Miami OH AD David Sayler calls out Bruce Pearl's knowledge as analyst, defends viral tweet

Miami (Ohio) athletic director David Sayler called out Bruce Pearl’s knowledge as a basketball analyst. Pearl recently said the undefeated Redhawks would not come up to snuff in other Power Four leagues.

Sayler had a viral tweet calling out the former Auburn coach, saying Pearl should be nowhere near a TV studio. But Sayler elaborated more on Wake Up Barstool Tuesday.

“Well, I am an accounting major in undergrad. I know math pretty well. I think zero in the last column is pretty good math as terms of adding up to our scenario,” Sayler said. “But you know, I’m just proud of our student athletes, and I was a little bristled on Sunday, when I heard some of his comments; I was here in the office catching up on some things. We had a huge board meeting last week where we just approved a new $240 million basketball arena to be built here on campus.

“And so I dropped that in the chat, the link to that, but I was doing some work catching up, and I heard his comments about we have to be undefeated, win the conference tournament to get in, kind of bristled by that, kind of heard a few ‘wes’ in there when he was talking about Auburn, okay, whatever. And then yesterday, the Big East stuff was, was really where I felt like, you know, I needed to step in and just defend, really, the heart and soul of college basketball, the mid-majors, and the magic of March Madness.”

As it stands, Sayler is watching Miami (Ohio) go through an undefeated season (29-0). No matter who you play, that is a tremendous accomplishment if it can be done. They are ranked No. 19 in the latest AP Poll and have two regular season games left before the conference tournament.

“The story of a school like Miami versus the story of the 11th place SEC team or 12th place Big Ten team that nobody really wants to see, so I just felt like it was time for me to stand up for our student athletes.,” Sayler said. “You know, they’re on the verge of doing something historic when you talk about since 1985 when the tournament expanded, there’s only been seven teams that have gotten to this point we are. We’re one of seven that are 29-0 and that’s over 12,000 teams that had a chance to do that. And we’re one of seven if we finish undefeated.

“We’re one of five to ever do that. And for somebody to say that we don’t belong in a tournament of 68 teams when we’re one of five all-time or one of seven all-time to accomplish something, I just can’t buy that.”

Sayler doubled down on Pearl’s basketball analysis, too. He might as well have said that the long time coach didn’t pay attention when it came to his takes on TV.

“Well, I also just didn’t quite understand — you know, DePaul on my screen here, they’re in fifth place in the Big East and he mentioned them being last,” Sayler said. “So I don’t quite know how an analyst doesn’t have the right rankings of the Big East teams. And the other piece is Buffalo, who’s in our league, who’s seventh in the MAC, beat DePaul by 13. So there’s a few things there. UMass is ninth in our league; they’ve beaten two ACC teams. Eastern Michigan’s 11th in our league and they beat Cincinnati.

“So we just need to be honest about what non-conference scheduling has become. It’s really risk management. It’s not competition. The current system incentivizes avoiding risk rather than rewarding competitive courage, and that’s a shame for college basketball.”