Auburn's Sebastian Williams-Adams Details Team's ‘Desperate’ Mentality

The Auburn Tigers are determined to show they won't go down quietly as they fight to keep their tournament hopes alive

Auburn is feeling the pressure, but they also have the desire to overcome it | Petre Thomas-Imagn Images

It has been quite a different season for the Auburn Tigers after a 2025 Final Four appearance, though quite a bit has changed on the Plains in the time since. The team returned just a single scholarship player from its 2025 roster, hired a new head coach and has been struggling in the time since.

Recently, the Tigers suffered a five-game skid, only snapping their losing streak with a walk-off tip-in shot against Kentucky on Saturday. The Tigers’ tournament hopes are still alive, but Auburn forward Sebastian Williams-Adams was clear: it will not be an easy road.

What happens next for the Auburn Tigers? Don't miss out on any news and analysis! Take a second, sign up for our free newsletter, and get breaking Auburn Tigers news delivered to your inbox daily!

"We're still hungry,” Williams-Adams said. “We're still desperate. We've got to play our way into the Tournament... That's our only goal right now."

The now 15-12 Tigers have a tough stretch of games coming up, and they will need to win most, if not all, of them if they want to make their way into March Madness. Up next for the Tigers is a matchup with Oklahoma, before they head back home to take on Ole Miss and LSU. Auburn will complete its season with a rematch of the Iron Bowl of basketball against Alabama, this time played in Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa.

It is desperation time for the Tigers, but ‘desperate’ is not exactly a bad thing for this team, Williams-Adams argued.

"I think we know we're at our best when we're playing desperate,” Williams-Adams said. “We've established that, for the rest of the season, we're playing desperate. We're playing for our Tournament hopes. We have to."

For the Tigers, this ‘desperate’ situation seems to be not only a measure of the cruciality of their upcoming games, but also a reflection of the effort the team is willing to put in to win in these matchups.

Take KeShawn Murphy, for example: the Tigers absolutely needed to win against Kentucky this past Saturday, and their usual top-level scorer, Keyshawn Hall, was limited to just 10 points. 

Despite a disappointing performance in the Tigers’ prior matchup against Mississippi State, Murphy played with a vengeance against the Wildcats, scoring 25 and grabbing 10 rebounds in just 24 minutes of playing time, including a crucial defensive stop to secure the win for the Tigers.

If the Tigers can continue to play with the vengeance, or ‘desperation,’ as Williams-Adams put it, Steven Pearl’s squad may just find itself in decent seeding for the March Madness tournament, but it will not be easy.