March 2024 marks the five-year anniversary since the Auburn’s men’s basketball program, led by head coach Bruce Pearl who was in his fifth season on the Plains, made its historic run to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament – the Tigers’ first Final Four appearance.
This Auburn team, led by the likes of Jared Harper, Bryce Brown and Chuma Okeke, etched itself into the Auburn history books with the Final Four run, the most wins in single-season history (30) and the program’s first SEC Tournament championship since 1985 – something that not even Pearl himself saw happening when he took the job in 2014.
“I felt confident enough that we could be a competitive program,” Pearl said. “I wasn’t sure whether the championships or the Final Four would ever be in the cards.”
But there was something different about the 2018-19 team that allowed Auburn to make history and exceed Pearl’s expectations. This team had the chemistry, the brotherhood and the chip on its shoulder to carry it.
While Auburn’s roster wasn’t made up of five-stars like many of its opponents were, the team fought for each other, and even though heart is often thought of as a cliché in sports, the Tigers used it to knock off the blue bloods of college basketball during their run.
“Just overall, we always felt comfortable around each other,” said Anfernee McLemore, starting center for the Tigers in the 2018-19 season. “There was never any sort of competition to see who’s going to score the most points or who’s going to do better than each other. Whoever’s night it is, we’re going to support you, and we’re going to do everything we can to win.”
And that’s exactly what the team did. Okeke was the lone Tiger in the starting lineup that was a top-60 recruit, according to 247Sports. The rest of the starting five was filled with a 5-foot-11 point guard in Harper, a three-star shooting guard in Brown, a three-star small forward from junior college in Malik Dunbar and another three-star in McLemore who played as an undersized center in the SEC at 6 feet, 7 inches.
But this scrappy, determined, overlooked team used its camaraderie to knock off three of college basketball’s most storied programs during its Final Four charge in Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky.
“I feel like everybody on the team was underdogs, even coming out of high school,” Okeke said. “People coming from JUCO schools, everybody had a chip on their shoulder regardless if we made the tournament or not. I feel like that’s how we played that whole year. We just wasn’t looked at the way we wanted to be looked at, so we wanted to change that when you got a whole bunch of underdogs ready to dethrone the blue bloods and just take over.”
So where did this chemistry come from? The coaches didn’t force the players to hang out off the court according to McLemore, but it was a decision among each other.
From consistently swapping roommates with each other, to eating at Mikata the day before a home game, to taking a team trip to Italy the prior season, this Auburn team just loved being around each other. But perhaps the biggest bonding point was an in-home music studio shared between Brown and Okeke.
It started when Okeke bought studio equipment his freshman season on the Plains and was recording music on his own when he found out that Brown also liked to make music. From there, Okeke started creating lyrics while Brown would make the beats, and the two combined to make music together.
In Okeke’s sophomore season, he and Brown became roommates, put money together and created an in-home studio that the whole team enjoyed using and all made music together.
“One of my favorite memories from that team is that everybody just liked to sing so much,” McLemore said. “[Dunbar] would be, at six in the morning, just singing for no reason. Chuma, Horace [Spencer], I think even Bryce at one point, definitely Malik, they all made a song. They used to just make music and just play it in the locker room. It was a fun atmosphere to be around. It wasn’t just a basketball team. We were really, I felt like, a family and we was all just having fun just playing the game of basketball. I think that’s what made us such a good team that year.”
The season, however, was not always filled with highlights. The Tigers finished 11-7 in the SEC, five games back from the best regular season SEC record as LSU went 16-2. During the regular season, Auburn suffered road losses to South Carolina, Mississippi State and LSU while also getting swept by Ole Miss and Kentucky.
The Tigers’ road loss to Kentucky was a 27-point defeat in Rupp Arena that served as their fourth loss in their last five road games and caused concerns about Auburn’s ability to play away from home. It was a game that Pearl admitted he thought Auburn would win, and it was “a humbling defeat.”
However, that loss spurred Auburn for the rest of the season as Pearl said the players decided it was time to turn the season around.
The Tigers won their final four regular season games, won all four of their SEC Tournament games en route to an SEC championship and won four games in the NCAA Tournament, including a revenge win over Kentucky without Okeke due to a torn ACL suffered in the North Carolina game, before eventually falling to Virginia at the hands of a foul call in the final seconds and a missed double dribble committed by the Cavaliers.
In the Elite Eight game against Kentucky, the Tigers were not deterred by their previous defeat on the road to the Wildcats and their two-point loss at home to Kentucky head coach John Calipari and his squad in the regular season. Instead, the team, which was riding an 11-game win streak, was eager to meet the Wildcats for a third time that season.
“We knew it’d be diffiult to beat a good team three times, that we were playing with house money, that they’re the ones who are supposed to win and they had three first-round pros that have all gone to the NBA and done really well,” Pearl said. “And in that particular game, Jared Harper and Bryce Brown were too much to handle, and yeah, one of the greatest wins in history of Auburn basketball to get to the Final Four.”
Prior to the victory over Kentucky, Auburn narrowily beat New Mexico State in the Round of 64, defeated Kansas in the Round of 32 in dominant fashion where the Tigers led for the final 38 minutes and five seconds of game time and held off North Carolina in the Sweet 16.
The wins over Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky gave the Tigers victories over the three winningest programs in college basketball history and was a testament of Pearl and Auburn accepting the opportunity to make history – something that Pearl and his teams have never shied away from.
“I said, ‘Hey you couldn’t ask for God to give us a better opportunity to make history,’” Pearl said. “Like, he actually put this in front of us, and then he lifted us up and carried us all the way through. It was his plan, and we were just following, including his plan to lose in the semifinal game as tragically as we did. And knowing that it would take a group of Auburn men to be accountable for the loss and not place blame anywhere else because that would take away from Virginia’s victory. So the whole thing was according to his plan.”
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Jacob Waters is a senior majoring in journalism. From Leeds, Alabama, he started with The Plainsman in August, 2021.
Twitter: @JacobWaters_
