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Bruce Pearl backtracks on Miami of Ohio, says they're in despite not being MAC's best team

Byington mugby: Alex Byington03/08/26_AlexByington

Bruce Pearl made headlines last week when the former Auburn coach-turned-analyst dismissed unbeaten Miami-Ohio (31-0) as a worthy NCAA Tournament team if it didn’t win next week’s MAC Tournament to claim the conference’s automatic bid. Pearl — who retired a month before the 2025-26 regular season — instead stumped for the Tigers, which are squarely on the NCAA bubble entering the SEC Tournament.

“With Miami-Ohio, here’s the deal,” Pearl said Feb. 28 on TNT. “Are we going to select the 68 most deserving teams, or are we going to select the 68 best teams? If we’re selecting the 68 best teams, Miami (Ohio) is gonna have to win their Tournament to qualify as a champion. As an at-large, they are not one of the best teams in the country. That’s going to be a difficult choice for the committee to make.”

A week later, after receiving plenty of pushback both nationally and from Miami-Ohio itself, Pearl appears to have changed his tune. During halftime of Sunday night’s Michigan–Michigan State game on CBS, the former Auburn coach flip-flopped on the RedHawks’ NCAA chances while also claiming another MAC team could ultimately win its way into the 68-team field by winning this week’s conference tournament.

“(Miami of Ohio) might not be the best team in the MAC, it might be Akron – it might be the Zips!” Pearl said, via Awful Announcing. “Five years in a row they’ve won 22-plus games. … They play fast, they’re God-oriented – I’m rooting for Akron to make the upset, that way two teams make the NCAA Tournament out of the MAC. … I’m putting Miami of Ohio in. They’re in!”

That’s in direct contrast to last week’s comments about the RedHawks’ NCAA chances. Pearl later doubled down with Barstool Sports when the former Auburn coach suggested Miami-Ohio is “not built for the grind of a Big Ten or even a Big East. In the Big East Conference this year, they’d finish in the lower half.”

Those comments prompted Miami-Ohio athletic director David Sayler to accuse Pearl of pure bias in a Sunday night post on X/Twitter, and then went after the longtime SEC coach in a conversation with On3’s Pete Nakos last week.

“It just goes against everything that’s at the heart and soul of college basketball,” Sayler told Nakos. “March Madness — what it’s supposed to be — what we saw growing up as young kids that made it special. And for someone who has coaches at these levels, and made his way up to the top, and then he threw another ‘We’ in there about Auburn on Monday, it crossed the line, and I wasn’t going to stand for it anymore.”

Miami-Ohio is college basketball’s only unbeaten team at the conclusion of the regular season having won all 31 games this season, including going a perfect 18-0 in MAC play. Akron, meanwhile, is 26-5 overall and 17-1 in conference play with a 76-73 loss to the RedHawks on Jan. 3.