Before facing the Hoosiers, Bruce Pearl recalls his Indiana coaching roots
Sitting in his Neville Arena office, Bruce Pearl was handed a tablet while filming an interview posted by Auburn’s basketball social media accounts.
“I’m going to show you the photo of a logo. The first couple words that come to your mind, what does this mean to college basketball,” the off-camera interviewer said.
Auburn’s head coach took the tablet, looked at the image and raised his eyebrows.
“Wow,” Pearl said, before turning the tablet to face the camera and show the Indiana logo on the screen.
“You know, what jumps out at you when you see IU, Bobby Knight jumps out at me,” Pearl said.
In his first head coaching job, Pearl learned how to run a team beneath Knight’s long shadow. Now, more than 30 years after his first season at Southern Indiana, Pearl will face that Indiana team this weekend, playing the Hoosiers at 1 p.m. Saturday at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
“Indiana, obviously, is a blueblood,” Pearl said during a press conference Thursday. “It’s a historic program out of the Big Ten. What an opportunity for us to be able to play one of the bluebloods in college basketball. And I say that with all due respect.”
Pearl coached at Southern Indiana from 1992-2001. It was his first head coaching job after working as an assistant at Iowa. He won 231 games in Evansville, Indiana and won a Division II national championship in 1995.
Being a Division II school until 2022, Southern Indiana has never played IU in the regular season. Pearl’s old program has played the state’s flagship in exhibitions, but Pearl has never played a regular season game against Indiana.
But his time in Evansville coincided with the final decade of the late Knight’s tenure in Bloomington. Knight was fired in 2000.
Knight passed away on Nov. 1. Indiana players are wearing a patch on their uniforms displaying “RMK” — the initials for Robert Montgomery Knight — in his honor. He was 83.
Pearl had connections to the legendary coach first through his son Tim who was a student manager at Stanford when Pearl was an assistant coach there. Then he made his way to the Big Ten against Knight at Iowa.
“One of the things that I was doing as a young head coach was watching Coach Knight,” Pearl told reporters Thursday. “I was listening to his radio show and always was so impressed with how he communicated with the fans. He absolutely taught the game to the fan base, and he had more respect for the fans than the media. He would give the media such a hard time and barely answer their questions, and some random caller from Fishers, Indiana or whatever — he’d go and answer that question and break it down. I learned a lot by listening to him and watching him.”
Pearl has brought an awareness and an attention to basketball to a school predicated by its football team. During Pearl’s run of success over the last seven years at Auburn, Neville Arena has developed into one of the best home crowds in the SEC.
But Pearl’s knowledge of what a basketball school can be came from his time near Bloomington.
Hoosiers refer to their home as the “State of Basketball.” Pearl noted the significance of high school basketball in Indiana, where 10 of the 12 largest high school gyms in America are located.
The Indiana-Purdue basketball game each year is akin to Indiana like the Iron Bowl in Alabama — without poisoned trees or shootings.
“Their fans know the game,” Pearl said. “They know the game cause when they were in high school they played the game. There’s a basketball rim or a backboard on every light pole in the state, everybody’s backyard. As a result, the high school coaching is outstanding. The youth coaching is outstanding. The players are high-IQ. I think the biggest thing I learned is that— now, they don’t know nothing about football. Whereas our fanbase, they’ve forgotten more than some of our coaches know about football.”
But to build a community that cares about basketball in Auburn like the one in Bloomington has taken years of Pearl’s work. Slowly, it’s taking shape.
It will be seen Saturday in Atlanta, where Auburn is expected to have a large crowd against a strong-traveling IU fanbase. Maybe a decade ago, Auburn would be playing an effective road game, even in Atlanta.
“Basketball matters in Indiana,” Pearl said in the video. “It really does.”
Matt Cohen covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @Matt_Cohen_ or email him at [email protected]