Bruce Pearl has turned Auburn basketball (basketball!!) into the talk of the town
Picture the college football fan emerging from several years of hibernation. Players are being paid six figures, maybe seven, and they have more free agency than any pro athlete in any team sport. Coaches are hopscotching from campus to campus and taking players with them. The sport has changed more in the past eight months than it has in the past 80 years.
And yet, if this Rip Van Winkle has any sense of history, any sense of the inner workings of intercollegiate athletics, his reaction to all of those changes would pale in comparison to his response to the news out of Auburn: The men’s basketball coach in the Loveliest Village now makes more money than the football coach. A lot more.
National Signing Day may not be the holiday it once was, but more than a few gobs would have been smacked by the buzz on Auburn’s campus Wednesday. It wasn’t about football recruits. It was about No. 1 Auburn (21-1) winning its 18th consecutive game, beating Alabama 100-81 on Tuesday night.
You expect that kind of reaction in Kentucky, where even Bear Bryant couldn’t break basketball’s hold on the citizenry. After World War II, Bryant made Kentucky a top-10, Orange Bowl-winning team. But when the school gave basketball coach Adolph Rupp a Cadillac and Bryant a cigarette lighter, Bryant figured out where he stood.
But at Auburn? A program that used to schedule basketball games around sorority meetings? Former Tigers basketball coach Sonny Smith once pretty much reversed Bryant’s experience to explain the power dynamics of Auburn athletics. “They bought the football coach a house,” Smith said. “They gave me a mobile home and told me not to take the wheels off.”
Not anymore.
Auburn backed up the armored truck last week and unloaded it onto basketball coach Bruce Pearl’s front yard. The millisecond that Louisville expressed an interest in hiring Pearl, Auburn came up with an eight-year contract extension that will pay Pearl an average of $6.275 million per year. That’s about $1.2 million more annually – give or take a few lemonades at Toomer’s Drugs – than the university is paying football coach Bryan Harsin.
I don’t know where Pat Dye is right now, but I’m betting he’s spinning faster than a Cuisinart Core Custom 13-Cup Food Processor with a dedicated mix speed for smooth, flawless, gentle mixing and emulsification.
Dye, who died in 2020, coached football at Auburn from 1981-92 and served as athletic director every season but the last. He was the football coach about whom Smith cracked wise. Smith recruited and coached Charles Barkley and Chuck Person. Smith took Auburn to the Elite Eight in 1986, and in two other seasons the AP named him SEC Coach of the Year.
Even with all those credentials, Smith said that if he had marched into Dye’s office demanding a higher salary than Dye himself, “He’d say, ‘What time do you want to call a moving van?’ ”
Smith’s charm and quick wit has made him a beloved fixture in Auburn athletics. He is 85 and still serves as the analyst on Auburn radio broadcasts.
“I was a very popular person,” Smith said. “But basketball wasn’t.”
It had been that way forever. Until the mid-1950s, the winningest basketball coach in Auburn history was Shug Jordan, who was 95-77 in 10 seasons (1933-42, 1945-46) before taking over the Tigers’ football team for 25 years. (Jordan also was Georgia’s basketball coach for two seasons in the late 1940s). That pretty much summed up Auburn basketball – a side hustle until the football gig opened up.
Auburn used to play its basketball games in a 2,500-seat Quonset hut. The Auburn Sports Arena, known unofficially as The Barn, is best remembered for burning to the ground during the 1996 Auburn-LSU football game.
“There were 2,000 students and 500 townspeople, and that was it,” said Francis Sanda, a freshman at Auburn in 1959 who is in his 51st season as the basketball official scorer.
In 1969, the university opened Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum, which had 12,500 seats. But the coliseum sold out only when Alabama or Kentucky came to campus. The athletic department began to tie basketball tickets to football tickets.
“To get football priority, you had to buy a basketball season ticket,” Smith said. The biggest donors ponied up for basketball tickets, but beware the unintended consequence.
“The best seats at Auburn, up and down the front rows up through the middle of the court, were sold, but people weren’t in them,” Smith said. “We had money to run the program but not support.”
“Being here in East Alabama, we did good on weekends but people would not come during the week,” Sanda said. “Columbus (Ga.) is 30 miles away, but on eastern time. You’d start at 7 p.m., but it would be 8 over there. That made it tough. Sororities and fraternities had meetings on Wednesday night. That knocked some of the Greeks off of it. But big games? Somehow they could reschedule their meetings.”
In the mid-1990s, when someone explained the Greek issue to new coach Cliff Ellis, he said, “To hell with that. We’re going to get basketball to where they want to come.”
Ellis got Auburn to the Sweet 16 in 1999, and the next season the Tigers made it to No. 2 in the AP poll. But by 2004, Ellis was out, done in by NCAA violations. Auburn basketball then descended into a decade of aspiring to mediocrity. Jeff Lebo had two winning records in six seasons, and Tony Barbee alienated the fan base to the point that the Auburn Tip-Off Club disbanded. The Tigers downsized to the 9,121-seat, on-campus Auburn Arena, but they couldn’t even fill that.
That’s what Pearl took over when he arrived almost eight years ago. Pearl was, by all accounts, the most popular person on campus before he took Auburn to the 2019 Final Four. Even on a campus known for its friendliness, Pearl overwhelmed the locals with his bombastic warmth. He will give an after-dinner speech waiting for the light to change at the crosswalk of College Street & Magnolia Avenue (better known as Toomer’s Corner).
The campus responded to him. The fan base responded to him. The Tip-Off Club is thriving again, and when that Alabama game began shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday — 9 p.m. in Columbus — all 9,121 seats in Auburn Arena had someone standing in front of them.
Most of all, the basketball players responded to him. Auburn is No. 1 in the nation. Freshman Jabari Smith is projected to be the top pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, and sophomore Walker Kessler is expected to go in the first round, too. Auburn hasn’t lost since Thanksgiving Eve, a two-overtime loss to No. 17 UConn. And now, not only is the school not going to lose its basketball coach, it’s paying him more than the football coach.
If that don’t beat all – and Auburn just might.