![]() Kessler, who averages 4.5 blocks and is among the favorites for national Defensive Player of the Year, loves watching the confusion on guards’ faces as they enter the paint and find nowhere to turn. There is something vicious in the way the team defends, a chaotic swarming on the perimeter, a quiet suffocation inside. One look at the talent on hand in Auburn’s locker room, one look at the way their pieces click together on the floor, and you can begin to imagine a version of the tournament that ends with them cutting down the nets in New Orleans. Walker Kessler Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images ![]() A goal that could change the way the college sports world views Auburn, and, in many ways, how Auburn sees itself. A goal that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. 2 seed in this week’s NCAA tournament, it’s clear that goal exists in the shadow of another one. But even before achieving it, even before becoming a no. Six games from that moment, they will do just that, earning their first outright conference title in more than 20 years. Yes, of course, Auburn would also like to win the SEC. “We gotta win six games to win the league,” he says. Before that ascent, they have another six-game peak to scale in order to reach another goal. “Six games.” He’s moving into a point about how the NCAA tournament is a six-game mountain, broken up into separate single-game climbs. “How many games does it take to win it all?” Pearl asks.īefore anyone can respond, he answers himself. ![]() On the floor, Smith and Kessler are orbited by spark plug transfer guards KD Johnson and Wendell Green Jr., along with a collection of holdovers from last season’s 13-14 team who had to step into smaller roles to accommodate Auburn’s influx of talent. The 2022 March Madness Cinderella Guide 2022 NCAA Men’s Tournament Breakdown: The Best Picks and Biggest Questions for Each Region ![]() Smith may be selected first overall in the NBA draft, and Kessler will shortly follow. For both, this is their first season on the Plains. They are the twin planets around which Auburn’s offense and defense revolve, and they make up perhaps the most talented big-man pairing the sport has seen in recent years. There’s Jabari Smith Jr., a 6-foot-10 freshman with never-ending limbs and an exquisite jumper, and there’s Walker Kessler, a 7-1 sophomore and a smothering defensive force, the man Pearl calls the most dominant college basketball player in America. “We have six games to go,” he emphasizes, as he stands in front of a screen showing film on the Tigers’ next opponent, Vanderbilt.īefore him sit his Tigers players, leaning back in their plush film room chairs. Now, Pearl has turned one of the country’s most historically moribund programs into perhaps the best team of his career, electrifying a campus that had rarely seemed to care much for men’s basketball until soon after Pearl showed up. It’s been 17 years since Pearl first emerged on the national scene by taking the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to a Sweet 16 16 years since he lifted Tennessee to national relevance 11 years since he was fired from the same job after receiving a show-cause penalty for lying to the NCAA. He’s wearing a gray Auburn hoodie over a gray Auburn T-shirt and gray Auburn sweatpants, and his hair and his goatee are, well, you get the point. On a Tuesday afternoon in February, deep into the long slog that is a college basketball season, Auburn men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl stands in a windowless room in Alabama, talking to his players about the immediate tasks that lay before them, but also about something bigger, something grander, something that Auburn basketball has never done before.
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