Myron Medcalf
Tuscaloosa, Alabama – The whole gym has frozen in whi.
“Listen!” Alabama head coach Nate Oates cried out Alabama head coach Nate Oates after he refused to take his foot off the gas in recent practice. “There are no three pointers for this defense! None!”
Three hours southeast, Auburn’s head coach Bruspal was in a similar state.
“This isn’t going well!” he cried out to the players during a session in mid-February, his hands being thrown into the air. “Unless our big guys step up, this won’t work! I’ll do it again!”
There are fireworks every time the Tigers and Crimson Tide meet in a rivalry dating back to 1893. Throughout its history, the pinnacle of conflict within this state took place on the football field at the Iron Bowl. However, the Saturday marquee matchup for No. 1 Auburn and No. 2 Alabama at Tuscaloosa (ET, ESPN 4pm) will be the first 1-2 meeting in SEC history as well as those two teams. We will be posting the Basketball Center stage.
The Stakes raised the contest to another threshold.
“It’s definitely a big game,” said Alabama forward Grant Nelson, who averages 12.7 points per game. “That’s something everyone is talking about. It’s something that all my friends want to catch that game, so all my friends want to come out and watch.”
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Saturday’s matchup will be the first conference meeting involving the top two college basketball teams and No. 1 and No. 2 teams since Gonzaga and UCLA met in Las Vegas during the 2021-22 season. It will be the first of the following. According to an ESPN survey, they fought in 2016 in a triple-over-time event.
The rise of these two teams represents a shift hierarchy of college basketball, challenging the traditional definition of “blue blood.” Pearl and oats have led Auburn (2019) and Alabama (2024) to the first and final four appearances in each program’s history, respectively. Despite being known as football schools, Alabama and Auburn are preparing to break men’s NCAA tournament records for most conference bids by ensuring they’re over 12 in Sunday’s choices. We will enter on Saturday as two anchors for the well-established SEC.
The program reached this moment with a clear approach.
The Mark Sears (17.8 ppg, 4.9 APG) leads the tide and plays at the fastest pace in America. Under the oats, they launch three pointers for almost half the time with the ball – and they score in a barrage of barrage (they reached 100 points in seven games this season).
In Auburn, top National Player of the Year candidate Johnny Bloom is the dominant unit leading the Tiger Steam that turns all games into heavyweight matches. It is America’s most balanced team, ranked number one for its adjusted offensive efficiency and within the top 20 for its adjusted defensive efficiency. The Tigers are also one of the nation’s most experienced crew (9 seniors) and undoubtedly the deepest (10 players at least 10 minutes per game).
Fans who have gone through past chapters of Alabama Auburn rivalry are hoping for a fierce battle, but the ranking alone doesn’t mean everything about this matchup.
Tide and Tiger supporters can be anything, and anytime.
“I hope they leave us alone,” the self-proclaimed Auburn Superfan and former vice president of the Jungle, Michael Floyd, the Tigers’ basketball student section, told ESPN. “Let’s get something at once. Do we want to (at) basketball and ultimately invest in it?
“I don’t want to say this, but you have to give credit where the credit comes: what they do there is crazy. Our rival was last weekend when Duke was in North Carolina. I want to blow the brakes off.
This rivalry almost caused a fight, featuring such energy versions of hardwoods in 2011 before either team could be this good.
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Cam Newton just got to hand in the Heisman Trophy, and his teammates were on the courts of the Aubern Arena at the time, for the then Iron Bowl victory celebrations and then Alabama Point Guard Trevor Leliford. We gathered nearby. .
Auburn football player crowded the Alabama men’s basketball team at the entrance to the arena just before the Tide ran to the floor before the tip off. Releford, the guard of the first team of all SECs of his time in Alabama, does not name his name. But he wasn’t surprised either. It’s the fiery nature of Alabama Auburn rivalry, he said.
“The guys on the football team – they had a little entrance to the gym for us – they made us feel a little bit of that physicality,” Leliford said Alabama won 68-58. We visited Tuscaloosa, where we talked about the game. “It’s Alabama. It’s Auburn. They gave us a bit of a joke. They didn’t troll us because we were (tough). But is it good to liven up that game? It’s it.”
These days matchups don’t need any extra hype.
The success of both teams has pushed the “basketball iron bowl” (the phrase that two schools raised eyebrows) into another dimension. Yes, bragging rights are always the main prize in this rivalry. However, this Saturday results could affect the national profiles of both schools, with the winners ready to win an easier path to San Antonio and the national championships.
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“There’s no professional sports in Alabama,” Pearl said. “We’re that. There was a time when you had to go to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi – Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina or Duke if you were from this part of the country. The school wins championships and becomes a professional.
That status change coincides with an upgrade of the SEC’s overall coaching pedigree. Both oats and pearls have transformed the program into an attractive hub for forwarding and elite recruits. They combined since 2018 to create nine first round picks in the NBA Draft. Four for Auburn and five for Alabama. They established themselves as a perennial NCAA tournament team.
Pearl arrived in Auburn in 2014 and since OATS joined Alabama in 2019, they have changed their expectations in schools and caught up with the country’s best teams in the transformational phase of sports. Now they will meet to determine the best team in America.
“The good thing is that you can play against the best teams in the country twice here in the final month of the season,” Oats said. “So we can test ourselves.”
And it will be a test for both teams.
Alabama and Auburn will play the most important game in the history of their rivalry at Tuscaloosa on Saturday.
Fans who grew up in this rivalry know that 24 hours after Valentine’s Day, one of these teams will break their hearts.
“We know we’ve got a little more up for that game,” Lelford said. “It’s Alabama, Auburn. You don’t want to be on the loser. I don’t care if it’s soccer, gymnastics, or anything. What we want to go to is the pride of the whole university. Whatever it is, We want to win the most.
