This is an opinion column.

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The Final Four gets a postscript with this week’s mailbag, and apparently Auburn coach Bruce Pearl has some work to do … plus we dip our pinky toe into a molten vat of President Donald Trump’s curious form of statecraft.

Jeff in Dothan writes …

Like most AU fans and alums I am proud of our guys and the coaches, too. They represented Auburn with class and teamwork, coming up short but breaking records along the way.

The only critique I will offer is this one. Bruce Pearl needs to carefully examine how they go about physical preparation throughout the season because our teams have a habit of fading down the stretch. Even our best teams have faltered physically near the final few weeks of the season and that needs to be solved because the conference is only going to get better, more physical and better conditioned moving forward.

Do you think that going all out to win the SEC championship takes too much out of a team heading into March? Of course, not many coaches want to admit that they would hold back in February for the sake of being fresher for the NCAA Tournament…The team that beat Bama in Tuscaloosa this year could have torn through this year’s Tournament and cut down the nets. But that was Auburn at its best. From that moment, something was missing. Even the Kentucky game in Rupp Arena was nowhere near that game. Whatever is happening, it is real and BP has to solve it if we are going to achieve the ultimate prize. Ok then.

Joe writes …

Thank you for writing an honest appraisal of Auburn in the second half of the Four Four. I greatly appreciate Coach Bruce Pearl and his continual positivity and optimism. He and the guys have represented AU so well this season. A poor second half shouldn’t detract from an outstanding year. And yet, it was a very poor second half, a reversal of an exceptional first 20 minutes. Here’s the dirty laundry:

• The nation’s best guard, who went into the locker room with a high of 14 points, was allowed to drop 20 more.
• AU was led in scoring by two guys with significant injuries.
• Touted as the deepest team in the nation, AU only played seven over 40 minutes. Unless, I’m mistaken, one-time starter Chris Moore didn’t see the court.
• Both Denver Jones and Pearl cited fatigue after a week’s worth of rest.
• There’s much to discuss statistically: free throw percentage, turnovers, and attempting almost 50 percent fewer shots in the paint.

As a former coach who ran the Flex, I have many questions about AU’s schemes, but won’t bother you with X’s and O’s. Let’s just say Dr. Tom Davis probably utilized entry plays, pressure releases and the simple action of turning the offense over. Tiger cutters also have a history of not using the screens their teammates set. Yes, I’m disappointed with the final 20 minutes of the 2024-25 season, but we’ll still hang two banners for a great season. We should be very proud of our accomplishments this year. War Eagle!

ANSWER: Tough critics after Auburn’s best season in basketball history … I like it! Auburn set a program record for wins this season with 32, but the Tigers ran out of juice against the eventual national champs. Florida out-rebounded Auburn by 10 in the second half of the Final Four while the Tigers committed 12 turnovers. There’s your game. Rebounding wins championships.

Dr. Tom Davis is Coach Pearl’s old mentor. Pearl coached with Davis at Boston College, Stanford and Iowa before branching out on his own. Davis likes to tell a funny story about Pearl in his early years as a team manager for Boston College.

BC played in the NCAA Tournament one year without cheerleaders. Pearl didn’t like that. No cheerleaders? Not on Pearl’s watch.

Pearl borrowed a cheerleader outfit and was Boston College’s only cheerleader during the game. At one point, Pearl stood on the baseline and tried to distract opposing players during their free-throw attempts. The refs had to stop the game and tell Davis that if he couldn’t control his cheerleader, then Boston College would be hit with a technical foul.

There’s a reason why Auburn has the best home-court advantage in the SEC. It’s Pearl, who has made cheerleaders out of Auburn’s entire student body.

Auburn’s games in the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 are where all of Pearl’s hard work was on display for the country to appreciate. It was the pinnacle of Pearl’s career. The pro-Auburn crowds inside Atlanta’s State Farm Arena were the best I’ve ever seen for games in the NCAA Tournament. That weekend felt like the crowning piece atop everything Pearl has built for Auburn University.

Pearl is an American original. I love everything about him, and especially his strong personality and dedication to transparency. He now has over 700 wins for his career. It’s tough for me to be critical of a coach who has taken Auburn basketball from nothing and built it into a national powerhouse. I go back to Auburn’s loss at Duke before the conference schedule. Duke won 84-78 at Cameron Indoor. I was there. I made the drive. For a former student manager who once dressed up like a cheerleader, Cameron Indoor is Pearl’s kind of place.

Pearl said something prophetic in his post-game news conference after the loss. He mentioned that some of Auburn’s naysayers believed that the Tigers might peak too soon. More specifically, Pearl said that some believed that Auburn’s roster didn’t have much room to grow as other teams.

I think Pearl was self-assessing his team at that moment and looking for ways to motivate everyone before conference play. Let’s not get bogged down with overanalyzing the loss to Florida. Auburn was beat up by the end. Florida developed into a national champion as the season progressed and its best player, guard Walter Clayton, Jr., caught fire in the NCAA Tournament. I like the idea of Pearl analyzing his roster to get the most of everyone in March. Pearl will begin this next season with younger players, so he’ll have a chance to make some adjustments to the formula.

Maybe Auburn guard Tahaad Pettiford can be next season’s Walter Clayton, Jr.

Bud writes …

The future of America and our way of life is immensely more important than college football at any level and any state dominance of such. Your disdain for Trump policies shows through your writings. You are simply wrong in your thinking and as you state, you are not an economist, but you are an American. Common sense alone should guide your thinking towards correcting the mistakes of past administrations regarding trade balances and our national debt. Our current administration is doing all it can to reverse past practices and lack of business knowledge. Perhaps while on campus one day you could sit in on a class in Econ 101. Could be enlightening.

I do enjoy many of your articles. Big picture, please. I give to the Alabama Alumni Association. Hope they use it to recruit good future students, be they athletes or not. (Still looking for mega-donors for NIL.)

Jerry writes …

The NCAA slowly is killing all college sports with so many transfers and paying millions to college athletes. Trump is not harming college sports but politicians and greedy players and coaches are. Now the teams with the most money can buy players. We should have a draft like the pros since we are paying players. You so-called media folks try to blame Trump for something that went back to Obama and Biden.

ANSWER: I’m not going to pretend to be some kind of two-bit armchair economist. I’m sure there are plenty of those on Fox News these days. My only wish is that President Trump’s curious interpretation of statecraft stays the heck away from college football (and especially games when Alabama plays LSU), but let’s not reinvent history here. The Supreme Court voted 9-0 in Alston v. NCAA. The court ruling paved the way for the NIL era and the courts have decided the future of college sports with this latest settlement of House v. NCAA. It looks like the settlement will undergo a few tweaks over the next couple weeks before being implemented. When everything gets sorted out, schools will begin sharing revenue with athletes. The Supreme Court emphatically stated that the NCAA is not above the law. Does that mean that college sports are ruined? No, we just witnessed the best college basketball season in SEC history! The NCAA just can’t prevent athletes from earning a living for their abilities.

Is “our way of life” more important than college football, though? That seems like a Catch-22 or some kind of Gordian riddle. College football is our way of life, and in Alabama we do it better than anyone else. How do we change our state economy so that we can outspend Oregon for football players? Isn’t that what our politicians really need to be asking themselves?

BE HEARD

Got a question for Joe? Want to get something off your chest? Send Joe an email about what’s on your mind. Let your voice be heard. Ask him anything.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the book “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s Ultimate Team.”