The Final Four is set with all four No. 1 seeds for the first time in 17 years but it feels like no one is really taking the top overall seed seriously. Auburn earned the top slot thanks to a tremendous regular season, but a slump down the stretch where the Tigers dropped three of their final four games entering March Madness raised doubts about their ability to win it all.
Bruce Pearl's team handled its business with relative ease in the South Region, working hard to score an impressive second-half comeback against Michigan in the Sweet 16 before pulling away from Michigan State early in the Elite Eight. The odds aren't in favor of Auburn, who is currently sitting with the longest odds (+550 according to ESPN) to win the NCAA Tournament entering Saturday's action.
While the Tigers may not be the top choice to win their first national title now, they have demonstrated why they can win it all over the course of the season. One key aspect of Pearl's roster building has put Auburn in an excellent position to prove the doubters wrong and win their first championship.
1 big reason Auburn can win the National Championship
The key to Auburn's success is its experience, particularly with a deep core of upperclassmen that have played multiple years in college basketball. The advent of NIL and the transfer portal has made college basketball more of an older player's game, moving away from the one-and-done model that dominated the 2010s in favor of teams with plenty of experience in the college game.
The Tigers employ a rotation of 10 players who get at least nine minutes a game and eight of them are either seniors or fifth-year players, headlined by SEC Player of the Year Johni Broome and guard Chad Baker-Mazara. The lone freshman with significant run in the rotation is point guard Tahaad Pettiford, who has thrived as a facilitator for his more experienced teammates without having to carry the load on his own.
The last national champion led primarily by freshman was Duke back in 2015, when Tyus Jones and Jahlil Okafor were two of the top playmakers for the Blue Devils. Every title winner since has had a lot of experience in its rotation, including all four Big East title winners (UCONN and Villanova twice each), North Carolina (in 2017) and Virginia (in 2019).
The core of Auburn's roster (Broome, Baker-Mazara, Denver Jones, Chaney Johnson and Dylan Cardwell) also played together during the 2023-24 campaign, when the Tigers were a 4-seed in the NCAA Tournament before getting upset by Yale in Round 1. Having that much continuity made it easy for Pearl to integrate his key new pieces (Pettiford alongside transfers Miles Kelly and J.P. Pegues) as the missing pieces to a winning nucleus.
The experience that Auburn assembled left them well ahead of the rest of the country before other teams built their own chemistry over the course of the regular season. Starting from that far ahead still leaves the Tigers in an excellent position to withstand the pressure of contending for a national championship, and they will also thrive on the fact that the media appears to be sleeping on their chances entering San Antonio.