Miami (Ohio) AD on Bruce Pearl's criticism: 'Goes against everything at the soul of college basketball'

In his office in Millett Hall on Sunday, Miami (Ohio) athletic director David Sayler heard a few comments from Bruce Pearl directed at the RedHawks the day before. In the midst of an undefeated 30-0 season in Travis Steele’s fourth year, they’re one of the stories of college basketball.

But with Selection Sunday less than two weeks out, Pearl was critical that Miami would have to win the Mid-American Conference tournament to earn a ticket to the NCAA Tournament. On Saturday, Pearl said Miami was “not one of the best teams in the country.”

“I was in the office Sunday, kind of catching up on things that I needed to do, and I heard some of his comments about that if we don’t win the tournament, then we’re not in,” Sayler recounted to On3. “I heard a few we’s in there about Auburn, which made me bristle a little bit. He has his opinion about whether we’re worthy or not, fine.”

The former Auburn head coach took it a step further on Monday, telling Barstool Sports that Miami is “not built for the grind of a Big Ten or even a Big East. In the Big East Conference this year, they’d finish in the lower half.”

When Sayler caught wind of Pearl’s latest comments, he decided to take to X. The athletic director said he should not be “near a TV studio covering this sport.”

“That’s where I just felt he went too far, one in disrespecting our student-athletes and what they’re accomplishing, they’re on the verge of something historic,” he said. “You talk about something that only five teams have done in the last 40-plus years of this sport. There are over 300 teams that compete in this sport, and so that’s over 12,000 opportunities to go undefeated, and we might be one of only five teams to ever do it. And you’re going to sit here and compare us to a last-place team in a different conference. It’s disrespectful on a lot of levels.

“It just goes against everything that’s at the heart and soul of college basketball. March Madness — what it’s supposed to be — what we saw growing up as young kids that made it special. And for someone who has coaches at these levels, and made his way up to the top, and then he threw another ‘We’ in there about Auburn on Monday, it crossed the line, and I wasn’t going to stand for it anymore.”

Miami’s schedule is ranked No. 282, per KenPom. Sayler told On3 that the RedHawks have had trouble scheduling games against power conference opponents. In his rebuttal to Pearl on X, the athletic director accused Pearl of pushing Auburn’s NCAA tournament hopes at Miami’s expense.

“If you look at some of my social media, people laugh at me, but I’ve been using some Yoda quotes lately,” he said. “We’re trying to fight the evil empire here. The system is set up for the power conference schools at the start of the year. They can set their schedules. They can play all home games, maybe a neutral site game, but they don’t have to go on the road, and we do. And then at the end, when we don’t have a lot of big games, everyone says, ‘Well, you didn’t play enough big games.’ Well, nobody would play us. So it’s like this double-edged sword. You can’t win either way.

“Unfortunately, what’s happened is nonconference scheduling has really become more about risk management than it is about competition. For the big schools, they’re just incentivizing avoiding risk rather than rewarding competitive courage. They’ll play Quad 1 games, they’ll play Quad 4 games, but they really don’t want to play anybody in Quad 2 or Quad 3, because if they lose, or if the game’s closer than it should be, they get hurt with the metrics.”

Sayler told On3 he is not looking for an apology from Pearl, but he does not believe fans want an NCAA tournament with teams near the bottom of power conference standings. “He can have his own opinions,” he said. “He can have his own thoughts. I disagree with them. I don’t think people want to see the 12th-place SEC team and the 11th-place Big Ten team.”

At the worst, Miami will finish the regular season 30-1 if it loses to Ohio on Friday night. Sayler believes hitting the 30-win mark will matter come Selection Sunday, and he “takes a lot of solace in the fact that I know the committee does its work.” Miami has already claimed its first MAC regular-season title since 2004-05.

“We won 25 games last year,” Sayler said. “This isn’t some fluky, cute story. This year, we’re really good. Travis has built a program, and we had a lot of players come back. People knew that, they didn’t want to play us. The Power Four is creating an environment where that’s what it’s becoming, and in my opinion, some of the media, some of the analysts who are supposed to be objective, who grew up watching this tournament and grew up watching this sport, they’re turning on it. They’re kind of feeding into that belief and that structure. I just hope we all collectively can get back to what the heart and soul of college basketball is, the magic of March Madness.”

For now, NCAA tournament expansion talks are paused. NCAA president Charlie Baker is a vocal advocate of expansion. But Sayler told On3 he’s not convinced expansion would be a win for mid-major teams.

“I’m not in favor of it because what I think would happen if it does is you’ll take the 13th-place team in the Big Ten or the SEC,” the Miami athletic director said. “It isn’t going to help the mid-majors. So I don’t see the need to do it. The tournament’s great how it is. Some of the people on the bubble talk don’t belong in the tournament regardless. Getting bigger doesn’t solve that. It just adds more teams, in my mind, that don’t belong in there.

“I’m also struck by the bubble, where these power conference teams lose games to unranked teams, and they never slide off the bubble. Auburn just never falls off when they only won one game in February. They lost seven in February, and four of those seven were to unranked teams. And they don’t pay the penalty, whereas if we lose one game, everyone’s going to crucify us and take us off. The double standard of it all is frustrating, and that’s why expanding is going to make a difference.”