Bruce Pearl woke up on a rainy Selection Sunday morning in Alabama the same way Auburn fans across the country did, suspended in a state of waiting, with little to do before the brackets were revealed but think. Maybe Pearl thought about life, family, or basketball, or all the people who’ve come and gone in a coaching career that now spans 4 decades. Maybe he thought more on Tennessee’s 70-65 win over Auburn in the SEC Semifinals, the third Auburn loss in 4 games, a loss that meant Auburn would not play for the SEC Tournament championship for the third time under Pearl.
With no championship to play for, all Pearl and Auburn could do is wait for the bracket to be revealed.
Maybe the down time on Selection Sunday, a chance to recalibrate and begin again, will be a good thing for Auburn.
The hyperfocus of camera lenses have been on this Tigers program since late November, when Auburn barnstormed its way through the Maui Invitational with clinically efficient offense, hounding ball pressure defense, and a team full of selfless players that reflect their coach’s infectious joy for playing for one another while wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
The whole season has been an exercise of extremes. The dominant run through Maui. The pure id of the College GameDay experience and the rock fight win over Tennessee in January. The nearly 2 months spent at No. 1 in the polls. The excitement and buzz of overnight campouts before home games with pizzas delivered by Auburn coaches and card games with Auburn players. The unmitigated joy of the win at Alabama in the biggest regular-season SEC basketball game ever played. On the other hand, there’s the looming and inevitable sadness in knowing that at some point, this ride, this coronation of Auburn into a “basketball school” and national powerhouse, all of that will end, and how will Auburn fans feel when it does? Will there be joy? Will there be grief? Most likely, there will be both.
And so, hours before Adam Zucker would take to CBS to announce Auburn as the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, Pearl and Auburn waited.
On the surface, Pearl, the high-energy, fast-talking, passionate coach who former Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs plucked out of coaching exile and NCAA purgatory to lead Auburn on March 18, 2014, does not seem a good candidate to embody patience.
Dig deeper, though, and Pearl exemplifies a purposefulness and patience that is rare in a profession filled with men and women who destroy themselves chasing a finish line that doesn’t exist. You have to be an intentional, patient man to build programs the way Bruce Pearl builds programs at places where there’s so little history of sustained success.
As a reporter, you dance around the elephant of what Auburn was before Pearl, or two decades of Tennessee inconsistency and losing before Bruce, or Milwaukee’s first 3 trips to the NCAA Tournament, which only came to fruition when Pearl strolled the campus as head coach. You talk in platitudes and are openly respectful— “Yes, Auburn had some great players before you arrived, Bruce, obviously”—but the truth is never too remote.
It always comes back to Bruce, the program builder.
Sure, Charles Barkley went to Auburn, and so did Chuck Person, leading the Tigers to the Elite Eight in 1986. But before Pearl arrived in 2014, Auburn had finished with a sub-.500 record in 12 of the previous 15 seasons, with an average attendance that filled less than 65% of its home arena. Since Pearl’s arrival, Auburn has won 240 games, 3 SEC regular-season championships, and 2 SEC Tournament titles. Auburn’s students sleep in the winter cold for days for entry into home games at Neville Arena, a venue so fearsome to opponents it now has its own nickname, “The Jungle,” which has reached household status in the college basketball vernacular.
To contextualize the extent to which Pearl has revolutionized what basketball means at Auburn, consider this: in the football-mad SEC, it is a minimum $1,000,000 donation to even get on a list to receive season tickets to Auburn basketball. It is helpful to read that sentence twice, to let it wash over you and digest it a bit.
Tickets on resale markets to individual home games aren’t any easier to acquire, as prices ranged from $550-$750 on resale markets for highest row and standing room only seating for Auburn’s 2025 marquee home games against Alabama and Florida.
It’s not just home games, either.
At the traditionally blue-blood heavy Maui Invitational in November, Auburn fans outnumbered fans from the likes of North Carolina and Michigan State. When Auburn played Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium in December, there were more Auburn fans in the building than visiting fans at a typical Carolina-Duke game, even though the University of North Carolina is only 10 miles down the road.
Auburn, once a basketball backwater lost in the wilderness in a conference that was, beyond Kentucky and Florida, a parochial afterthought in the sport, is now a national power, the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, which begins in full Thursday. What’s more, in an era of unprecedented success for SEC basketball, Pearl and Auburn seem poised to stay in the conversation at the pinnacle.
But success can be fleeting.
The crowds that swarm Neville, the adoring fans that travel in droves to Maui, Durham, Nashville, and everywhere in between, all of that can be gone in an instant.
What makes the story of Auburn’s ascendancy into a national powerhouse so compelling, a tale of redemption, of faith, of failure, and above all, of family, is that no one in the sport understands how unlikely success is to attain and how fickle and fleeting success can be to sustain better than Bruce Pearl.
Pearl turned failure, along with his commitment to family and faith, into program pillars, building a behemoth at Auburn and a legacy that will last, on and off the court, long after he’s gone.
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The Boston College student manager turned coach bucked all the odds in rising the professional ranks and building Tennessee into a perennial SEC contender, reaching 3 Sweet 16s and the Elite Eight in 2010, before losing it all hard and fast.
By the spring of 2014, Pearl was in the wilderness, talking hoops with fans on SiriusXM and counting down the final months of a 3-year show cause penalty issued by the NCAA for violations he committed at Tennessee in recruiting former Ohio State star Aaron Craft. Tennessee fired Pearl in 2011 after the school uncovered other violations, separate from the Craft investigation, but the show cause came not because of the violations, per se, but because Pearl lied to the NCAA about the Craft incident, even after he was presented with photographic evidence of the violations.
Pearl wasn’t sure he’d ever get a chance to coach at the highest level — or any collegiate level — again, until Jay Jacobs called.
Eleven years later, Pearl is a future Basketball Hall of Famer chasing a second Final Four and a national championship with an Auburn team that just completed one of the best regular seasons in the history of the sport.
To understand how that happened, you have to understand that Pearl used his past failures as a pillar on which he built the Auburn program.
“When I was fired at Tennessee, when I failed and got in trouble with the NCAA, it was devastating because I failed as a teacher and I failed as a role model,” Pearl told me by phone earlier this month. “But I took that and the lessons from it to Auburn.”
Pearl was convinced he could make his own failures a pillar of program building. If he could fail as a man, and as a coach, his players needed to understand they too could fail. An Auburn basketball player plays without fear of failure.
“When you think of a Bruce Pearl basketball team, the thing that stands out is not just how hard they play but how they played without fear of failure,” former Florida head coach Billy Donovan, now with the Chicago Bulls, said of Pearl, who he competed against for several seasons in the SEC. “There’s a fine line between arrogance and confidence, and playing without humility and playing confidently, and Bruce’s teams manage to play confidently while retaining the hunger that comes from humility. They control what they can control. You will miss shots. You’ll miss free throws. You control how you defend. You control box outs, rebounds, how you fight for a loose ball. Bruce’s teams are excellent at controlling what they can control.”
There’s freedom in knowing that failure is part of basketball, just as it is part of life. For Pearl, a player that knows he’s allowed to fail on the floor, as in life, is a player motivated to play hard and play for the “Auburn” on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back. This isn’t just aspirational coach speak. When Tahaad Pettiford hits a 1 vs. 5 3-pointer in transition late in the second half of a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup at Alabama, it is a program philosophy in action.
Tahaad Pettiford & Chad Baker-Mazara – Dagger #1 & Dagger #2. These two shots completely flipped the momentum in this Auburn-Alabama game. pic.twitter.com/GbZp9Atbuu
— Vince Wolfram (@vincewolfram15) February 19, 2025“My guys know what they think they are good at and what I think they are good at. So, when they take certain shots, or make certain plays that some might think, ‘Oh, that’s a bad shot,’ or ‘Oh, that’s a little quick,’ or ‘They didn’t get it to both sides of the floor,’ or whatever some color commentator might say, they know that I’ve got as much confidence as they do that they are going to make that shot.”
Like trust, freedom to fail is earned at Auburn.
“The trade-off with the freedom is that you are going to play hard,” Pearl tells me. “You are not taking possessions off. You are going to be coachable. You want freedom? Alright. I’ll give it to you. But the trade-off is you’re gonna play hard and you’re gonna be a great teammate. And if you won’t, I’m not going to give you that freedom because you haven’t earned it. Our guys earn it.”
Other coaches notice the freedom and fearlessness Auburn plays with, too.
“The thing about Bruce is his teams play with trust and confidence. They aren’t bothered,” John Calipari, who has competed against Pearl at both Kentucky and now Arkansas, told SDS. “That’s about what he does to players. He finds what they do well and emphasizes it. He doesn’t ask kids to be what they are not. He coaches what they are.”
It’s a formula that’s worked for Pearl everywhere.
Pearl studied the art of coaching under Dr. Tom Davis at Boston College, Stanford, and Iowa, watching Davis leave programs better than he found them at every stop along the way. Boston College, where Pearl worked as a student manager, won a league title in 1980-81 and reached the Elite Eight the following season, cementing a now-forgotten legacy as a building block in the monster that would become the Big East, well before the Eagles departed for the ACC. Pearl was an assistant for Davis at Iowa from 1986-1992 as well, helping the Hawkeyes reach 5 NCAA Tournaments, including an Elite Eight appearance in the 1986-87 season.
He took lessons in program-building from Dr. Davis with him to head coaching jobs at Southern Indiana, where he won a Division II national championship, and Milwaukee, where he won a Horizon League title and took the Panthers to 3 consecutive NCAA Tournaments, including a Sweet 16 run in the 2004-05 season.
None of these programs were consistent winners at the time of Pearl’s arrival as either an assistant or a head coach. All of them enjoyed sustained success under Pearl’s watch.
“He’s one of the best program-builders in the sport, if not the best one when you consider the places he’s built winners,” Florida head coach and former Pearl assistant Todd Golden told SDS earlier this season.
Golden agreed Pearl’s ability to stare down inevitable failure is a special sauce baked into the DNA of his Auburn program.
“Auburn plays incredibly hard. They play fearlessly, without fear of failure, and selflessly,” Golden told SDS. “They prioritize development. They evaluate well, and they recruit not only good players but players with character who want to win, work hard, and can be coached hard. They are incredibly consistent in their approach.”
That consistency begins with goals.
At every stop along the way, Pearl has looked around the league he’s in to find the gold standard program. He’s then made it his mission to compete with that program.
“One way you build your program,” Pearl told SDS,” is to look at who the best coaches are in your league, the best programs in your league, and go out and beat them.”
Pearl’s done that wherever he’s been.
At Milwaukee, Pearl went toe-to-toe with Butler, seizing the Horizon League by beating the Bulldogs consistently. At Tennessee, Pearl was a thorn in the side of Donovan, beating the legendary Florida coach in 3 of 4 meetings in 2006 and 2007, when the Gators captured back-to-back national championships and going 8-4 against Donovan overall.
Pearl has done it again at Auburn, finding ways to compete and consistently snag wins against Tennessee’s top-tier program under Rick Barnes and Alabama’s rising program under Nate Oats.
“You don’t have to win them all,” Pearl said. “But if you go out and beat them even half the time, you will be right there all the time.”
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Pearl didn’t just learn basketball lessons from his personal failures at Tennessee. To stop there would sell the story short. He also learned that to build a program, he needed to invest in building a family in the communities where he coached.
“After I failed at Tennessee, I took the commitment of responsibility to the community even more seriously,” Pearl told SDS.
Honoring that commitment began within weeks of being fired at Tennessee. That very month, Pearl and his wife Brandy hosted “An Evening in Orange,” which became the first million-dollar charity event in Knoxville history.
“To much is given, much is expected,” Pearl said this month of his charitable efforts, which include AUT Live, the cancer charity for whom the Pearls have raised millions of dollars, as well as Children’s Harbor, an organization that serves families and children with multiple handicaps. The Bruce Pearl Family Foundation has raised over $1.5 million dollars for Children’s Harbor over the last 8 years, reflecting Pearl’s commitment to making his own past failures right in the community where he coaches.
Pearl is genuine and candid when he discusses why he feels community-building is part of program-building.
“Pat Summitt taught me so much about that,” Pearl tells me. “She said to players, ‘You signed up for this Lady Vol stuff. I didn’t beg you to become a Lady Vol. This is what it takes.’ I tell my players. You said you want to play for Bruce Pearl. This is what it’s going to take. It’s going to take a commitment to Auburn off the court. So, when I say that, I mean it. We’ve graduated 45 players at Auburn in the last 11 years. That’s more than anyone at the Power 5 level. Thirty-three of those players are African-American. Those are crazy numbers. It takes a village to build a program.”
It also takes faith and family to build a program.
Pearl also believes that a program that serves together stays together.
“Everyone uses that word family. It’s an overused term in sports,” Pearl tells me. “But faith, family, that’s a big part of our culture. My staff stays together,” Pearl said of the connection between service, faith, and family in program building.
“We hire guys like Todd Golden, who is smart but also a high character individual. Steven (Pearl) has been with me 11 years. Ira (Bowman) has been with me 9 years. Chad Pruitt has been with me 11 years. That’s family, because families try and stay together,” Pearl says. “Here at Auburn, the staff stays and the players stay. Dylan Cardwell, 5 years. Chris Moore, 5 years. Jaylin (Williams) last season, was a 5-year guy. That’s been the formula. Coaches and players. We still build it the old-fashioned way. Yes, we’ve gone into the portal. Yes, we’ve been able to adjust to the way the game has changed. But in many ways, it’s still the old-fashioned way.”
When Pearl took the job at Auburn, there were plenty of cynics who wondered if even a coach as successful as Pearl had been had bitten off more than he could chew.
Those doubts lingered as Pearl’s first 3 Auburn teams finished no better than 11th in the then-14 team SEC. Complicating matters, in 2017, just over 3 years into the job, former assistant and Auburn legend Chuck Person was sentenced to 200 hours of community service for his role in a bribery scandal that attracted a federal investigation. Top recruits Austin Wiley and Danjel Purifoy both missed the 2017-18 season as punishment, and Pearl, who was not implicated in the investigation, was suspended nonetheless for “failure to monitor” Person.
Another coach might have looked for an exit strategy. Pearl knew what he was building and stayed.
Auburn won 26 games and a share of the SEC title in 2017-2018 and a year later, the Tigers made the program’s first Final Four.
“Faith in what we were building and what we are doing is at the center of it,” Pearl tells me with an earnestness that’s rare in a profession of salesman, Pearl included. “You can’t explain it. In the last 8-year stretch, Auburn has won either the SEC Tournament or the SEC regular season championship 5 different times. That means 5 different teams have been champions. God has blessed us beyond what we deserve.”
Pearl’s success has elevated him, too, and he’s used his platform, notably to speak out against anti-Semitism, in support of Israel, and to relentlessly advocate for the importance of graduating players in the transfer portal era, where that has become harder and harder.
“It’s not just about basketball,” Pearl tells me. “It’s about graduating kids. It’s about raising money for people in need. It’s about doing the work of the Kingdom.”
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This March, Pearl’s work will be about basketball, and the pursuit of a national championship, the last thing for Pearl to win at the Division I level.
All Auburn fans of the past 20 years can remember 3 moments in cinematic detail: Cam Newton’s final drive to cap the “Camback” against Alabama in 2010; the “Kick Six” and Rod Bramblett’s call on radio in 2013; and the 2019 Final Four against Virginia. Everyone cried when Samir Doughty was called for a hip bump on Kyle Guy’s desperation three with .6 seconds on the clock in Minneapolis. Everyone still remembers hoping against hope that Guy would miss at least 1 of the free throws, sending the game to overtime at worst. It wasn’t meant to be.
Six years later, though, and another Final Four and title game opportunity beckon.
For 2 months, Auburn was, along with Duke, one of 2 prohibitive favorites to win the title, led by Naismith Award finalist Johni Broome, defensive savant Denver Jones, the dynamic freshman Pettiford, and a host of players who embrace their roles and impact winning.
Entering the NCAA Tournament, the “prohibitive” favorite label has been shed and the bandwagon thinned, thanks to a stretch of 3 losses in 4 games after Auburn clinched the SEC regular-season championship on March 1 at Kentucky.
But Pearl snarled at the notion there was “panic” in the Auburn camp on Saturday, calling a reporter’s question about concern a “real softball” before noting that Auburn’s losses were to Texas A&M, Alabama, and Tennessee, all teams that on Selection Sunday were protected seeds in the NCAA Tournament.
Despite the late season slide, Auburn ranks 4th in KenPom this season and 9th in the history of the KenPom database (1997) entering the tournament, predictive metrics that bear out what a bear it will be to send Auburn home this month or in the Final Four next month in San Antonio.
The Tigers have no obvious weaknesses, no glaring deficiencies. They have the nation’s best player in Johni Broome, whose form hasn’t dipped, even as Auburn has lost close games down the stretch. And after a season where the Tigers won 15 Quadrant 1 games and played the toughest schedule in the country, there’s little that will rattle them or that they have not seen as they enter the NCAA Tournament.
Will Auburn pass the test again? Be patient, Auburn family. Don’t fear failure. It’s all a matter of faith.
Built by Bruce: How Faith, Family, and Failure helped Bruce Pearl build Auburn into a basketball powerhouse Saturday Down South.
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