By Aidan Joly
For the second straight off-season, college basketball had a surprising coach retirement late in the game.
On Monday, now-former Auburn coach Bruce Pearl announced that he will step down following 11 seasons at the helm of the Tigers. His son Steven will take over the program. The 65-year-old’s decision came just 42 days before the start of the season.
Since 2020 college basketball has seen six national championship-winning head coaches retire, along with now four more who should be considered for the Hall of Fame. There are only seven active coaches who have won a national title. Pearl never won a national title, but he was certainly one of the biggest faces of the sport the past few seasons.
Pearl’s legacy is certainly a confusing one.
For starters, he was coming off perhaps the best season of his coaching career, leading Auburn to the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament and to the Final Four for the second time in his career (more on that in a second), was named AP’s co-coach of the year alongside Rick Pitino – one of those seven with a title – and was nearing 700 “official” career wins.
Pearl transformed Auburn from a program that, outside of a few years in the 1980s with Charles Barkley, was an also-ran in the SEC to one of the premier programs in the country. Before Pearl, Auburn only had one SEC conference tournament title to its name. Pearl won it twice. It had never been to the Final Four before Pearl. Heck, Auburn had only been to the tournament eight times ever before Pearl arrived. He got them there six times in 11 years.
He finishes his career with an unofficial record of 706-268 (his official record is 694-270 due to NCAA penalties).
Before Auburn, he guided Tennessee to an Elite Eight appearance and two more Sweet 16s, getting the Vols to No. 1 in the country in the AP rankings for the first time ever.
He did so by being boisterous, showing up in student sections at women’s basketball and football games shirtless, with a heart-on-his-sleeve persona and a sense of humor.
Of course though, there is the other side of Bruce Pearl’s legacy.
Rumors have swirled the past few months that he would leave Auburn to run for a soon-to-be-open United States senate seat in Alabama. He has been more and more political on his social media feeds as of late and has been vocal about his support for President Donald Trump. However, he said in his farewell video posted to Auburn basketball’s social media pages that he will not run for office. It created some question marks over the summer about the program’s future.
Pearl was only ever hired at Auburn due to a three year show-cause penalty that stemmed from NCAA violations when he was at Tennessee, which resulted in him being fired in Knoxville in 2011. The matter was trivial – he had a recruit at a cookout at his home when the recruit wasn’t supposed to be there – but got in the most hot water for lying to the NCAA and instructing others to do so.
Back in the late 80s while he was an assistant at Iowa he got into trouble in a recruiting scandal that ruined his chances at becoming a Division I head coach anytime soon. He spent nine years as a Division II head coach before getting his first Division I head coaching job at Milwaukee in 2001.
At Auburn the program got tied up in the FBI’s 2017 investigation into college basketball. Auburn stood by Pearl, which was controversial at the time, but in 2018 Auburn made the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2003. Auburn eventually got hit with a postseason ban in 2021.
Finally, it is fair to criticize the timing of his retirement that handed the reigns to his son, despite the fact that Pearl had in the past criticized nepotism in sports.
Former Virginia coach Tony Bennett was criticized for retiring right around a year ago, just weeks before the season. Ron Sanchez was the interim but did not get the full-time job, which eventually went to Ryan Odom.
That’s not to say the 38-year-old Steven Pearl isn’t qualified. He joined the program in 2014 as an assistant strength and conditioning coach, served as the director of basketball operations, worked his way to an on-court assistant job in 2017 and had been the associate head coach and defensive coordinator since 2023, helping build a top-10 defense in the sport last year.
Would Steven Pearl have gotten the job had Bruce retired in April? We’ll never know. Auburn also did not give the younger Pearl an interim tag, which would have clouded this season with whether he’d get the full-time job next spring.
In a career that had so many strange turns and chapters, maybe this was the only way the book could be closed.
AJ Hoops 