Chris Moore said they could have been so much better last season. Dylan Cardwell said the team was made up of cliques. There was a cultural problem, they both agreed. They called last year’s team selfish. They said it held them back. It all ended symbolically with a glimpse at its potential against a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament before a meltdown two hours up Highway 280.

So the coaches called a meeting. It had to stop. It had to stop then.

“They sat us down,” Cardwell said. “They said, we’re going to change our culture. And we did.”

Maybe they didn’t know it then, maybe if not for the vision head coach Bruce Pearl had in finding a different type of player in the transfer portal, but it was this meeting sometime between the loss to Houston and the start of summer workouts that founded what’s become Auburn — the deepest team in America, an SEC champion.

Pearl required sacrifice to get a collection of 11 players in rotation all willing to agree to accept less for themselves in order to win, the sum greater than its parts.

That means an incredible level of buy-in. It’s buy-in that takes so long to build that it starts with a team meeting just weeks after the previous season ended. It’s buy-in that requires every single player to be fully committed and a culture built so strongly to ensure it lasts.

It lasts nearly a year later, this collection of parts sat in a locker room together in Nashville after cutting down the Bridgestone Arena nets, maybe that buy-in had never been clearer.

“There’s no cliques,” Cardwell said. “We’re all one unit. Of course, there’s going to be people that are closer than with other people but at the end of the day, there’s not a single clique on the team. That’s a first for me.”

At the SEC Tournament, Auburn showed why this culture works. No team in this league has more fun than Auburn. Taking trick shots in pre-game shoot around — a foursome all heaving up half-court shots before going back to the locker room — or a mosh pit and fake boxing matches and smiles so unbecoming of the business-like approach of so many others as the season reaches single-elimination basketball games.

That’s Auburn, and how this team has always functioned in the 2023-24 season.

“This is probably one of the closest teams I’ve been on,” forward Johni Broome said. “Everybody loves each other.”

That translated to a stage at center court Sunday, where Auburn kept dancing onto the podium and hoisted a trophy as SEC champions. All 10 members of Auburn’s rotation post-Lior Berman’s ACL injury scored in two of its three SEC Tournament games including the championship against Florida. It was this depth that separated Auburn from an upset-riddled field and showed why it could win in March.

Broome was named the SEC Tournament MVP. He did so as the best player on a team that doesn’t have a true superstar. He did so playing fewer than 25 minutes per game.

But why? Why stay here and sacrifice minutes and individual stats?

“It is worth it,” Broome said, fending off laughs from point guard Tre Donaldson sitting next to him, trying to make the serious Broome crack a smile. “It always pays off in the end. I’m willing to sacrifice my minutes for wins. Whenever I need to go to my guys, I know they got my back.”

Then Broome cracked up laughing. That was why. That he can genuinely love his teammates to be willing to accept less.

It’s the result of the internal culture change from Auburn’s team meeting. It was a months-long process.

“They bought in early,” graduate student Carter Sobera said. “Not middle of the season, end of the season. It’s like, we kinda got started on that front way earlier than in other years I’ve been here. I keep saying it, but this team just genuinely cares about each other and has since day one.”

Cardwell said the team meeting forced himself and his teammates to be more accountable. To require cleaning out their own lockers and have difficult conversations. It required being humble.

That process had to start with a whole summer to make mistakes. It would not be a quick change to create a new culture and for it to be genuine.

“We couldn’t have conversations and hold everybody accountable because we didn’t have relationships,” Cardwell said. “So you really can’t go across the room and say, ‘Hey, box out for a freakin rebound.’ We can’t really say that because we’re going to take offense to it. They don’t know it’s coming from love. This team, for the most part, everybody knows it’s coming from love because we spent months and months and months building that camaraderie.”

Cardwell and forward Jaylin Williams talked about required breakfasts over the summer. Their meeting had to manifest in time spent together to build the culture foundational to its depth. The teammates went out together, practiced together, played games together, whatever it took.

“I feel like we really know each other as brothers,” Moore said. “We all want to see each other succeed. See each other thriving. I feel like that’s a big key.”

“The whole spring and summer, we changed,” Williams said. “We was working harder than I’ve ever worked at Auburn. Some mornings I woke up and didn’t want to go to the gym.”

But that culture change of returners had to be met by blending new faces into these ideals.

Externally, Pearl sold a recruiting pitch antithetical to the modern age of NIL wooing. Whereas so many high schoolers and transfer portal entrants seek money and playing time, Pearl never offered that.

In fact, he sought the opposite.

“Honestly, the first thing I told BP was I just wanted to be a part of a family,” FIU transfer guard Denver Jones said. “Part of an organization. And I want to win. I feel like that was the biggest thing. I knew with the team that we was building, that BP and them was trying to build, I knew we would a shot.”

Jones played 33.4 minutes per game last year at FIU and scored 20.4 points per game. Now, the starting shooting guard at Auburn, Jones is scoring 8.9 points per game and playing 21.7 minutes per game. He has played his best basketball as the season got later.

Over Auburn’s last seven games playing the best basketball of his season, Jones is playing 25 minutes per game and scoring more than 12 points per game. It’s still not his numbers from the smaller school. But he knew that would be the case. He didn’t care.

Jones said he finds the challenge of playing in the SEC fun. Here, he said, everyone was the best player on their previous high school or college team. Now, they all formed one cohesive group.

Aden Holloway came to Auburn as a five-star recruit and took on a role bouncing in and out of the starting lineup. That’s not common for a five-star these days. Holloway said that wasn’t what he was expecting when he came to Auburn. Certainly, he had plans of succeeding quickly as a high-volume scoring guard like so many on Pearl’s prior teams.

What Pearl required was efficiency even when Holloway’s shooting struggled in SEC play. So Holloway worked on the other aspects of his game. He became a better passer — he leads Auburn in assist-to-turnover ratio — and an improved defender.

It’s the first time Holloway has accepted a role not being the star and in his first year of college. It’s difficult. He was willing to do it. He was rewarded.

“When it really hit me, we were on the stand and then the confetti fell,” Holloway said minutes after winning an SEC title. “That was one of the craziest moments of my life for sure.”

Backup forward Chaney Johnson said he came to Auburn from Division II Alabama-Huntsville without a role set in stone. He might have a chance to start, he said, but he didn’t know for sure.

“I didn’t want come into a situation where I was just going to take that leap and just get the ball every time,” Johnson said. “I would rather be part of a better team than be somewhere where I might get a lot of shots, but the team’s not very good. Winning is the main goal.”

That all worked for Auburn to have a sort of Noah’s-Ark-type team. It truly has two of everything and uses every piece. Aden Holloway and Tre Donaldson at point guard. Denver Jones and K.D. Johnson at shooting guard. Chad Baker-Mazara and Chris Moore at small forward. Jaylin Williams and Chaney Johnson at power forward. Johni Broome and Dylan Cardwell at center.

“It was definitely worth it, and it’s going to keep being worth it,” Moore said. “You got a group of guys that believe in each other and once you’ve got that, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to play against. I feel like we’re the most dangerous team in the country because of our depth and how we don’t have to play guys 30 minutes night in and night out. We can play guys 20, 15 minutes and then the next game it can flip-flopped and there won’t be no egos involved.”

That depth is why so many metrics love Auburn.

Despite being selected as a No. 4 seed in the East Region and shipped off to an opening two rounds in Spokane, Washington, most computer rankings have Auburn as a top-five team in America. Auburn is No. 4 in KenPom, No. 5 in the NET, No. 5 in T-Rank and No. 2 in the EvanMiya ranking.

Auburn scores the fourth most bench points per game in the country (34.06) and eight in bench minutes percentage (43.1% of the total minutes).

It’s the backbone of an Auburn team that won 26 of 27 games by double digits — 7th in the country in average scoring margin. It’s the only team that is in the top 10 for both offensive and defensive efficiency.

“Even on tough losses, this team has stuck together, man,” Williams said. “We would leave the locker room like we won the game. ‘We can learn from this guys.’”

On the sideline, teammates cheer for each other and genuinely mean it. Sobera said that’s what makes Auburn’s depth work, and why they’re dangerous in a tournament. Teams with less depth will get tired. Auburn doesn’t. Everyone has fresh legs. The pressure is off, the players say, because they know they can rely on someone else to pick them up.

“Chad (Baker-Mazara) is one of my closest friends,” Moore said of his positional counterpart. “I honestly feel like I’ve been knowing Chad my whole life, and that helps us on the court. We trust each other, we have the utmost confidence in each other.”

“It’s probably not normal for other teams, but we make it routine here.”

Auburn is not reliant on any one player, and every player is happy for it to be someone else on any given night.

So it was fitting in the final moments of the SEC championship game — the result just a mere formality — when Pearl subbed off Broome for Cardwell. As Cardwell walked onto the floor, he held his arms up in the air and high-fived Broome. Then Broome dropped his hands, and hugged his teammate.

They were both champions. The sacrifice had been worth it. It’s Pearl’s best coaching job at Auburn to turn this collection of parts into a machine. His plan had been validated.

“My staff did an outstanding job with player development and I think the guys did a great job all year long of being unselfish and all being patient and all accepting less individually so we as a team could accomplish more,” Pearl said at a Neville Arena press conference before traveling to Spokane.

Then Pearl sat up in his podium chair, smirked, then chuckled.

“That was pretty good.”

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