Prior to Saturday, across the past 40 seasons, the No. 1 and No. 2 schools met 16 times in the regular season. None of the teams that played in those games wound up winning the national championship.
Bruce Pearl’s top-ranked Auburn Tigers can buck that trend.
Because what happened at Coleman Coliseum — Auburn winning 94-85 against No. 2 Alabama with insistent style and impressive resourcefulness despite losing two key players to foul-outs — was more than just another impressive Quad 1 win.
Though, it was also that. The Tigers’ victory brought them to 14 Q1 dubs, which is six more than the trio of teams with eight apiece, all of them from the SEC: Alabama and Kentucky, which lost Saturday, and Tennessee (which nearly lost).
Auburn, comfortably the No. 1 overall seed in Saturday afternoon’s top-16 bracket reveal, is moving toward a plane of its own existence and legitimacy. In this, the best version of the SEC we’ve ever seen, Auburn is simultaneously a major reason for that while separating from its conference brethren in the process.
If there was going to be real doubt about the nation’s best team in the nation’s best conference, Alabama needed to bring its best and provide room for skepticism on Saturday, given it had the benefit of hosting the Tigers in the pair’s first of two scheduled matchups (with more possibly to come in the postseason).
Instead, the Tide were rolled following one of their worst 3-point showings of the season (5-of-26), a dismal display that doomed Nate Oats’ team en route to a first: Saturday is the only time Alabama has failed to lead at home since Oats got there in 2019.
“They’re the No. 1 team in the country for a reason,” Oats said.
His team entered Saturday shooting 56% in its previous three games; Alabama was merely 38.6% against the Tigers. All-Americna guard Mark Sears finished with 18 points, his two second-half 3s significant to get the game tied at 68,…
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