To win an SEC title, Auburn basketball may in its most important week
Chaney Johnson hasn’t been at a Division I basketball school for a full year yet and he’s quickly figured out the stakes. The Auburn forward gestured with his hand at eye level during a Tuesday press conference to signify this Auburn team’s level right now. And then he moved his hand above his head, to say that if Auburn can its two games this week, it will take the next step up.
“If we win these two, we go from here,” Johnson gestured. “To here. So it’s real important to get these two.”
As head coach Bruce Pearl has said throughout the season, Auburn has played to put itself “in position to be in position” to win the SEC regular season championship. It has done that. Auburn is a game back of first place in the SEC. It is in a position to position itself at the top of the SEC.
And the top team in the league standings will be in Auburn for a date on Valentine’s Day, with tip-off set for 7:30 p.m. South Carolina leads the SEC with a 9-2 conference record and a 21-3 overall record.
“If we want to win the championship, we have to beat South Carolina tomorrow,” Pearl said during a press conference Tuesday. “Pretty simple. Already being a game behind them, two games behind them with six then to go would be something I don’t think we would be able to overcome. So, it’s going to be a real challenge because they’ve only lost three games. There’s obviously a reason for that.”
Pearl is beginning to seriously look at the prospect of chasing a championship now. Throughout the season, he has said Auburn’s preseason prediction to finish sixth in the SEC seemed about right. He felt Associated Press rankings that put Auburn in the top 10 previously this season were viewing Auburn as better than this team really was.
But it was going to take winning a truly big game for Pearl to seriously think a championship was a legitimate possibility. And until Auburn beat Ole Miss in Oxford, Pearl hadn’t seen it.
“(Those wins) said to me, ‘OK. We have a chance to be better than we were picked. Sixth in the league,’’” Pearl said.
With consecutive wins over Ole Miss and Alabama, Auburn’s first two Quad 1 wins of the season, Pearl finally felt his team had proven it was good enough to be at the top of this league because it had beaten two of the SEC’s better team. Simple as that.
Auburn will now have to continue winning in the building where its played its best basketball this season. The Tigers are a perfect 12-0 at Neville Arena. It put up one of its best performances of the season in its last home game, beating Alabama exactly one week ago by 17 points.
But while Pearl’s outlook and goals to this point are quite clearly set on a trophy with two of its biggest wins still relatively close in Auburn’s mirror, Pearl’s team is entering this pivotal week on the heels of one of its worst games of the season — losing 81-65 Saturday on the road against Florida.
“We lost to Florida but we got South Carolina and Kentucky in the same week,” Auburn center Johni Broome said Tuesday. “That’s the good thing about playing in the SEC. We beat Alabama, a very good team, then we slipped at Florida but now we got two great teams at our home court in the Jungle. I feel like we could bounce back pretty quick as long as we get the next two. It’s a very important week for us. We talk about winning the SEC championship so I feel like these two are very important games to do that.”
KenPom rates the SEC as the third-best conference in America this season, a sign of how far the conference has grown from the Kentucky-dominated seasons of years past.
So with two of those games in one week, there will not be a week more important to the rest of Auburn’s season than this one.
Matt Cohen covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @Matt_Cohen_ or email him at [email protected]