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Against Creighton, Auburn looked like a team that listened to Dylan Cardwell’s blunt message
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There’s blunt, and then there’s whatever Dylan Cardwell said.
The veteran Auburn big man called out his team on Thursday after its sluggish Round 1 victory against Alabama State. On the heels of 3 losses in 4 games entering the NCAA Tournament, he took aim at his team’s effort in a not-so-subtle way.
“We lost to Texas A&M, we lost to Alabama, we lost to Tennessee because we aren’t playing hard,” Cardwell said after Thursday’s Round 1 win (H/T On3). “We come out and we’re still pissing away the opportunity and we have to stop doing that. You can’t afford that. You have the option to go out as the best team in Auburn history or the biggest bust in the country. At some point, it has to click. What more is it going to take?”
Apparently, it took Cardwell’s message.
On Saturday night, a more determined Auburn team took the floor and dug deep in a way that it hadn’t since it won the SEC regular-season title weeks ago. The Tigers’ 82-70 victory against Creighton in the Round of 32 was about more than just punching a ticket to the Sweet 16 (that’s the first such trip since the 2019 Final Four run). It was about embracing Cardwell’s message.
That mission was accomplished, even if it included some mortal moments from the tournament’s top overall seed.
A 2-point halftime deficit wasn’t ideal, and neither was the fact that Johni Broome looked more like a guy playing through injuries than a National Player of the Year. There’s a world in which the combination of those things could’ve sent Auburn into a panic instead of a new gear. Fortunately for the Tigers, the latter happened. On a night in which Broome was held to 8 points on 4-of-13 shooting opposite of ageless Creighton 7-footer Ryan Kalkbrenner, the alternative scoring options were there.
The best version of Chad Baker-Mazara took the floor. He did a lot of the heavy lifting with 17 points, and he would’ve had more if not for taking contact to the hip on a drive at the 13:32 mark of the second half (he tried to return but couldn’t). Baker-Mazara had 17 of Auburn’s first 53 points, and he left after wincing through a pair of made free throws. That was part of a 20-4 Auburn run over the next 7:12 that ultimately was too much for Creighton to overcome.
That type of surge has been hard to come by the last couple weeks. It speaks to Auburn’s versatility that much of that run was fueled by things like second-chance points (Auburn had 19), forcing contested shots (only 24 of Creighton’s 70 points came in the paint) and elite shot-making from Tahaad Pettiford and Denver Jones (they combined for 38 points on 12-for-22 shooting).
And of course, the presence of Cardwell was monumental. He eventually left the game with what appeared to be cramping issues, but not before he did all the glue guy things. He cleared out post-players to create high-percentage looks on offense, he helped limit Creighton to just 4 offensive boards and he put an exclamation point on that aforementioned 20-4 run with a dunk.
Cardwell’s presence was felt in about every way. It would’ve been a horrendous time for him to get into foul trouble and become a non-factor in a losing effort. After a comment like that, he could’ve been the the mouthpiece for a team that ended more divided than united late in the season.
Nope. At least not yet.
Nobody had to remind Cardwell of what Auburn endured 3 years ago. It was in the same Round of 32 that the Tigers watched a 1-seed end with a blowout loss to a veteran Miami team. He knew as well as anyone that there wasn’t any guarantee that the 2024-25 version of Auburn — one that also had its late-season losses questioned after a No. 1 seeding — would right the ship. Shoot, there’s no guarantee that Cardwell and Co. will get past a Michigan team that also boasts a pair of 7-footers who’ll be able to match Auburn’s size.
But Saturday’s second-half run might prove to be the turning point that Auburn needed. It wasn’t long ago that every conversation about the Tigers centered on those 16 Quad 1 wins, and how it built a historically impressive regular-season résumé by never flinching. None of that matters anymore. What mattered on Saturday night was that Auburn had guys step up and perhaps avoid being, as Cardwell would say, “the biggest bust in the country.”
It was fitting that any Creighton hope was dashed with 1:11 to play when Denver Jones isolated his defender in a 6-point game, and somehow got a leaning bucket to fall as he was fouled. Jones looked to the Auburn bench and did Steph Curry’s “Night Night” celebration. Had Auburn delivered another sleepy performance, the conversations would’ve centered around why it never clicked when it needed to.
It might be time to put that discussion to rest.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
