On April 5, Auburn played Florida for the right to compete in the NCAA championship game. Now, coach Bruce Pearl and his assistants have to rebuild their roster from scratch. Unless 6-foot-1 freshman guard Tahaad Pettiford pulls his name out of the NBA Draft pool — and he’s climbing up the mock draft boards into the late first round — none of the players from the Final Four team will return in 2025-26.
Such is life in college athletics these days. Just like Baylor coach Scott Drew, Pearl is starting over, a prospect that five years ago was unheard of for a program of Auburn stature. NIL and unlimited transfers have made roster continuity seem like a relic that went out with high-top canvas sneakers.
Pearl is okay with NIL and is glad to see players finally getting compensated properly, but he is not a fan of the NCAA’s unlimited transfer rule. “It’s teaching kids to flee, not fight,” he told Hoops HQ. “It’s hampering player development. One year in a program is not going to get it done.”
Auburn’s roster isn’t barren because that many players took flight. Only four decided to push the transfer portal eject button and Pearl encouraged Pettiford to take his shot at the NBA. The others graduated, most notably 6-foot-10 senior power forward Johni Broome, whom Pearl called “maybe the greatest transfer in the history of college basketball.” Broome, lightly recruited out of high school, played for a year at Morehead State before transferring to Auburn, where he stayed three years and became a consensus first team All-American last season.
Players like Broome don’t come around often, so Pearl must replace his 18.6 points, 10.8 rebounds, 2.9 assists and 2.1 blocked shots a game with a committee approach. The bulk of that task will fall on two Division I transfers — “the two KeShawns,” as Pearl called them, referring to KeShawn Murphy, a 6-foot-10 230-pound senior from Mississippi State, and Keyshawn Hall, a 6-foot-7 senior from UCF.
Since Murphy played for an SEC rival, Pearl and his staff didn’t have to watch a ton of film on him. As a junior, Murphy averaged 11.7 points, 7.4 boards and 1.6 assists. “He’s a great story,” Pearl said. “He was patient. He stayed at Mississippi State for three years and he got better every year.”
Hall led the Big 12 in scoring last season at 18.8 points per game. “He’s a matchup nightmare,” Pearl said.
As Pearl told Hoops HQ before the Tigers played Michigan State in the Elite Eight, he loves to find players who, like him, are grateful to be at Auburn. Auburn signed two junior college transfers as well as 6-foot-8 sophomore Elyjah Freeman, who played at Lincoln Memorial, a Division II school in Harrogate, Tenn. Like Broome, Freeman played his high school ball in Florida and was largely unnoticed by Division I schools. As a freshman at LMU, Freeman averaged 18.9 points and 8.7 rebounds and shot 58.7 percent from the field and 45.6 percent from three-point range. He’s long and springy and narrowed his list of schools to Indiana, Tennessee and Auburn before opting to go with Pearl and the Tigers. “He’s a classic late bloomer,” Pearl said.
Auburn found more size in 7-foot junior center Emeka Opurum, who played last season at Butler Community College in Kansas, where he averaged 9.4 points and 8.1 rebounds. And to help fill the wing positions created by the graduation of Miles Kelly and Chad Baker-Mazarra’s decision to transfer, Auburn signed Abdul Bashir, a 6-foot-7 junior who averaged 27.2 points last season at Casper (Wyo.) College and was rated by JUCORecruiting.com as the No. 3 JUCO prospect nationally. The third Division I transfer is 6-foot-5 senior guard Kevin Overton, who averaged 7.8 points and 3.7 rebounds as a sophomore at Texas Tech and shot a solid 33.3 percent from three.
Pearl and his assistants knew the spring portal season could be challenging, which is why they signed three four-star freshmen last November — 6-foot-8, 230-pound Sebatian Williams-Adams from Houston; 6-foot-1 Kaden Magwood from Charlotte; and 6-foot-5 Simon Walker from Huntsville, Ala.
Pearl is still on the hunt for more players and is making no predictions about his 2025-26 team. “We’ll see when we get them all on campus, but I like this group,” he said. However this incoming class ends up, it won’t include a lot of familiar names. That’s just how Pearl likes it. The less his players have done, the more they’ll have to prove.
