Steven Pearl Pleas for NCAA Tournament Bid After Auburn's Collapse vs. Tennessee

The Auburn Tigers suffered an embarrassing collapse at the hands of Tennessee on Thursday afternoon, falling 72-62 to the Volunteers to bow out of the SEC Tournament early after two games.

Auburn needed the win to likely secure an NCAA Tournament bid as Selection Sunday is just three days away. However, instead, an implosion on both ends of the floor allowed Tennessee to mount a 20-0 run to overcome a 10-point Auburn lead in the second half.

The Tigers led 51-41 with 10:26 remaining in the contest, but that Tahaad Pettiford jumper was followed by a nearly 7-minute scoring drought that ultimately resulted in a double-digit Volunteer victory.

Despite the abysmal closing 10 minutes, Auburn head coach Steven Pearl believes his squad should absolutely earn a bid to the Big Dance.

He spoke on it after the game, and he certainly made his case for why the Tigers deserve a spot in March Madness.

"If you look at our resume, if you compare us to the rest of the teams on the bubble, which I’m happy to go over all these notes with you, we deserve to be in the tournament. I’ll just go on a rant then,” Pearl said.

“Here's the thing. What people have to understand is, like, it's my job to fight for my team,” Pearl said. “It's my job to be my team's advocate. It's my job to speak about all the things that this group's done.”

"Some of the biggest things that we're told to do in scheduling, especially during football season, is to get some of these prime time matchups for TV ratings, to compete with football. That's why we play teams like Houston and Purdue and Arizona, we go to the Players Era. We do all those things,” Pearl continued.

Prior to conference action beginning, Auburn faced a historically tough non-conference slate, one that certainly competes with last year’s out-of-conference schedule. The Tigers faced Houston (neutral), Purdue (neutral), St. John’s (neutral), Michigan (neutral), and Arizona (road).

"So we scheduled a really hard out-of-conference schedule. We had some really quality wins in that streak,” Pearl said. If you look at – this tournament is a team of who you can beat. If we're going to look at six teams on the bubble right now, Texas, SMU, VCU, Miami Ohio, Missouri, New Mexico, we have more top-25 NET wins than everyone in that group but Missouri. We have more top-50 (NET) wins than everyone in that group. We have two top-25 road neutral wins, more than everyone else on the bubble. We have more wins over the projected field than anyone else on the bubble.”

"If you look at the major metrics that they use — NET, KenPom, KPI, Strength of Record, and Wins Above the Bubble — we are better than every team in that group in at least five out of the seven categories, and in a couple of them six of the seven.”

Auburn currently holds four Quad-1 wins – vs. St. John’s, at Florida, vs. Arkansas, and vs. Kentucky – but it has also dropped 12 Quad-1 games. The Tigers sit at No. 38 in the NET rankings, which, as Pearl pointed out, is higher than the other squads on the bubble (excluding SMU).

"Our strength of schedule, overall we're at three, and out of conference we're at 15. If you look at the rest of that list, they're far below us as far as the schedule that we played,” Pearl said.

"We did the things that were asked of us in scheduling. With 10 new guys, that was probably a little aggressive on our part with nine underclassmen. Our guys have some of the best wins in college basketball. This team deserves to be in the tournament.”

Now, all Auburn can do is wait. Selection Sunday is almost here, and the Tigers’ postseason fate might be in the hands of other teams on the bubble. Nonetheless, it’ll be interesting to see whether the selection committee values Auburn’s total losses (16) over its impressive metrics and elite strength of schedule, or vice versa.

"It's a team that can win games in the tournament. I think they've done enough ultimately to have their name called on Selection Sunday."