After a loss to Tennessee in the SEC Tournament on Thursday in Nashville, the Auburn Tigers are now in wait-and-see mode to see if they can sneak into one of the final spots in the NCAA Tournament next week. The Tigers are one of the most talked-about teams on the bubble, and ESPN’s Joe Lunardi has them as the first team out of the 68-team field following the 72-62 loss to Tennessee.
In its first year under head coach Steven Pearl, the Tigers have gone 17-16, including their 1-1 stretch during the SEC Tournament. That record also includes a run where Auburn lost seven out of eight SEC games late in the season. The Tigers do boast ranked wins over St. John’s, Arkansas, and Florida, but Auburn has lost its other nine ranked games this season.
Pearl, though, is adamant that his team deserves to be in the dance. He gave his pitch to the media following the Tigers’ loss to Tennessee on Thursday evening.
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“Here’s the thing,” Pearl said. “What people have to understand is, like, it’s my job to fight for my team. It’s my job to be my team’s advocate. It’s my job to speak about all the things that this group’s done.
Some of the biggest things that we’re told to do in scheduling, especially during football season, is to get some of these prime time matchups for TV ratings, to compete with football. That’s why we play teams like Houston and Purdue and Arizona, we go to the Players Era. We do all those things.
So we scheduled a really hard out-of-conference schedule. We had some really quality wins in that streak. If you look at — this tournament is a team of who you can beat. If we’re going to look at six teams on the bubble right now, Texas, SMU, VCU, Miami Ohio, Missouri, New Mexico, we have more top-25 NET wins than everyone in that group but Missouri. We have more top-50 wins than everyone in that group. We have two top-25 road neutral wins, more than everyone else on the bubble. We have more wins over the projected field than anyone else on the bubble.
If you look at the major metrics that they use — NET, KenPom, KPI, Strength of Record, and Wins Above the Bubble — we are better than every team in that group in at least five out of the seven categories, and in a couple of them six of the seven.
Our strength of schedule, overall we’re at three, and out of conference we’re in 15. If you look at the rest of that list, they’re far below us as far as the schedule that we played.
We did the things that were asked of us in scheduling. With 10 new guys, that was probably a little aggressive on our part with nine underclassmen. Our guys have some of the best wins in college basketball. This team deserves to be in the tournament.
It’s a team that can win games in the tournament. I think they’ve done enough ultimately to have their name called on Selection Sunday.”
Auburn will officially find out its tournament destiny this Sunday during the NCAA Reveal Show. Until then, though, the Tigers will head back to Auburn to study the tape and get ready for a potential opportunity.
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