Steven Pearl admits Auburn's early-season schedule was too much

The Auburn Tigers have played an intense non-conference schedule in the first weeks of the season. With that has come some mixed results, like their 88-60 loss to Purdue over the weekend.

That loss to Purdue was Auburn’s second in its last three games. That prompted head coach Steven Pearl to joke that playing the very challenging non-conference schedule was his dad, Bruce Pearl‘s, idea from when he’d been the team’s head coach.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” Steven Pearl said. “So, you can call [Bruce Pearl] on that one.”

Auburn now sits at 8-4 on the season. That’s a record that includes a 1-4 record against Q1 opponents. As it stands now, the Tigers have only beaten St. John’s from their Q1 opponents. Auburn is also 1-0 in its only Q2 game, which came against NC State.

For his part, Steven Pearl knows that the record is going to stick with a lot of people. However, the degree of difficulty of that challenge has only been increased for Auburn, given the roster turnover the Tigers have had to endure.

“No, I mean, you look at the schedule. At this point, through 12 games, with 10 new players and the only returner a sophomore point guard, it was too much. It was probably one or two games too much just based on what we had,” Pearl said. “But you’ve got to put it in perspective. We played seven games against high major opponents. Okay? We go 3-4 in those games. We’ve played 12 games so far. We’ve played seven games away from home in neutrals or road environments. I’m counting tonight as a road environment. It was a road game.”

On Monday, the AP Top 25 Poll was updated. Auburn isn’t ranked in it. The Tigers, instead, are receiving votes, sitting around 28th overall. It’s not ideal, but it’s also not the end of the season at this point.

“You look across the country,” Pearl said. “I don’t know of — there’s not 10 teams that have a better record than us up to this point with the schedule that we’ve played. There just aren’t. Maybe five, in my opinion, just based on what I’ve seen in the landscape. Would I rather be 9-3? Of course. 10-2? Sure. But 8-4 with the schedule that we’ve played, it’s solid. It’s not great, okay, but for a team with 10 new guys and one returner from a Final Four team, it’s a lot.”

From here, Pearl has a lot of confidence. They’ve seen some of the best teams in the country already, teams that even the SEC’s struggle to compete against. So, that should help prepare his team down the stretch.

“The encouraging part is we’re watching that film and I think we’re gonna learn a lot from it, and we’re gonna look at it and say, ‘Damn, we missed a lot of open shots tonight.’ That’s why the game got away from us, ultimately, in the second half. So, yeah, you want to test your guys and challenge your guys. Our guys haven’t lost confidence. They’re still bought into what we do. which is really important. You look at the SEC. The three best teams that we’ve played have been Arizona, Michigan, Purdue, and then Houston, who beat Arkansas tonight and everyone is saying Arkansas is gonna win our league. We should’ve beaten Houston, in my opinion. So, I say that. We may not play four better teams the rest of the year,” Pearl said.

“The SEC is really good this year, but we’ve played four Final Four teams so far. We played four teams that in some metric have been ranked No. 1 at some point this season. But we’ve got to be more competitive in these games. We can’t get blown out like this. Tonight is the one exception where we competed at a level where the score wasn’t what I thought it was. The Michigan and Arizona games, we just got our ass kicked. Like, we didn’t execute. We didn’t play with the effort or energy we typically do. Tonight, I thought we flew around. I thought we battled. We just missed shots. When you miss shots in tough environments, that’s going to happen against a really good team.”

Next up, Auburn will wrap up its non-conference schedule against Queens NC. After that, it’s into SEC play with a test against a currently ranked Georgia team.

“So, I think we’re battle tested,” Pearl said. “I think we have a Top 25 resume right now, just based on what we’ve already done. So, as long as we continue to get better, like we did last week, we’ll be fine.”