This is an opinion column.

You may not like his politics or his personality, and if so, he really doesn’t care, but unless you’re the NCAA Division I Basketball Committee – more on that group in a minute – you have to give Bruce Pearl his due. He changed the game of basketball at a school and in a state long dominated by football.

For the better if not forever.

The latest evidence poured in Sunday with the same furious intensity and contagious joy the Auburn team and its boisterous family unleashed in Nashville. They turned Bridgestone Arena into the Jungle North and overwhelmed a very good Florida team in the SEC Tournament Championship Game.

So much for the notion that the building would be a ghost town after Kentucky went one-and-done Friday. This is no longer your father’s Big Blue Nation except, perhaps, to the old heads on that pesky selection committee. We’ll get to them shortly. I promise.

That emphatic 86-67 statement by the Tigers simply added to Pearl’s legacy as the most impactful basketball hire in this state since UAB lured Gene Bartow from UCLA to start a program from scratch and cause Alabama power brokers to itch for decades to come.