In today's Auburn basketball notebook, sportswriter Bryce Johnson opines on the Tigers' postseason outlook after a 27-point loss at No. 4 Kentucky.
"If we think we are good enough to win a national championship, it starts here today in Rupp Arena,” said Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl pregame.
Two hours later, his team scored seven points to start the second half, cementing a 27-point defeat to the No. 4 team in the country. Once the final buzzer rang it was clear this Tiger team is far from a national championship.
Kentucky is notoriously a second-half-of-the-season team. Coach Calipari even boasts how he doesn’t teach defense until way into the season. Come March, though, his teams know how to win, there’s no denying that. They’ve been to the Final Four four times this decade and have made it out of the first weekend every time except once.
For Auburn, which preaches about going further than just to the second round like they did last year, a February Kentucky team is a much better measuring stick than a January one. The January team beat them by two points. The February team held Auburn to the exact same amount of points it scored against Clemson in March Madness last year.
Unless something drastically changes, odds are that the Tigers won’t reach their goal of surpassing last year’s team.
Future NBA center Austin Wiley, who was supposed to be a centerpiece of the team, hasn’t been able to stay on the court. He even went down in Saturday’s game with a non-contact leg injury on the same leg that has been giving him complications all year.
Bryce Brown, the sharpshooting guard, started the season on a tear but hasn’t scored over 20 points in a month.
Jared Harper, a preseason SEC Player of the Year candidate, didn't record an assist against the Wildcats for just the second game of his career.
The biggest problem with the entire roster is lack of consistency. It’s rare for a player to put together a string of good games. Come tournament time everyone has that guy they call on late in the shot clock for a bucket.
Look at PJ Washington on Kentucky. He put up 24 points on Auburn, eviscerating any matchup placed in front of him. This was without his running mate, Reid Travis, whose the second-best player on the team.
Washington has been doing this ironically since he played Auburn last. In the last six games, he’s scored over 20 points in every single one. He’s blossoming at the right time.
It isn’t all dark and gloomy, though; this might be the wake-up call Auburn needs to end the season strong. It still has the SEC Tournament to prove itself, along with a probable March Madness bid. All of the Tigers' weaknesses were exposed on a national stage, so there’s a chance they use this as a learning experience.
Even if this season ends early, there’s a top-10 recruiting class on the way next year. Pearl has done nothing but make this program relevant again, so it makes sense to trust him.
The only thing that can be determined immediately is that as of this weekend, there’s a 27-point gap between the Auburn Tigers and a national championship-contending team.
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Bryce Johnson is a junior Journalism major at Auburn University from Santa Monica, CA. He works as a sports writer for The Plainsman.
- @Brycejohnson310
- bzj0020@auburn.edu
