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Myron Medcalf
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The entire gym froze at the whistle.
“Listen!” screamed Alabama head coach Nate Oats, as he catapulted onto the court from the sideline, refusing to take his foot off the gas at a recent practice. “There should not be any 3-pointers against this defense! None!”
Three hours southeast, Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl was in a similar state.
“This doesn’t work!” he yelled at his players during a mid-February session, his hands thrown up in the air. “This doesn’t work unless our big men step up! Do it again!”
Every time the Tigers and the Crimson Tide meet in a rivalry that dates back to 1893, there are fireworks. Throughout its history, the pinnacle of this in-state conflict has taken place on the football field, in the Iron Bowl. But Saturday’s marquee matchup between No. 1 Auburn and No. 2 Alabama in Tuscaloosa (4 p.m. ET, ESPN) will place basketball center stage in the first 1 vs. 2 meeting in the history of the SEC — not just these two teams.
The stakes have elevated the contest to another threshold.
“That’s definitely a big game,” said Grant Nelson, the Alabama forward who is averaging 12.7 points per game. “That’s what everyone talks about. That’s what all of my friends want to come out and watch because they want to catch that game.”
Saturday’s matchup will be the first between the top two teams in college basketball since Gonzaga and UCLA met in Las Vegas during the 2021-22 season, and the first in-conference meeting involving the No. 1 and No. 2 teams since Kansas and Oklahoma battled in a triple-overtime affair in 2016, according to ESPN Research.
The rise of these two teams also represents a shifting hierarchy in college basketball that is challenging the traditional definition of a “blue blood.” Pearl and Oats, respectively, have led Auburn (2019) and Alabama (2024) to the first Final Four appearances in each program’s history. Despite being known as football schools, Alabama and Auburn enter Saturday as two anchors of an SEC primed to break the men’s NCAA tournament record for most conference bids by securing more than a dozen on Selection Sunday.
The programs have reached this moment with distinct approaches.
Mark Sears (17.8 PPG, 4.9 APG) leads the Tide, who play at the fastest pace in America. Under Oats, they launch 3-pointers almost half the time they have the ball — and they score in barrages (they’ve reached 100 points in seven games this season).
At Auburn, Johni Broome, a top candidate for national player of the year, is the dominant force guiding a Tigers squad that turns every game into a heavyweight bout. It’s the most balanced team in America, ranking No. 1 in adjusted offensive efficiency and inside the top 20 in adjusted defensive efficiency on KenPom. The Tigers are also one of the nation’s most experienced crews (nine seniors) and, arguably, the deepest (10 players average at least 10 minutes per game).
Fans who have lived through past chapters of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry expect an intense battle, but they also caution rankings alone don’t mean everything in this matchup.
Backers of the Tide and Tigers tussle over, well, anything — and, at any time.
“I wish they’d just leave us alone,” Michael Floyd, self-proclaimed Auburn superfan and former vice president of The Jungle, the Tigers’ basketball student section, told ESPN. “Let us have something for once. We get good [at] basketball and now they want to finally invest in it? Come on.
“I don’t want to say this, but you have to give credit where credit is due: What they’re doing over there is crazy as well, which makes what we’re doing here even more special. Because we want to win it when our rival is good. No one wants to see what we saw last weekend when Duke just blew the brakes off North Carolina. We want to see a good, old-fashioned, neck-and-neck rivalry.”
This rivalry featured a version of that kind of energy on the hardwood as early as 2011 — before either team was this good — and it nearly caused a fight.
As Cam Newton — with the Heisman Trophy he had just won in hand — and his teammates gathered near the court at then-Auburn Arena for their official Iron Bowl victory celebration and pregame reception, then-Alabama point guard Trevor Releford braced for trouble.
The Auburn football players crowded the Alabama men’s basketball team at the arena entrance just before the Tide ran onto the floor ahead of tipoff. Releford, an All-SEC first-team guard during his time at Alabama, wouldn’t name names. But he also wasn’t surprised. That’s just the fiery nature of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry, he said.
“Those guys on the football team — they had a little entryway for us into the gym — they let us feel that physicality a little bit,” Releford said about the game Alabama won 68-58 before later sweeping that season’s series when Auburn visited Tuscaloosa. “It’s Alabama. It’s Auburn. They gave us a little banter. They didn’t rough us up because we’re [tough]. But it was good to spice that game up.”
Recent matchups haven’t required any extra hype.
The success of both teams has pushed the “Iron Bowl of basketball” — a phrase frowned upon by the two schools — into a different dimension. Yes, bragging rights are always the main prize in this rivalry. But this Saturday’s outcome could impact the national profiles of both schools, with the winner primed to earn an easier path to San Antonio and the national championship.
“There are no pro sports in the state of Alabama,” Pearl said. “We are it. There was a time when, if you were from this part of the country — Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi — you had to go to Kansas or Kentucky or North Carolina or Duke because you couldn’t come to these schools, win championships, become a pro and stay home. Now, you can.”
That shift in status has coincided with an upgrade in the SEC’s overall coaching pedigree. Both Oats and Pearl have turned their programs into appealing hubs for transfers and elite recruits. They have combined to produce nine first-round picks in the NBA draft since 2018; four for Auburn and five for Alabama. They have established themselves as perennial NCAA tournament teams — and, now, national title contenders.
Since Pearl arrived at Auburn in 2014 and Oats joined Alabama in 2019, they have altered expectations at their schools and kept up with the country’s best teams at a transformative stage for the sport. Now, they’ll meet to determine the best team in America.
“The good thing is we get to play against the best team in the country, twice here in the last month of the season,” Oats said. “So, we’ll get to test ourselves.”
And it will be a test, for both teams.
Alabama and Auburn will play the most pivotal game in the history of their rivalry — perhaps in any sport, football included — in Tuscaloosa on Saturday, then they’ll do it again on March 8 in Auburn.
Fans who have been raised in this rivalry know that 24 hours after Valentine’s Day, one of these teams will have its heart broken.
“I do know we got up a little more for that game,” Releford said. “It’s Alabama, Auburn. You don’t want to be on the losing side. I don’t care if it’s football, gymnastics, whatever. It’s a pride throughout the university that we want to go and get them. You want to get a win, no matter what it is. It could be a canned goods competition. We want to win. We want to have the most.”