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The Auburn Tigers have become a perennial national title contender under Bruce Pearl, and that has never been more true than it is in 2024-25. Auburn has spent the entire season as one of the top-ranked teams in the nation including a long stint at No. 1 that came to an end at the end of the regular season.
Pearl is no stranger to taking this Auburn program into the NCAA Tournament. This will be his sixth appearance in March Madness as the head coach of the Tigers, and he will be seeking his second Final Four.
Many college basketball fans will remember the 2018-19 team, led by Jared Harper and Bryce Brown, that overcame the tragic injury to Chuma Okeke to knock off top seed North Carolina and No. 2 seed Kentucky in the regional to reach the Final Four. Pearl and company were just seconds from the title game before losing a classic to eventual national champion Virginia.
Outside of that run, Auburn has had its share of disappointments. In his first tournament with the program, Pearl and company were blown out by Clemson by 31 points. He also had the 2021-22 team that was a No. 2 seed but got upset by Miami in the second round.
Last season, Auburn came into the Big Dance as a popular sleeper pick as a No. 4 seed, but the 13th seeded Yale Bulldogs stunned Pearl and company in the first round. Auburn is hoping for better results this season, and it has put in the hard yards to get the most favorable path possible heading into postseason play.
Why Bruce Pearl's squad is a top seed and a title contender
Even though Duke currently occupies the top spot in the AP poll, Auburn is still the heavy favorite to be the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. That would guarantee the top spot in the South Regional and would allow Auburn to play its second weekend in Atlanta, so there would be plenty of Tigers fans in attendance.
The resume speaks for itself for Bruce Pearl's group. Auburn ranks No. 1 in just about every resume metric, and it all comes back to the surplus of quality wins that it has collected. The Tigers are an astonishing 16-4 in Quad 1 games, many of those coming in SEC play, and are 21-4 against the top two quadrants.
It's almost unheard of to have those numbers heading into the postseason. Despite a rough final week of the regular season that saw Auburn take a pair of tough losses against Texas A&M and Alabama — the latter of which came on a Mark Sears buzzer-beater in overtime — it still has to be the favorite going into the SEC Tournament.
Auburn also has the SEC Player of the Year and the possible Wooden Award winner in Johni Broome, who is capable of dominating a game on the offensive end of the floor by scoring from all three levels and dominating the glass. Broome is surrounded by a deep, ferocious group of guards and a pair of big men that give Pearl's squad a ton of size.
None of this means that Auburn is unbeatable, of course. There are still a few things that could get this group into trouble in an elimination game setting.
What could sink Auburn's chances in the NCAA Tournament
It's hard to pick at a specific area on the court where you can really outmatch this Auburn team that is so deep and well-rounded, with very good players at every position both in the starting lineup and off the bench. However, there are two areas that have popped up in both of their losses.
The first area is the transition points. Auburn likes to play in the half court and get Broome involved in the offense, but any team will happily take any freebies that out can get. Pearl's squad has just 21 fast break points in total across its four losses, including a big old goose egg against Duke back in December.
A common theme of those games is that they are all games where the opposing team scored the ball efficiently. Alabama, Duke and Florida all shot the ball extremely well against Auburn, making the Tigers take the ball out of bounds time and time again, which gets us to the second area where you may be able to get after them.
Texas A&M absolutely slaughtered Auburn on the boards in its win in College Station at the beginning of March. In that game, the Aggies collected 24 offensive rebounds and finished the game plus-16 on the glass in total, which really swung the game in their favor.
Now, it will be difficult for most teams to replicate that. Texas A&M is one of the top offensive rebounding teams in the nation and Auburn, while not an elite team on the boards, is still 73rd in the country in rebound margin. It would be rare to see a beating like that again on the glass, but the formula is there.
The main thing that Auburn will have to avoid is just missing players. Denver Jones has been struggling with an injury of late and Johni Broome has also been battling through ankle injuries for most of the conference slate. The eye test will tell you that Broome isn't playing with the same quickness and explosion that he was earlier in the season. His production is still very good — he did have 34 points in his last game against the Crimson Tide, after all — but it's worth monitoring.
Then there's the wild card that is Chad Baker-Mazara. Of course, the veteran wing got tossed early in last season's tournament loss against Yale, which really hurt Auburn on the perimeter. While this year's squad is better-equipped to handle that, he decided to give the fans a sneak peek of the possibility on Saturday.
Auburn really missed Baker-Mazara after he got himself ejected for throwing an elbow into the back of Chris Youngblood's head during a boxout. With the 25-year-old in the lineup, maybe the Tigers win that rivalry game on senior day, but we will never know.
If Auburn is serious about winning a national championship, it needs Baker-Mazara to avoid those simple mistakes and Broome to get 100% healthy before the Big Dance gets going. This is a national title contender, but we have seen how quickly that can come crashing down for many teams before.
