When last year’s Auburn team made it to the NCAA Tournament, it had traveled around 11,000 miles. But, according to coach Bruce Pearl, this year’s team traveled about 31,000 miles
The Tigers have been to West Virginia, Los Angeles, Seattle, Mexico and, included in Pearl’s mileage crunch, Israel. But with the biggest games of the season looming, Auburn won’t have to do more than travel more than a couple hours to Birmingham, where it’ll begin NCAA Tournament play against No. 8 seed Iowa at 5:50 p.m. Thursday at Legacy Arena.
Since the Sonny Smith era at Auburn, which began in 1978, the Tigers are 25-9 in Birmingham. Eleven of those wins were against the in-town UAB program, but the last time Auburn logged a postseason win there was 1985, when it beat Alabama 53-49 for an SEC Tournament title. “This, for our fans and for our students, I think it’s just awesome,” Pearl said. “So hopefully we’ll get great support and see if we can have a shining moment or two.”
“I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't start a press conference talking about how special it was for me to be at Iowa as an assistant for six years,” Pearl said Sunday. “The Hawkeye State is something special. I think people in Alabama, here in the South, would share a lot of things with the people in Iowa in the Midwest. Two great states full of great people.”
““A really important time for me as an assistant coach under Dr. Tom Davis,” Pearl said, “and I still have some great, great friends there.”
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