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Bucky McMillan questions 'crazy' ending to win over Auburn

Danby: Daniel Hager01/07/26DanielHagerOn3

In one of the craziest college basketball games of the season so far, Texas A&M held off Auburn 90-88 in Neville Arena Tuesday night.

The Aggies led 85-73 with 3:51 remaining in regulation, but the Tigers went on a 15-5 run over the final 3:50 to pull within two. Auburn forward KeShawn Murphy then seemingly hit a game-winning 40-foot buzzer-beating three with .6 remaining on the clock, but it was waived off upon further review.

With the win, Texas A&M and first-year head coach Bucky McMillan improved to 12-3 (2-0) on the season. Auburn and its first-year head coach, Steven Pearl, fell to a disappointing 9-6 (0-2) mark. Last season, Auburn lost just six of its 38 games en route to a Final Four appearance.

Bucky McMillan couldn’t believe game wasn’t over sooner

Following the game, McMillan reiterated that he could not believe that the game was not over well before Auburn had the opportunity to win the game via the deep three-pointer.

“The last shot was unbelievable, along with everything that led up to that, because I could not believe the game was not over,” McMillan said. “I just couldn’t believe. I look up and there’s a sideline out of bounds with no timeouts. That was crazy. You never see that, or you would never elect to do what we did in that scenario. But end of the day, I don’t want to take away make it one play or not, our guys fought hard tonight and played good basketball.”

“Look, we’re playing good basketball right now. We lost arguably our best player in Mackenzie Mgbako. He missed the start of the season and two of our three losses were without him. Right now we’ve won 10 of our last 11, with the loss coming to SMU, a top-25 team in overtime. So that’s what I care about, is that we keep playing good basketball.”

Steven Pearl and Auburn hopped on phone with SEC league office following loss

As soon as the shot was waived off, Pearl and Auburn hopped on a call with the SEC regarding the play. He remained in shock that the shot was not counted following the heartbreaking loss.

“I don’t have a clear understanding still,” Pearl said postgame. “We still gotta gather more information and get an understanding as far as what their determination was. I didn’t want to keep (the media) waiting much longer, so I don’t have a clear understanding under what the reasoning and what they were going off of. We’re gonna gather more information, and hopefully we can elaborate on it.”

Auburn will avoid to dropping to 0-3 in SEC play for the first time since the 2020-21 season on Saturday against No. 15 Arkansas, while Texas A&M looks to open SEC play with a 3-0 record for the first time since the 2022-23 season on Saturday against Oklahoma.