Then they went to the film room. Of all the things Bruce Pearl and his staff could have shown the team after blitzing through Nashville, they settled on a specific subject: The defense from Auburn’s run to the championship.
“They understand, look, that’s why we won — because of the way we guarded,” Pearl said Tuesday, right before Auburn left for Spokane. “And that was it.”
In three straight games against three NCAA Tournament teams, Auburn allowed 55 points, 66 points and 67 points. It was the first time the Tigers had kept three consecutive opponents under 70 since the start of January, when they clamped down Penn, Arkansas and Texas A&M.
Three of Auburn’s top 11 games this season in terms of defensive efficiency happened in Nashville, including a championship game in which it held a red-hot Florida team to its worst offensive performance in several months.
Much has been made of Auburn’s offense over the last several weeks, and for good reason. The Tigers needed to start hitting shots at a higher rate ahead of tournament time, and they’ve done just that. Auburn has scored more than 85 points in six of its last eight games and shot 42.4% from deep over that span.
But the foundation of this team is defense. Before the Tigers caught fire at the right time, they had one of the best defenses in the entire country. That hasn’t slowed down at all, as Auburn will enter the NCAA Tournament with the nation’s No. 1 defensive effective field goal percentage.
Although Auburn has played like a top-five team for most of the season, its record in Quad 1 games ultimately kept it down to a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Pearl said Tuesday that the seeding “could be better, but I’m OK with it.”
Being a No. 4 seed not only sets up a potential matchup with a No. 1 seed in the Sweet 16 — in this case, defending national champion and overall top team UConn — it puts you in the path of one of the highest-rated small school champions in the first round.
For Auburn, that means a matchup against Yale, which took advantage of top seed Princeton’s semifinal loss to Brown and hit a buzzer-beater to win the Ivy League final Sunday.
On KenPom, Yale is the second highest-rated No. 13 seed, only trailing Samford. It’s also ranked ahead of No. 11 seed Duquesne and No. 12 seed UAB, the latter of which is on the other side of what Auburn is calling a “four-team tournament” in Spokane.
Pearl was quick to point out Tuesday that the Ivy League has punched well above its weight class in recent NCAA Tournaments.
Of the last 10 times the league has sent a team to the Big Dance, four different teams have won in the first round: 13 seed Harvard over 4 seed New Mexico in 2014, 12 seed Harvard over 5 seed Cincinnati in 2015, 12 seed Yale over 5 seed Baylor in 2016 and 15 seed Princeton over 2 seed Arizona in 2023.
Additionally, four of the five first-round losses have been close calls: Harvard lost by 9 to Vanderbilt in 2012, Harvard lost by 2 to North Carolina in 2015, Princeton lost by 2 to Notre Dame in 2017, and Yale lost by 5 to LSU in 2019. The only blowout loss came in 2022, when Yale lost by 22 to Purdue.
Yale is no stranger to this moment, and head coach James Jones has been in charge of the Bulldogs since 1999. He’s tied with Mark Few — who got name-dropped by Pearl on Tuesday, since Gonzaga is in Spokane — as the third-longest tenured head coach in Division I men’s basketball.
“This is a really good coaching staff, this is a really good team, a really good program, and they’ve got a really good history of first-round upsets,” Pearl said. “Why is that? Because they play the right way. Because they play hard, they play physically, they’re from the Ivy League, so they’re smart. They’ll run great stuff.”
And Auburn is no stranger to Yale, either.