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Nobody can take away Auburn’s run, but that’ll forever be a missed opportunity not to play for a national title
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As Johni Broome put his face over the Auburn jersey that he’d wear for the last time, I couldn’t help but think about what crossed his mind as he watched Florida celebrate its Final Four victory in San Antonio. I won’t pretend to know. Shoot, we didn’t even get confirmation on what he appeared to be saying after his awkward injury in the Elite Eight victory against Michigan State.
But man, that stings.
That stings for an Auburn program to lose in the same spot that it reached for the first time in program history 6 years ago. It stings when you think about how this was the team with the No. 1 overall seed who ate Quad 1 wins for breakfast in the regular season. It stings when you think about the 8-point halftime lead against the Gators.
All of it should sting.
Auburn couldn’t be the first team in the NCAA Tournament to find the answers for Walter Clayton Jr., who went off for 34 points. How much of that was the injured thumb and shoulder of Chad Baker-Mazara? That’s debatable. You could point to injuries — the other being the obvious one to the right elbow of Broome that was suffered on that aforementioned Elite Eight play — or you could point to something a bit more blunt.
Auburn blew a golden opportunity.
It blew it by turning the ball over 12 times in the second half, which was the most of any half that it had all year. It blew it by having just 8 second-half points in the paint after it poured in 26 in the first half. It blew it by coming up with too many empty possessions down the stretch, including when Baker-Mazara geared up for a potential 3-pointer to make it a 1-possession game in the final minute, only to jump and decide not to shoot into Alex Condon’s 7-foot wingspan on a textbook closeout.
These things all doomed Auburn. It’ll sting more knowing how battle-tested this team was, and knowing that it moved well past the shaky stretch it endured heading into the NCAA Tournament, wherein the Tigers lost 3 of their final 4 games. You know, in case you haven’t heard about that.
But none of that mattered on Saturday. What did matter was that Bruce Pearl had every angle possible to sell to his team.
This was the regular-season game in which Florida’s ascent to potential national title contender became obvious. Pearl played up the underdog angle all week, as he should’ve. It’s not always easy to motivate the No. 1 overall seed who spent the majority of the season ranked atop the AP Top 25.
If we want to get personal, Pearl losing twice to his former assistant had to sting, too. Not that there’s been any sort of mention of bad blood between those 2, but let’s call it like it is. Pearl is in the other side of 65 years old and he just watched his season end against his former assistant, who probably still gets carded at the local liquor store.
(That’s not a shot at the baby-faced Todd Golden. It’s just reality.)
It would’ve been one thing to lose in a title-game scenario because that would’ve been another “first” for the Auburn record books. Instead, this will be remembered as a tremendously successful season that ended simply because Auburn wasn’t the best team on the floor.
That’s the other thing. Ask an Auburn fan about the 2019 Final Four loss to Virginia and the first thing that they’ll mention was the missed double-dribble call that cost the Tigers a chance to win the game. The postmortem for this historically dominant Auburn team will be “we ran into a better, more resilient team.” There’s no arguing that. Not after Florida won in The Jungle and in San Antonio. And if the response is “it’s a different game if Clayton doesn’t go off,” remember that, like Broome, that’s a first-team All-American we’re talking about.
Early on, Broome looked like he was going to be the guy who went off. Again, we don’t assume to know what the camera catches Broome saying, but it appeared after he scored on a nice little post move on the first possession that he said in the direction of Condon “all night.” Florida did a much better job defending him in the second half, and it wasn’t in fact, “all night” that he got those types of looks.
The same was true of Auburn freshman sensation Tahaad Pettiford, who averaged 17 points in the previous 4 NCAA Tournament games but was held to 7 points on 1-for-6 shooting on Saturday. Those 2 leading scorers going 0-for-6 from 3-point range was part of a 7-for-25 clip on a night in which Auburn needed a higher level of shot-making to match Florida.
Ultimately, though, that’s how Auburn’s 2024-25 season will be remembered. That game was a microcosm of the season between those 2 teams. Auburn’s last lead of the night came at the 6:53 mark on a thunderous Dylan Cardwell slam on an alley-oop pass from Broome. It was all Gators after that. Florida peaked at the right time. It’s revisionist history to say we should’ve known that was going to be the case when we saw how it played out with these teams 2 months ago. That loss was sandwiched between 14- and 6-game winning streaks. It didn’t sting then because everything was still in front of Auburn on what appeared to be an off night against an elite team.
Two months later, Broome and the Tigers walked off the floor knowing that the road was over. Time will tell if Pearl ever gets another crack at a title as good as the one he got. In another universe, Auburn doesn’t battle the toughest Final Four ever and it wins a title.
But in the only universe that mattered, Auburn will forever think about how close it came.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
