After Auburn was left out of the NCAA Tournament field, first-year head coach Steven Pearl made a unilateral decision. Unlike many power conference programs that, in recent seasons, have turned down bids to the NIT, the Tigers weren’t about to do the same. And Pearl wasn’t about to take a team vote on it.
“I said, ‘We’re playing,’” Pearl tells Hoops HQ. “‘I’m here to coach you and you’re here to play. So let’s go try to win five games and win the championship.’”
And thus, the Tigers, who scored some of the most impressive wins among SEC schools last season — St. John’s, at Florida, Kentucky — put aside their disappointment and embarked on an NIT journey that wound all the way to the Indiana Pacers’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse, where they defeated Tulsa for the title.
Pearl laughs at the recollection of how that journey began, in a home game against South Alabama of the Sun Belt Conference.
“For the first 20 minutes (playing in the NIT} looked like a bad decision,” says Pearl, whose team trailed 36-30 at halftime. But the Tigers, behind guard Kevin Overton’s seven second-half three-pointers, rallied for a 78-67 victory. At that point, the NIT became a mission, fueled by Pearl’s reminder to his players of what a successful run could mean.
“If you’re going to stay here, show me what I’m getting for next season,” Pearl says. “If you’re trying to leave, why not ball out, get some good tape of yourself, and go get yourself some (NIL) money.”
That worked out for all concerned. Auburn wound up losing six players in the portal, including 6-foot-8 freshman Filip Jovic to UCLA, 6-foot-8 sophomore Elyjah Freeman to Texas and 6-foot-8 freshman Sebastian Williams-Adams to Vanderbilt. But the Tigers’ two most important players decided to stay put. Point guard Tahaad Pettiford, a 6-foot-1 junior, is back to run the show after averaging 15.4 points and 3.8 assists. Pettiford is a scoring point who racked up some big games, including 30 points against Arizona, 29 against Arkansas and 28 against Tennessee. In the NIT title game, Pettiford came up big with 24 points and 8 assists.
Pearl thinks had it not been for the NIT, Pettiford might have joined his six teammates on the portal highway.
Overton, who tossed in a three-pointer with eight seconds in regulation against Tulsa to send the game into overtime and then made a 40-footer to ice a 92-86 victory, was voted the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. His heroics in the postseason (18.6 points per game, 53.7-percent three-point shooting) were hardly a surprise. In the regular season, Overton averaged 14.1 points and shot 41.3 percent from three, fourth in the SEC. He finished the season with 95 three-pointers — which tied for fourth in the league.
“It’s huge having those two guys back,” Pearl says. “They’re worth their weight in gold, because they gave us something to recruit towards for guys in the portal. We could tell them they’d be coming in to play with two potentially all-conference caliber guards.”
Pearl and his staff didn’t wait until the NIT was over to start recruiting. On March 31, five days before the Tulsa game, Auburn reached all the way over to France to land 7-foot freshman Narcisse Ngoy. No one is saying Ngoy will be the next Rudy Gobert or Victor Wembanyama, but his name has been mentioned in the same sentence as those two NBA stars, because he’s been cited as the latest in a growing line of talented French big men.
With a Loaded New Roster, Missouri Is Ready to Keep Climbing
After signing one of the nation’s top recruiting classes, Dennis Gates has been winning big in the transfer portal this spring
Ngoy certainly had his way in the French 2 Elite League, which he led in rebounding (11.5 per game) and blocked shots (2.5 per game) while averaging 10.8 points and shooting 70 percent from the floor.
Pearl had three goals in mind as he and his assistants restocked for next season. One was to find rim protection. Two was to get older; nine players on this season’s roster were underclassmen. The third goal, Pearl says, was the biggest lesson he learned in his first season as head coach after replacing his father Bruce, the winningest coach in school history.
“I think I’ve already applied it,” Pearl says, “as far as the type of player I need in my system. I loved all the kids we coached this past year. But one of the things we didn’t have were guys like we had in the past, like Dylan Cardwell, Chaney Johnson, Denver Jones and Chris Moore, who impact winning. You need four guys like that to mix in with your ultra talented guys who might be more selfish by nature. But that’s not a bad thing to have guys wired to score. You just need to balance them out with players who do all the other things you need to win.”
Auburn’s search for size didn’t end with Ngoy. Since the portal opened a month ago, the Tigers have signed 7-foot-1, 240-pound junior Bukky Oboye (Santa Clara), 6-foot-10, 240-pound senior Owen Freeman (Creighton), 6-foot-8, 225-pound senior Thomas Dowd (Troy), and 6-foot-8 senior Adam Olsen (South Alabama).
Like Ngoy, Oboye is a towering presence at the rim. Playing last season for a 26-9 Santa Clara team that earned an at-large NCAA Tournament bid, Oboye averaged 7.9 points and 4.1 rebounds while blocking 40 shots and shooting 66.7 percent from the field. He scored in double figures 11 times, including a personal best 22 points against Nevada.
Freeman comes with considerable accomplishment; as a freshman at Iowa in 2024, he was chosen the Big Ten Freshman of the Year, the school’s first since 1994, after averaging 10.6 points, 6.6 boards and 1.8 blocks. He was even better after transferring to Creighton, averaging 16.7 points and 6.7 boards before a finger injury ended his sophomore season after 19 games. Injuries plagued Freeman last season, too, limiting him to 26 games during which he averaged 5.0 points and 4.0 rebounds.
Dowd and Olsen bring a bonus — both are good to exceptional three-point shooters. As a junior, Dowd shot 33 percent from behind the arc, an acceptable number. But Pearl thinks he can be better. “I talked to a few of the coaches in (the Sun Belt),” Pearl says. “Ryan Panone (the Arkansas State head coach), said they treated (Dowd) like he was a 38-, 39-percent three-point shooter. He just had to take some tough ones at Troy. Here, with the continuity of our offense and playing with better players, he’ll get cleaner looks. He could shoot 40 percent. And Adam had to take a lot of tough shots too and still shot around 40 percent. With us, he could get that up to 45.”
As for one of those blue-collar connectors Pearl was searching for, Auburn went back to the portal for George Kimble III, who spent last season at Vanderbilt but never played because of a knee injury he suffered the year before at Eastern Kentucky, where in 25 games he averaged 18 points, 3.7 rebounds and 3.2 assists. If his knee is sound, Kimble, who can play either guard spot, will be a solid pickup.
Pearl and his staff are still looking for another piece like Kimble, which might be easier said than done with the insane amounts of NIL money being spent. But the Auburn coaches had been preparing all season for the portal. The 19 days it took the Tigers to win the NIT didn’t slow them down.
“These are wild times we’re in right now,” Pearl says. “You better figure it out or you’re going to get left in the dust.”
Meet your guide
