Bruce Pearl 'very disappointed' in ending of Tennessee game

Saturday’s game between the Auburn Tigers and Tennessee Volunteers was one of the lowest scoring affairs in college basketball this year. The two teams are of course, both places where Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl has coached during different times of his college basketball coaching career. Pearl failed to defeat his former team, as Tennessee defeated Auburn, 46-43 in a low-scoring, hard-fought affair. After the loss, Bruce Pearl spoke with the media in his press conference about how disappointed he was with the finish of the game.

Bruce Pearl was not happy

“At the end of the game, very disappointed. But, I’ve got to do a better job of getting our guys…In practice, I’ve just got to work on it even more. We work on a lot of things and I’ve just got to work on some end game offense, so I get my team better shots. That’s what I’m responsible for,” Pearl said.

It’s nice that Bruce Pearl wanted to take the blame on his shoulders, but both teams shot incredibly poorly in this game. Auburn shot 23.6% from the field and even worse from three-point range, 11.1%. Tennessee did not fare much better, shooting 27% from the field and 9.5% from three-point range. Simply put, it’s hard to get any worse than that for both teams. With that many missed shots, you might imagine there were an insane number of rebounds for Auburn and Tennessee. They combined to corral 83 total rebounds–which is just mind-blowing.

Since stats started being kept in 1999-2000, the Tennessee Volunteers are on pace to be the all-time leader in field goal percentage defense (34.8%). That might be a small consolation for Bruce Pearl and the Auburn Tigers, but it still had to be unbelievably frustrating to shoot that poorly, regardless of how historically good the Vols’ defense may be this season.

With the loss, Auburn dropped to 17-6 overall and 7-3 in the SEC for the 2022-2023 campaign.