Auburn basketball just may be historically good

The Tigers are comfortably the best team in what might be the best conference ever. The metrics say they could be an all-time great.

Last weekend, what will likely end up being the biggest, most anticipated and most consequential game of the 2024-25 men’s college basketball season was played.

It didn’t take place inside the hallowed halls of Cameron Indoor Stadium or Allen Fieldhouse. It wasn’t in a traditional hotbed of the sport like Lexington, Ky., Bloomington, Ind., or Chapel Hill, N.C.

Instead, it was inside a drab, 47-year-old arena in Tuscaloosa, Ala., about a mile away from the home venue of the team many more people at the university and within the state’s borders care about.

But while it was easy to dismiss Alabama’s game last Saturday against Auburn as an unlikely matchup with significant national stakes between two football schools – who share a football rivalry so intense that it once famously compelled a man to poison oak trees – it gave basketball fans across the country the rare chance to watch the Nos. 1 and 2 teams in the country meet on the same court in mid-February.

The outcome of it was decisive.

Coach Bruce Pearl’s Tigers had their way with the Crimson Tide, never trailing at any point in the game, leading by as many as 14 in the second half, getting a customarily excellent and well-rounded offensive performance, putting the clamps on one of the country’s most electric and efficient offenses, and coming out with a 94-85 victory.

Earlier that day, Auburn had been selected as the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament selection committee’s first top-16 ranking, with committee chair Bubba Cunningham noting that it was a unanimous selection. The win broke a tie with Alabama atop the SEC standings, putting the Tigers in position to win the regular-season championship of what could end up as the best season for a conference in the history of the sport. What had been an open question of who the best team in the country was entering the day was answered pretty persuasively by the end of it.

For Auburn, though, the Iron Bowl triumph was much more than just an affirmation of their standing atop the sport for the 2024-25 season. Rather, it was the latest data point that this team could be one whose achievements resonate well beyond this season. One of the greatest teams in modern college basketball history may very well be lurking right beneath our noses.

The numbers behind Auburn’s dominance

Any college basketball fan has those teams over the course of their lifetime, the squads that years or even decades later lurk in the corners of your brain and gleefully pop back up when thinking about a very particular, hard-to-achieve kind of greatness.

For me, it’s 1996 Kentucky, the first college basketball team I have vague memories of and a group as loaded as any with future NBA players; it’s 2007 Florida, following up on its relatively surprising 2006 title with an even more dominant run to become the last repeat champion the sport has seen; it’s 2019 Virginia, which pulled off the previously inconceivable feat of making a Tony Bennett team enjoyable to watch. Then there are the teams that didn’t finish the season hoisting a national championship trophy, but whose excellence is otherwise undeniable – 1999 Duke, 2005 Illinois and 2015 Kentucky, among others.

This year’s Auburn team doesn’t just have the potential to join that esteemed group, but it’s actually well-positioned to do so with Selection Sunday less than a month away.