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Auburn knows all too well the significance of grinding out a win vs. Ole Miss in the SEC Tournament
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After Johni Broome worked Malik Dia in the post and kissed in a dagger bucket off the glass in Friday’s SEC Tournament quarterfinal matchup, you can bet that Bruce Pearl let out an exhale.
Go back 3 years ago. Auburn had won the 2022 SEC regular-season title thanks to a 19-game winning streak that saw the program earn its first-ever AP No. 1 ranking. But a sluggish February bled into the postseason, and Auburn was 1-and-done in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals via a hungrier Texas A&M squad. While it wasn’t significant for the Tigers’ hopes of a 1-seed, it was significant because to that point, nobody had ever won a national title after failing to reach the semifinal round of their conference tournament (if they had one to participate in).
Three years later, that’s still true. Ergo, one can understand why Pearl and Auburn probably let out a collective exhale as Broome’s late score fended off a hungry Ole Miss squad.
A 62-57 SEC Tournament quarterfinal victory won’t be the start of Auburn’s championship DVD if there’s one to make at season’s end — the Tigers are tied with Duke as the +350 favorites to win it all at FanDuel — but think of the alternative. The alternative was flashbacks to 2022. It was flashbacks to wondering if this team had again peaked too early. After all, this Auburn team also had a long winning streak snapped on Feb. 8 — it won 14 in a row to that point — and was able to win the SEC regular-season title with 3 post-January losses.
Granted, 2 of those post-January losses in 2025 came after Auburn had already clinched the regular-season title. Even if the Tigers had lost on Friday instead of holding off Chris Beard’s squad, some would’ve spun it as “this tournament doesn’t matter” because it’s not a true barometer for NCAA Tournament success. Auburn has been at the forefront of that.
Last year’s squad emerged victorious in Nashville, only to be shocked by Yale in the Round of 64. The 2019 squad was the last team standing in the SEC Tournament, and it was the launching point for Auburn’s first Final Four run.
Spin it however you want. What everyone seeks — conference title or not — is to be playing their best basketball in March. Time will tell if that’ll be the arc for Auburn, who could lose in the SEC semifinals and still enter the NCAA Tournament with one of the most battle-tested résumés ever. Nobody will sniff Auburn’s 16 Quad 1 wins, which was why the 1-seed argument hasn’t been in doubt for weeks.
It was, however, fair to question how Auburn would look coming out of the gates against Ole Miss.
You could use several words to describe how the Tigers looked on Friday. Sloppy? Imperfect? Effective? All apply in a 15-turnover game that saw Auburn come up 23 points short of its season average. In a winning effort, again, that beats the alternative. The alternative was that Auburn could’ve dug itself an early hole, got tight in the second half, watched Chad Baker-Mazara have another head-scratching mental mistake and end up on the wrong end of another March upset.
Instead, Baker-Mazara’s loudest moment on Friday was a rim-shattering jam that put an exclamation point on a pivotal late sequence.
Those are the types of moments that Auburn will be tasked with seizing during the NCAA Tournament. It’s not just going to be about whether Baker-Mazara keeps his composure, nor will Auburn’s season be defined by whether Broome is at 85% compared to 75%. Can this team embrace the target instead of just acknowledging the target like last year’s squad?
Maybe that’s not a fair question to ask even though so many of the same pieces are in place. No matter what happens this weekend in Nashville, it’ll be difficult to avoid the conversation of last year’s squad until Auburn can get through the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament, which hasn’t happened since the 2019 Final Four run. Strangely, it might actually become more of a discussion topic if Auburn rolls through Nashville and completes the SEC sweep. That’d be no small feat, especially in the likely event that the will SEC break the Big East’s record of 11 teams in the 2011 NCAA Tournament.
The good news for Auburn is that for now, it can avoid the comps to the 2022 squad. That team ultimately lost in the Round of 32 and didn’t become the first national champion who failed to reach the semifinal round of its conference tournament. Auburn losing in the SEC Tournament semifinal would feel far less significant than a quarterfinal loss because 7 of the last 10 national champs failed to win their respective conference tournaments.
Make of that what you will. What you can make of Friday is that Auburn cleared a key hurdle. A collapse against Ole Miss might not have brought on a full-blown Pearl panic.
But he knows all too well that he wouldn’t have felt inclined to exhale.
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.
