Auburn senior guard KD Johnson admits he wasn’t tuned into ESPN’s College Gameday when it was said, but word travels fast in the Tigers’ locker room, so it didn’t take long for word to get back to him.

“We kinda heard some things this morning about us that we kinda didn’t like,” Johnson said on the evening of March 9, minutes after he and the Tigers topped the Georgia Bulldogs 92-78 in the team’s regular season finale.

Johnson was referring to ESPN’s Jay Williams and Andraya Carter both calling the Tigers “overvalued” during a segment on College Gameday that morning. Williams and Carter isolated Auburn’s guard play as the reason for their takes.

To be fair, Auburn is young and inexperienced at the point guard spot as freshman Aden Holloway and sophomore Trey Donaldson have both gone through runs as the Tigers’ starting point guard this season.

“We have the youngest point guards in college basketball Power Five, with the exception of maybe Kentucky,” Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl said. “Kentucky would have two freshmen, and we’ve got a freshman and a sophomore. You just don’t see it anymore, because of how old teams have gotten and are getting with transfers and everything like that.”

However, all season long, the Holloway-Donaldson tandem has proven age and experience can mean very little.

With Holloway and Donaldson acting as Auburn’s floor generals this season, the Tigers’ finished the regular season with the highest assist rate and lowest turnover rate of any Auburn team under Pearl.

“I think that both Tre and Aden have taken great care of the ball,” Pearl said. “They’ve understood our offenses, they play within their limitations, they’re unselfish. But they both are threats to score. They’ve just done a really good job taking care of the ball and valuing possessions.”

All that said, Pearl wasn’t up in arms at Saturday’s comments made by the folks with College Gameday, who he says “have been phenomenal to us” having visited The Plains the last four years in a row.

“Look, they’ve gotta pick somebody,” Pearl said. “But, you know, for whatever reason — maybe they don’t think we have much rise left. Maybe they think we’ve overachieved and so therefore, they felt we were a little overrated and that we weren’t going to be a team that would make much noise.”

Pearl has often reminded that the Tigers were picked to finish sixth in the SEC during the preseason.

Instead, Auburn finished the regular season ranked fourth in the league and was in the SEC title race until the very end.

“I thought this team could be good. I thought this team would be good with a chance to be very good. And I did think that picked sixth is about where I would’ve picked us, sixth or seventh,” Pearl said. “So they’ve exceeded my expectations a little bit. Instead this was a team that was very good with a chance to be great.”

But as evident by the opinions of Williams and Carter, not everyone is buying that.

Fortunately for Auburn, them buying in isn’t a requirement.

“You always get overlooked and doubted,” said Auburn junior center Johni Broome.

“But when you have a team like us that plays unselfish and do the things that we do on the court — the games we win and the times we do lose, how it looks, and you’ve still got people saying we’re the most overrated team out of 70 teams? It’s kinda like, ‘OK, so?’”

To Broome’s point, the Tigers rank eighth nationally in scoring margin with an average of +14.9.

“It’s time to go on a little run,” Broome said. “And I think we’re capable of it — especially in our locker room, our guys are feeling it.”

No. 12 Auburn is set to officially open postseason play Friday afternoon at the SEC Tournament in Nashville, where it’ll see the winner of Thursday’s Arkansas-South Carolina matchup at approximately 2:30 p.m.

“It’s step-up time,” Pearl said of opening the postseason. “You step up, you stay. You don’t, you go home.”

And in the case of the Tigers, who are entering postseason play with a bit of added motivation, Pearl doesn’t expect that to be much of an issue.

“I think we do,” Pearl said when asked if his team plays better with a chip on its shoulder. “Yeah, you definitely use that to motivate the players as to what they’re thinking.”