AUBURN — Still down by double-digits in the second half at home, it soon became desperate times, desperate measures for Auburn basketball.
Well, “desperate times” might be a stretch. Even though the Tigers have now followed up a four-game winning streak with three straight losses — including back-to-back ones at home — T-Rank says their chances at making the NCAA Tournament have fallen all the way down to… 85.9%.
“It’s disappointing, because we had two teams that were really good, that had good analytics, that could have really helped our résumé, and we lost to both,” Steven Pearl said Tuesday after an 84-76 loss to Vanderbilt. “So, missed opportunities there.”
In the big picture, Auburn’s three losses to top-20 teams Tennessee, Alabama and Vanderbilt prevented them from improving their shot at a better seed in March. This is still a team that has played the second-toughest schedule in the country and has four Quad 1 wins to its name, with only one non-Quad 1 loss.
Still, losses of any kind are still frustrating, especially when they’re stacked on top of each other. Auburn doesn’t want to be a team that lets losing become a habit, especially at a home arena that has been such a fortress for the program for years. The Tigers hadn’t lost three straight games in three years, nearly to the exact day.
Besides, after this Saturday at Arkansas, there are easier-on-paper games coming up that could really impact those NCAA Tournament chances, if the Tigers keep losing.
So the “desperate measures” definitely came out with a little more than 12 minutes to go Tuesday night. With Auburn trailing Vanderbilt by 12, Keyshawn Hall went to the bench… and never left it for the rest of the game.
And, on that note, we’ll start our four Observations from Auburn’s 84-76 loss to Vanderbilt — along with the Rotation Charts, Nerd Stats and Quote of the Night — earlier than usual.
Some of the calculus behind making a call like the one to bench Hall had to be the forwards’s technical foul he received a couple of minutes of game time earlier.
Still, Pearl said his decision to take out his leading scorer in a game in which Auburn was going to have to go on runs had a lot to do with what was happening when Hall was on the floor.
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