Show Me My Opponent, 2022-23: Auburn (#2)
The thing you gotta do is put the medium-sized round orange object in the hoop
First, before we dive in, well wishes and good thoughts to Zakai Zeigler, whose season has ended with an ACL tear. (More on the impact of that yesterday.) Tennessee will miss him, but I imagine Zakai is doing everything he can off the court to help impact the team on it. He, simply, is That Guy.
Now, the preview.
Tennessee, post-Zeigler season-ender, recovered both emotionally and physically to demolish a top-15 KenPom team in Arkansas at home after a frustrating run of play throughout February. In a longer season that doesn’t have a one-off tournament to end it you could chalk it up to how Real Madrid lose four of six in La Liga every once in a while or Man United being third in the Premier League despite losing their first two matches. Instead it merely affects you going from an expected 1-2 seed to a 3. Anyway, Tuesday was nice despite the bad stuff and people seem to feel a little better.
The next day, Auburn built a 17-point second-half lead at #2 Alabama and looked like clearly the better team for about 30 minutes. (It helped that they started off 9-for-11 from three.) Then they gave up a 16-0 run and lost in overtime and Bruce Pearl did an insane thing even for Bruce:
What looked like a promising enough season for Auburn a month ago has turned into a relative disaster. They’ve lost eight of 11, have gone from a projected 5-6 seed to a 10, and are in legitimate danger of missing the NCAA Tournament if they do not win this game.
Some would say that makes them a very dangerous draw on a Saturday afternoon; I would say there’s an equally logical argument that a team coming off of an extremely emotional loss to their rival, a team who last beat a top 50 opponent on January 14, is not that scary. But I know better than to go all the way in one direction or the other.
BELOW THE LINE ($): usually when you hear "it’s a must-win game” it is a must-win game because the team that needs to win is not very good