AUBURN, Ala. — One month before the No. 1 Auburn Tigers sealed their third regular-season SEC championship under Bruce Pearl, Charles Barkley was trying to make his way through a sold-out crowd at Neville Arena.
“Charles! Charles! Charles!” fans shouted at the former Auburn superstar, but it was the buzz for the team that caught his attention.
“[Before Bruce Pearl,] if we won one March Madness game, we’d be like, ‘We had a great season,'” said Barkley, who led Auburn to its first NCAA tournament appearance in 1984. “He got us to the Final Four [in 2019], which was a shocker to everybody, but now he’s gotten us to the point that unless we win a couple of March Madness games, we haven’t had a good season.
“That’s incredible.”
Before Pearl arrived in 2014, Auburn — which will face rival and No. 6 Alabama in a Sonic Blockbuster on Saturday (2:30 p.m. ET on ESPN) — 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.
In early February, however, the only way to get into a Tuesday night game against Oklahoma was with a standing room ticket. The upper bowl was stuffed with fans who peered down onto the court, chicken sandwiches and beers in hand. The 1,100 seats in the student section known as “The Jungle” had filled up hours before tipoff. And the top boosters, who push every program forward these days, sat around the court.
At Auburn in 2025, it’s a minimum $1 million donation to even be considered for season tickets. (That check, of course, comes with a parking spot in an exclusive lot next to the arena.)
“A relative asked me about tickets to the Alabama game a few weeks ago, and I just kind of laughed,” said Jason Harbison, president of the Auburn Tip-Off Club — the official booster club for the program. “Whether you’re texting or seeing people around town or here on campus and at games, basketball is what everybody’s talking about.”
Auburn — desperate for success amid its storied football program’s decline — is chasing its first national basketball championship, fueled by Wooden Award candidate Johni Broome and five players who average at least 10 points. And with Pearl’s powers to persuade prospective transfers and big-money boosters, the Tigers are seemingly built to stay at the top in a new era of college basketball.
But that possibility comes with questions.
How did they get here? And what will it take to stay?
“Now we’ve got to finish it out,” Pearl told ESPN. “We have to finish it out.”
Just after midnight on a Tuesday in February, dozens of Auburn students set up tents, camping out for tickets to an upcoming matchup against Florida … four days before it.
The demand at Auburn has intensified in the years after the team’s Final Four run, so the school has a lottery system to reward students who camp out for tickets and organize the process. That’s not uncommon at schools like Duke, Kansas and Kentucky. But Auburn? That’s new.
“We went in the [old arena] and you could walk in when you wanted to and get a seat and enjoy games,” said Corey Edwards, assistant vice president of student affairs and a former student who watched games at Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum, the team’s home before Neville Arena opened in 2010. “But it’s exciting to see that we’ve reached capacity in the student section and to see the students being excited about Auburn being great in basketball.”
The school’s fan base is so serious that the student section has an entire cabinet, including a president and vice president. Fans also take buses on road trips and line the streets in the cities of opposing teams to greet Auburn once it arrives. It’s cheaper to see Auburn play away from home: Standing room only tickets for Saturday’s matchup between Auburn and Alabama are listed for almost $600 on ticket resale sites.
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No. 1 Auburn takes down No. 2 Alabama in Tuscaloosa
No. 1 Auburn defeats No. 2 Alabama 94-85 in a big SEC matchup on Saturday.
That acclaim can disappear just as quickly as it arrives, of course. Because winning and consistency are the only proofs of concept at the most volatile time in college basketball history.
Pearl, of course, knows that as well as anyone.
Four years after he led Tennessee to the Elite Eight in 2010, Pearl was still living in exile. He had committed NCAA violations by hosting former Ohio State star Aaron Craft for a recruiting dinner at his house and then lying to the NCAA about the incident, even after he was presented with photographic evidence. The Volunteers fired Pearl in 2011 after the school uncovered other violations, separate from the Craft investigation. The NCAA hit Pearl with a three-year show cause, the scarlet letter of collegiate coaching, that essentially banished him from the game.
After the fallout, Pearl worked as a marketing professional and college basketball analyst at ESPN. An NCAA show cause has teeth: Any school that would hire him within that three-year period — during which he wasn’t allowed to recruit — risked incurring penalties from the NCAA.
Pearl did not know if he would ever get another chance to coach — or if he wanted.
“It was about whether or not I want to go back into it,” he told ESPN. “It was a combination of being embarrassed and accountable … so I just didn’t know if I wanted to go through that again and even put my family through that again because I had let so many people down.”
But with six months remaining on Pearl’s show cause, Jay Jacobs, Auburn’s former athletic director, had grown weary of the losing and sparse crowds at the multimillion dollar arena. He presented Pearl an offer.
Pearl wasn’t convinced it was time to coach again — it took his wife, Brandy, challenging him to dream about the possibilities at Auburn to open this door.
“She said, ‘I want you to wake up tomorrow morning,'” Pearl recalled. “‘All right, I want you to go to the closet. I want you to put your sport jacket on, put your jacket on. You are now Auburn’s basketball coach. You’re Auburn’s basketball coach and you’re going to go to Auburn to accept the job and you’re going to start recruiting and you’re going to try to rebuild that program. How does that feel?’ And I honestly woke up the next morning, I put the jacket on, I put myself there.”
Days later, he was on a private plane to Auburn after making a vow to Jacobs.
“I told [Jacobs] that if I do decide to take this job, you are never going to regret it,” Pearl said. “You’re never going to, I promise you that.”
Before the recent success, though, came hurdles. Pearl didn’t reach the NCAA tournament in his first three seasons with the Tigers. And in 2017, 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 a result, and Pearl was later suspended two games for failing to monitor Person.
It was only a year later that Wiley and Purifoy helped Auburn make a run to the 2019 Final Four, where the Tigers lost to Virginia. Although they were disappointed, the run turned Pearl into a visionary whom the Auburn fan base could follow.
“We knew it,” Pearl said. “In 2019, the world saw it.”
With that national semifinal run and top prospects who have since picked the Tigers over powerhouse programs, the next chapter of Auburn basketball had dawned as the fog hanging over Pearl’s first few seasons on campus cleared. And as NBA prospects developed under him — Jabari Smith, Walker Kessler, Isaac Okoro and Chuma Okeke were all first-round picks — the spotlight on the Tigers’ potential grew.
Pearl is a shameless salesman at a time that rewards those who can pitch their programs to prospects, fans and boosters who write the biggest checks. His personality can make his news conferences feel like Ted Talks — it’s not surprising he gives motivational speeches on the side.
Minutes into a meeting in his office last month, Pearl flipped on that promoter switch.
As if leading a chamber of commerce event, he boasted about the area’s economic forces. Timber, he said, is a gigantic industry in Alabama. He mentioned a nearby Kia plant that is a major hub, too. But it’s not just business for Pearl. The golf courses around campus? Some of the best in America, he claimed. And if you’d like to see the ocean, you’re in luck, because you can get to the Gulf in a few hours.
Then, he shifted to a conversation about his faith and his political views. On X, Pearl discusses topics his peers tend to avoid publicly. But at Auburn, Pearl is unfiltered.
“He’s going to continue doing what is important to him, what he’s passionate about, and he’s going to do it unapologetically,” said Steven Pearl, the head coach’s son and assistant.
At first glance, an Auburn practice looks more like a middle school gym class on the last day before spring break. In mid-February, as the Tigers jogged around, Chad Baker-Mazara — the team’s resident class clown and temperamental star — poked teammates and giggled like a kid at the dinner table.
The squad that has dominated the greatest SEC in conference history does not seem to take itself too seriously. But when Pearl blew his whistle, the laughing stopped and the No. 1 team in America began to compete with the same intensity that has overwhelmed a multitude of opponents.
“That’s how we are. We goof around with each other at all times,” Baker-Mazara said. “I mean, this is outside the court. We goof around all the time. It is always playing around and joking around. But we made a pact this summer that whenever we come in here and [Pearl] says his first words, that’s it.”
When they’re focused, the Tigers are a force of nature who can throttle anything in their path.
“They’re competitive defensively and physical defensively,” said Oklahoma head coach Porter Moser, following a Feb. 4 loss at Auburn. “And if you do get by them, they don’t stop.”
This run began before the season. These Tigers strengthened their bond in the offseason with battles on the court and frequent trips to Crumbl for their favorite cookies. But a players-only meeting over the summer solidified their path — that’s when they all decided on a theme for the season.
“[We] all made a list and our word was ‘sacrifice,'” Broome said, “because you’ve got to give up things in order to win the national championship.”
Broome has battled through shoulder and ankle injuries that have cost him multiple games and portions of others this season, but he does not make excuses. When he arrived from Morehead State three years ago, Pearl told him that he didn’t care about anything Broome had achieved before Auburn. He would have to prove himself to earn the playing time he wanted. Broome accepted that challenge, and in his final year for the Tigers — averaging 18.0 points, 10.7 rebounds and 2.4 blocks — the star forward has emerged as the only talent to compete with Duke’s freshman phenom Cooper Flagg for national player of the year.
“Auburn has given me a lot,” Broome said. “Auburn has changed my life, so I just want to do everything I can to continue to praise Auburn and bring Auburn up. The rise of Auburn has been amazing. I joined the ride three years ago and I just want to leave my mark and continue to see it rise once I’m gone.”
Now Broome, Pearl and the Tigers — one of the nation’s most balanced teams with a 10-man rotation that ranks first in adjusted offensive efficiency and 10th in adjusted defensive efficiency — are in pursuit of history.
A national title is a lofty goal for a squad that has never won the crown, but it’s also a chance for the Tigers to change the entire future of their program. College basketball, it appears, is accepting applications for a new generation of blue bloods in a transformative chapter for collegiate sports. A championship run will put Auburn at the front of the line and give it an edge in the years ahead, as revenue sharing will soon add another wrinkle to the sport.
Barkley altered the program’s future when he took the Tigers to the NCAA tournament for the first time four decades ago, but even he could not have imagined Auburn’s current success and what it might mean for the future.
“To make Auburn a basketball school,” Barkley said, “is something I never thought it would be.”
