Well, that was brutal.
Let’s revisit the shameless prediction I made six games ago:
My six-game prediction:
Win vs. Texas A&M at home OMG SO WRONG
Win at West Virginia WRONG
Win vs. Georgia at home RIGHT (WHEW!)
Loss at Tennessee RIGHT, BUT MAN…
Loss at Texas A&M (but it’s close) RIGHT, BUT MAN, AGAIN…
…close win vs. Bama at home (Yes, in this scenario, we’re defending a home-court streak that Alabama would love to spoil, and they’re already marking this game as a win, but are we peacocking or not? They have way more to lose than we do. That alone doesn’t win games, but I’m glad they have to come to our place first with that record…and that baggage.) WRONG AND I HATE EVERYTHING AND THERE’S NO JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD
4-2 record upcoming, but I’ll be happy with 3-3. Feel free to argue with me in the comments. War Eagle.
OOF.
I even couched that prediction with a 3-3 soft landing, and now that outcome would’ve felt like Christmas-come-early given the results we ended up with. But that’s hindsight for you. I stand by what I predicted.
Because frankly, it doesn’t look that bad now that it’s done.
Here’s the honest question I want you to ask yourself: other than maybe the Texas A&M game at Neville Arena (where Tyrece Radford had an otherworldly, NBA-caliber stat line against us), did you really feel like those weren’t winnable games?
The beauty of this take (and it’s hardly a take) is that I don’t have to try that hard to defend it or even convince you to believe it—the numbers can do it for me. Plus it hurts more when it’s closer, and you hurt in the same way I do because you know most of those losses were all within reach. Do I even need to point out how many points we lost by in those five games? That’s not sunshine pumping—that’s seeing a good basketball team (or a “fine” one as The Auburn Observer pointed out on their latest podcast) simply not being able to finish. I also like what Ferg pointed out in that same episode, too, which is that we’re now 25 games into this season—you really shouldn’t be surprised at this point with this team.1 We have what we have. So far, it’s been enough to, at best, come out of a non-conference schedule with only a couple of losses as well as hit a five-game winning streak against mid-to-lower tier SEC competition. At worst, what we have has been enough to lose (mostly) close games against good SEC competition (and one Big 12 opponent), including new number one team in the conference and in the country, Alabama.
And if that last sentence stings to read, it stings more for me to write it, believe me. Alabama beat us. They’re better than we are. You can admit that. Good? Good. Let’s all throw up and move on.
I don’t have much else to sell you beyond the argument that Auburn is still a good basketball team that simply can’t hit the final nail in the coffin against the better teams in the conference. And “better” warrants a chuckle, because if you aren’t convinced that the rest of the SEC might be more stale than leftover white bread slices at Terry Black’s, then I don’t know what to tell you. Don’t get me wrong: Alabama is the clear destroyer this season—they are winning the SEC—but put this conference up against last season’s and tell me with a straight face that this one is just outright better. Then listen as I walk away laughing and full of brisket.
Anyway, here are my thoughts from this six-game stretch:
Texas A&M ending our home-court winning streak sucked, but we probably needed it. I think I already mentioned that last week or earlier. I’d obviously rather not have an opposing player shoot lights-out against us seemingly out of nowhere, but we don’t get that luxury. We certainly didn’t against West Virginia. You talk about not being able to finish games—I haven’t been that mad about missed opportunities in a long time. That game was winnable at the end and we absolutely squandered it.
It always feels good to beat the hell out of Georgia. It would’ve been great to get the season sweep, but given what I wrote above, I’ll take what we can get at this point. I didn’t need Georgia holding something else over us after another football national title. Plus, 94 points at home? Yes, please. More of that, please. Especially down this final stretch.
I watched the first half of the Tennessee game in a brewery in Chattanooga with friends during a bachelor trip. The diehard hoops fans within our group were mostly shaking our heads and throwing our hands up at how poorly we were playing against another beatable team. The rest were nursing hangovers. We were at the pinball museum near the aquarium when we saw the final sequence. Let’s not even talk about it much more than that.
In general, though, what in the world does it take for Wendell Green Jr. to get a foul called against him? The kid literally bleeds on the court for us and it’s like the officials have something personal against him. I’ll never understand it. Wendell deserves better than that.
Obviously, I want Wendell to get that call, and more obviously, I want Auburn to simply make shots to win in Knoxville, but if that was what it took for the Vols to get buzzer-beaten two games in a row afterwards, I guess I’ll take it?
Bruce Pearl had every right to clap back at that Aggie fan in Reed Arena last Tuesday night. I was at that game—the incident ended up in the aisle right next to me. It was my first road basketball game and likely my only opportunity to watch this Auburn team in person this season, and boy, was it a weird roller coaster of weirdos. All I’ll say is that Aggie fan deserved what he got, and he’s lucky a bunch of curse words and an injury-free escort (during which he yelled in all his young entitled delusion with his best my father is a lawyer inflection, “I DID NOTHING WRONG. I DID NOTHING WRONG.”) was all it amounted to. Any narrative or clipped video that implies Bruce was “just mad about losing” is absolutely false and missing a ton of context.
That might be my only trip to College Station, too, which, to quote a Barner friend of mine, looks like a 1980s Russian bunker complex…with cows. It really felt like the crowd only emboldened the officials to swing the game the other way when Auburn’s leads got too big. But also, hey, Tigers—play defense. Aggies are weird and now I kind of hope they lose the rest of their games. Enjoy your jazz hands, weirdos.
Some basketball coaches praise their opponents before a big matchup, giving them credit where it’s due. Nate Oats just talks about Super Bowls and repeats the same lazy script about our “new” arena. Seriously, he’s obsessed with talking about Neville Arena (it’s not going to date you, Nate). Last season, I understood it—he’d already seen Auburn whip out the Crimson Crane inside Coleman and knew what was coming on the away leg—but even then, his team wasn’t that bad. This year, what is the excuse? Do you really need bulletin board material when your team is coming to town as arguably the best in the country? It must kill chronically online Bama fans to know that their own chronically online coach can’t even admit that their team is the best and instead resorts to chronically online talking points about seating numbers. Is Nate Oats just an ass man? I genuinely don’t get it. Maybe after Saturday we can finally stop talking about arena sizes, though I suspect that since his guys didn’t beat us by 30, we won’t be so lucky. Always looking for an angle, that program. Manufactured adversity is the chief export in Tuscaloosa. The chief import is whatever awful suit brand Nate Oats subscribes to, which is apparently just a direct line to Creed Bratton’s closet:
And for as much as Alabama pretends not to care about Suni Lee and Auburn Gymnastics, they were sure doing plenty of balance beam backflips after Saturday’s win trying to decide whether we were good enough of an opponent to get them to the number one spot or we were just “lol lil bro” and not very good.
Speaking of backflips, let me see if I understand this: Bama basketball players threw the Crimson Crane at us on Saturday…because last year we threw it at them…because they had thrown it at us in football the year before? So they threw their own Dwight Schrute pose at us unironically because they were still mad we’d made fun of it during last year’s sweep? Do I have that right? Oh, not Alabama making Texas A&M look normal…
Finally, look—I know officiating is bad this season. I get it. I can’t claim to be better than that mentality as a fan. But I wonder if we ought to adopt a policy of all-or-nothing—with an emphasis on the “nothing”—when it comes to the impact officiating has on the outcome of a game, especially when Auburn simply doesn’t do the little things to put itself in a winning situation. You’re certainly within your right to complain about officiating, but I don’t find that sustainable. At some point, your team has to do things like make easy field goals, get defensive stops, convert free throws, take advantage of transition scoring opportunities, and not turn the ball over. I know the stripes can influence a lot of those outcomes, too, but I watched (in person!) Auburn leave at least 6-7 early first-half points on the floor against Texas A&M in Reed Arena last Tuesday, and that was long before the free throw disparity fiasco. You make those easy buckets in the first few minutes (on the road, no less) and maybe you don’t go home wondering what could have been…maybe.
Now that this stretch is over, we move into, arguably, the most important few weeks in the season. The five-game win streak proved Auburn was, in fact, good (or at least better than one embarrassing loss in Athens). This last six-game stretch showed us, in spite of the losses, how good we still are and how much better we could be if not for a few missing pieces. Now comes how good Auburn needs to be.
If Auburn can take care of business against the remaining matchups (Missouri, Vanderbilt, Ole Miss) that probably land somewhere difficulty-wise between that five-game winning streak last month and the last six games, they can stop a lot of the bleeding (or what feels like an out-of-control skid to a lot of fans, but really isn’t) and bolster up the win column for whatever comes in March. And that certainly is a possibility for this team. Plus, Tennessee has only looked more and more vulnerable since they lost to Florida. It’s not crazy to believe we could snag a win at home against the Volunteers to end the regular season. I don't even think Bruce has to pull a mid-2010s Nick Saban here and try to convince his guys that nobody believes in them—I think all they have to do is just play basketball. The truth is that Auburn only needs to be as good as about 3-4 wins out of the remaining six. Then they can let the two postseason tournaments take care of themselves.
I won’t make a prediction here because I don’t want the stress. Let’s just enjoy what we have—ugly, mostly good defensive basketball that sometimes shows up offensively—and see where we land for the SEC Tournament and (probably) March Madness. And if you don’t enjoy that, then you don’t have to watch.2
Okay, finally finally, I liked this exchange, mainly because of serious-version LT…or at least the version of LT that I could show my grandmother:
Ferg (who I got to meet after the game in College Station last week) has also pointed out, as have countless others, that even after all these losses have piled up, Auburn has only dropped in NET rankings by a few spots. Auburn is also still tied for fourth in the conference. Something, something, just the nature of college basketball, especially in a season where only a handful of elite teams exist. But I don’t do the nerd stats stuff, so you should go read/listen/subscribe to The Auburn Observer for that kind of content, because he does basketball the best out of all the Auburn writers, in my opinion.
By the way, are people on Auburn Twitter still quote tweeting Alabama basketball fans? I can’t say I never did that, but it seems really stupid to do that this season. Gump Basketball Twitter is just built differently than Auburn Twitter—somehow it seems like every one of them still has spots (or is wearing a sport coat that they stole from their transient dad’s closet) and yet boasts a follower count of 1,200 minimum, which means you’re never taking on just one of them. You pull one out of the ground and there are 50 clingers. And they all seem to have a podcast, too. I don’t know why anyone would invite that kind of fungal infection into their house.