With the No. 20 Auburn basketball program last losing to the Michigan Wolverines, the team would get its third defeat of the season at the hands of No. 2 Arizona, 97-68. As the Auburn basketball team is looking to not plummet after major leadership changes, like Bruce Pearl’s retirement, his son, Steven, would speak about how he’s the reason for the dreadful result.
The game had never been in doubt for Arizona, as an early 20-point lead from a major run would put the Tigers off-kilter, having never had the ability to recover in the game. Pearl would be honest during his press conference, saying that he had them in a bad spot against the Wildcats, even saying that the “game was too much.”
“I think I put them in a really bad spot by playing this game, just being totally honest, and I’m just going to tell you what it is,” Pearl said, via 247 Sports. “This game was too much. We did Vegas three games in three days. We come home, we play a Wednesday night ACC/SEC Challenge game. We get done with that game at midnight.”
“We have one day to prep, and that day we couldn’t do anything because we had guys that played heavy minutes, so it was more film and just like the mental side of things,” Pearl continued. “And then we had to leave at noon the next day, so we had a 9 a.m. practice. There wasn’t a lot of time to get ready for that team. They had a week to get ready for us, so they did a great job of framing every entry pass that we had in our offense, and it really disrupted us, and it bothered us.
Steven Pearl on the current emphasis for Auburn basketball
Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
While the Auburn basketball team has stunned some people under Pearl, there’s no denying that the loss to the Wildcats is a tough one to swallow, even with Arizona’s success this year. Pearl would continue about the hectic travel schedule and the short preparation time, putting an emphasis now on his team finishing “strong academically.”
“They will be off until Wednesday. They actually have off Monday and Tuesday because we have finals this week, so we told them we got to finish strong academically because that’s obviously most important. And then we got to have three great days of practice, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, to get ready for a really good Chattanooga team in Atlanta,” Pearl said.
At any rate, the Tigers are 7-3, with their next game on Saturday against Chattanooga.