The computer metrics love Auburn.

Head coach Bruce Pearl’s team is No. 3 in the Torvik rankings, No. 5 in KenPom and No. 8 in the NET as of Friday. All are higher than Auburn’s No. 16 ranking in the Associated Press top 25, decided by humans, not machines.

Yet what the humans see which the computers can’t quite adjust for is Auburn’s resume. It’s lacking one key piece. Auburn may be 17-4 overall and 6-2 in the SEC, but it doesn’t have a single Quad 1 — the types of resume builders that the Selection Committee looks for come Selection Sunday.

Men’s basketball quadrants are defined as the following based on NET rankings:

• Quadrant 1: Home 1-30, Neutral 1-50, Away 1-75
• Quadrant 2: Home 31-75, Neutral 51-100, Away 76-135
• Quadrant 3: Home 76-160, Neutral 101-200, Away 135-240
• Quadrant 4: Home 161-353, Neutral 201-353, Away 241-353

As of Friday, Auburn is 17-0 in Quad 2, 3 and 4 games. It is 0-4 against Quad 1, with Appalachian State creeping into the top 75 this week.

But Auburn is about to get a slew of chances to crack a Quad 1 win over the next chunk of its SEC schedule. That begins Saturday night against Ole Miss in Oxford. Tip-off is scheduled for 5 p.m. and the game will be aired on the SEC Network.

“I think we have a chance to win the league,” Pearl said at his Friday press conference. “I think we have a chance to be between one and about eight or nine as we sit right now. That’s about where we could be. Then you gotta start thinking about getting a game like this one.”

Auburn has 10 regular season games to play including Saturday. Five of them will be a chance for a Quad 1 win as of Friday’s NET rankings. Those include Saturday’s game at Ole Miss, a home game this coming Wednesday against Alabama, a Feb. 10 game at Florida, a Feb. 17 home game against Kentucky and a Feb. 28 trip to Tennessee.

NET No. 37 Mississippi State, No. 41 South Carolina and No. 82 Georgia are all within the range of jumping up to a potential Quad 1 contest for that game’s respective host site.

Three of Auburn’s five remaining Quad 1 games are on the road, where Auburn has struggled this season.

Auburn is 2-3 over its first five true road games. It played two SEC road games last week — against now No. 24 Alabama and Mississippi State — which both could have been Quad 1 wins. It lost both games. It shot the ball poorly in both.

“I mean, every crowd’s a great atmosphere,” Auburn guard Denver Jones said Friday of Auburn’s 3-point shooting. “There’s nothing like going away and having the opposing team’s crowd yelling at you. That just takes some getting used to sometimes on this level, just trying to go through that and shoot the ball well, sometimes that can have a little bit of an effect.”

Auburn is shooting 29-119 on 3-pointers in true road games. That is 24%. It will be hard to win road games shooting like that.

After shooting 11-49 from deep in its road games last week, Auburn didn’t have enough offense in order to win difficult road games.

That certainly won’t be enough to beat a much-improved Ole Miss team on the road. Auburn beat Ole Miss 82-59 on Jan. 20 at Neville Arena. Ole Miss hasn’t lost since then, beating Arkansas, Texas A&M and Mississippi State all in a row.

“We know things that we have to do on the road,” Pearl said. “We’ve got to take care of the ball. We’ve got to make shots. Shoot it better obviously. We’ve not shot the ball from 3 particularly on the road as well. We gotta continue to improve our rebounding. We do those things, and we give ourselves a chance. We don’t improve in those areas, then we’ll continue not to beat teams on the road.”

Matt Cohen covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @Matt_Cohen_ or email him at [email protected]