Auburn’s Final Four run was more impressive than initially thought

Getting to a Final Four is a tremendous feat in college basketball, but Auburn managed to make it more impressive by reaching Minneapolis this April just a year after they weren’t even recruiting players.

The lifeblood of college basketball is recruiting, an essential skill for any coach worth his salt. With the constant roster turnover from players graduating and turning pro, recruiting new players is the key to allowing a program to maintain success at the Division I level.

The Auburn Tigers have been a successful program over the past few years, reaching the NCAA Tournament in 2018 and getting all the way to the Final Four in March, but they managed to do it under very severe recruiting restrictions. The school’s athletic department told AL.com’s Sam Blum that for an eight-month period from September 2017 until April 2018 the basketball program didn’t engage in any recruiting at all.

The lack of recruiting was one of several self-imposed penalties Auburn issued after former assistant coach Chuck Person was arrested as a part of the FBI probe into college basketball. Auburn had previously held out two players, Danjel Purifoy and Austin Wiley, for the entire 2017-2018 season because they would have been ineligible to compete.

Auburn is still sorting through penalties, as head coach Bruce Pearl told Jon Rothstein recently, but with the Tigers still short-handed the fact they made a Final Four run with a significantly shortened recruiting window in the previous year is impressive. This is not to throw a ton of praise at Pearl, who has his own laundry list of NCAA rules violations in his past, but the fact the Tigers were able to experience so much success in spite of their own self-inflicted wounds is impressive.

It remains to be seen if Auburn will receive any further discipline from the NCAA’s investigation into the allegations the FBI probe brought up, although Blum notes the program has yet to receive a Notice of Allegations from the NCAA.