Best AU Basketball Article Ever Written?

[AUApostle 7,651]

Sometimes the only thing standing in the way of our redemption, restoration, and destiny is being able to forgive ourselves.

https://www.al.com/auburnbasketball/2022/03/the-search-that-resurrected-auburn-basketball-and-bruce-pearls-career.html?outputType=amp

 

Growing up in a kosher household in Boston, Bruce Pearl never really acquired a taste for dairy.

Even as an adult, Pearl generally avoided cheese. He’d order a chicken parmesan, hold the parmesan, as mixing meats and cheeses wasn’t part of his diet. Over the years, though, there was something he’d make an exception for — pizza; particularly an everything pizza — a perfect pie smothered in a smorgasbord of meats and veggies, held together by a bubbling layer of cheese. It became his go-to order.

It’s fitting, then, that perhaps the most consequential decision in Auburn basketball history, and one of the most important decisions of Pearl’s career, was hashed out around a kitchen island with a few boxes of — what else? — deluxe pizzas from Marco’s sprawled across it eight years ago. That was the night then-Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs got Pearl to agree to become the Tigers’ new head coach, setting the program on a path to never-before-seen prosperity on the Plains — two SEC regular-season titles, an SEC Tournament crown, three NCAA Tournament berths, a Final Four appearance, the program’s first-ever No. 1 ranking and a No. 2 seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament.

“It’s just one of those things that just doesn’t come along very often,” Jacobs told AL.com. “And when it does, and the skillset of the individual meets the need of the university, those are really hard things to come by. When they do, you have a chance to be No. 1 in the nation and a top seed and selling out basketball games — before you start winning a lot of them — because people care.”

Three key endorsements

David Benedict had only been at Auburn for a couple of weeks when the 2014 “Snowpocalypse” brought much of the state to a standstill.

He was still settling into his new role as Auburn athletics’ chief operating officer when the state was rocked by that winter storm on Jan. 28, 2014. Highways iced over, making it nigh impossible to commute. Among the consequences of the blizzard was a postponement of sporting events, including that week’s rivalry game between Auburn and Alabama on the hardwood, which was pushed from Jan. 29 to Jan. 30 at Auburn Arena.

The Tigers and the Tide were mired in mediocrity, both below .500 entering the rivalry game—Auburn at 8-9 and winless in the SEC in Tony Barbee’s fourth season; Alabama sitting at 9-10 overall and 3-3 in league play under fifth-year coach Anthony Grant. That week, Jacobs acknowledged to Benedict, his new right-hand man, that a change may be necessary at season’s end. The program was taking a step back under Barbee, and if things didn’t improve over the next month or so, something had to be done.

He already had one name in mind if it came to that. He confided in Benedict that he would try to hire Bruce Pearl, the former Tennessee coach cast aside by the sport while serving out a three-year NCAA show-cause penalty.

“Bruce was the guy that was the coach I had on my mind for several weeks,” Jacobs told AL.com. “We had a history of hiring coaches that maybe weren’t at the same level…. I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to hire somebody that had a proven background of winning at different levels and could compete in the SEC.”

Pearl fit that bill. He won a Division-II title at Southern Indiana in 1995, led Milwaukee to multiple Horizon League championships and a pair of NCAA Tournament bids — including a Sweet 16 run in 2005 — then guided Tennessee to six straight tournament appearances, including three Sweet 16 trips and an Elite Eight berth. He was on the market, out of coaching since March 2011 but splitting his time between three jobs. He was vice president of marketing for H.T. Hackney, a Knoxville-based wholesale grocery distributor; he also did radio for Sirius XM and was a college basketball analyst for ESPN.

 

After Auburn’s season ended with an opening-round SEC Tournament loss to South Carolina on March 12, Jacobs fired Barbee back at the team’s Atlanta hotel later that night. The next day, he was on the phone with Pearl about his interest in the job — but not before reaching out to three people who figured prominently in Pearl’s recent and checkered past.

Jacobs contacted Mike Hamilton, a close friend of his who was Tennessee’s athletics director during Pearl’s tenure with the Vols, to confidentially ask him about Pearl. Hamilton fired Pearl following the NCAA violations that produced his show-cause penalty, and those issues within the program ultimately caused Hamilton to resign from his post a few months later. He was still a big fan of the coach despite that, and he conveyed that to Jacobs while giving him his recommendation.

Then Auburn’s athletics director spoke with Dave Didion, who recently returned to the Plains as assistant athletics director for compliance following a five-year stint as the NCAA’s director of enforcement. Didion knew Pearl well; he oversaw the NCAA’s investigation into Pearl’s transgressions at Tennessee that cost the coach his job. Jacobs called Didion that Thursday and asked him flat out: Would you hire Bruce Pearl?

Without hesitation, Didion told Jacobs he would hire the coach.

“Quite frankly, it shocked me a little bit, because Dave is a black-and-white guy when it comes to the rules,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs wanted Didion to elaborate on his thinking. Why would he, of all people, be on board with hiring Pearl to lead Auburn’s program?

“Because Jay, he made a mistake,” Jacobs recalled Didion telling him. “He was remorseful for it immediately. I just believe people like that — he’s a good person — once they make a mistake, I don’t think they’ll ever make the same one again.”

That conversation led Jacobs to Mike Slive, then commissioner of the SEC. Jacobs had yet to speak with Pearl, and he didn’t know what interest, if any, he would have in Auburn, but he wanted Slive’s thoughts on the prospect of Pearl returning to an SEC program after his downfall at Tennessee.

“The commissioner’s exact words were: ‘It is time for Bruce Pearl to be back in the SEC,’” Jacobs said.

After vetting Pearl and getting the blessing of those three figures, Jacobs ran the idea by Auburn president Jay Gogue, who told the athletics director that if those three were on board with pursuing Pearl, then go out and get who he believed was the best coach Auburn could hire.

“Those conversations ring in my ear every time we talk about it,” Jacobs, now an executive associate athletics director at Florida, said in February.

If the jacket fits, wear it

Bruce Pearl’s initial interview for the Auburn job was far from a home run, and it certainly wasn’t what Jacobs expected when he and Benedict flew to Bristol, Conn.

The trio met at the DoubleTree across the street from ESPN’s campus sometime after 10 p.m. on Friday, March 14. Pearl was scheduled to be in studio the next day, providing on-air analysis during conference championship weekend. The conversation that night included very little discussion about the Auburn job, instead turning into a quasi-therapy session for Pearl as he wrestled with the idea of returning to the sideline.

“Quite frankly, the interview didn’t go very well,” Jacobs said. “Bruce was struggling to consider himself a viable candidate.”

It had been nearly three years since Pearl last coached a game. A little more than five months remained on his show-cause penalty. He was juggling three jobs, two of which at least kept him connected to the sport, though still at arm’s length from the profession he poured three decades of his life into.

With how things unraveled at Tennessee, Pearl was still grappling with the fallout—not just the impact it had on his own reputation, but how it affected his family, his former players, the Tennessee program and its fans. He became emotional as he spoke with Jacobs and Benedict, both of whom were taken aback by the coach’s candidness and vulnerability.

“He had a lot of remorse and embarrassment for his family because of what went on at Tennessee,” Jacobs said. “He was really more or less talking to himself about how could he do this? How could he get through the show-cause? Quite frankly, it wasn’t the interview that you have with the guy who was trying to become your next head coach.”

The meeting ended after midnight. Jacobs was looking for answers; something didn’t match up. He wondered if he missed something in his prior assessment of the coach, because the man he just finished meeting with wasn’t mentally ready to step into the void at Auburn. Benedict assured Jacobs that his initial evaluation of Pearl as a candidate was correct; it’s just that Pearl wasn’t in a headspace to accept any coaching job at that point. He still needed to convince himself that he deserved another chance on the sideline.

“I may have bombed it in his eyes, but I didn’t think I bombed it; I was just honest,” Pearl said.

Pearl was back in his hotel room when he received another call at 2 a.m. It was Jacobs. He wanted to sit down with Pearl again in the morning to discuss the job. Auburn’s athletics director needed to be sure he had the right read on the candidate he for weeks had envisioned for the job.

“When he got emotional in the first interview, I heard the guilt, but I heard the remorse even louder,” Jacobs said. “That made me want him more, because he was in a place that other people — Dave Didion, Jay Gogue and Mike Slive — wanted to forgive him, and he wasn’t willing to forgive himself because he was being so hard on himself. That’s why I wanted to talk to him again, because we all deserve second chances, and I wanted him to have a second chance.

“And I wanted him to be at Auburn. With that emotion and the way he cared, I knew he was Auburn. I knew 100 percent he was Auburn, and I had to convince him that he was.”

After Jacobs set up the next morning’s meeting, Pearl called his wife Brandy from his hotel room. He told her about that night’s interview and how he was noncommittal about a return to coaching. Brandy offered him a piece of advice heading into the morning meeting with Jacobs and Benedict.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Brandy told him. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, wake up as Auburn’s basketball coach and see how that feels. Go downstairs and have a cup of coffee—not as the vice president of H.T. Hackney, not as an ESPN color commentator; you are my husband, and you are Auburn’s coach. How does that feel? Try that on. Then take it off; take that jacket off, then put your jacket on you got right now working these three jobs and tell me how you feel.”

Pearl tried that proverbial jacket on for size that Saturday morning and met with Auburn’s administrators. His attitude in the interview was a 180 from the night before, and it was immediately noticeable.

“It felt good,” Pearl said. “It felt like the jacket fit.”

There was only one problem: Jacobs wanted to offer Pearl the job on the spot, but Pearl didn’t want to accept any offer until getting approval from his entire family. He still had to work in Bristol through the weekend and wouldn’t be back in Knoxville until Monday. Forty-eight hours is a lifetime during a coaching search, and while Pearl was the top candidate, Jacobs had other coaches to interview. He and Benedict already met with another candidate in New York before flying to Bristol, and there was a chance the job wasn’t going to be open by the time Pearl was prepared to make his decision.

Jacobs called the other candidate—at the time a mid-major coach who has since moved up to successfully lead a Power 5 program—that weekend and explained the situation: “I know you’ve got other opportunities, or I think you will as soon as everybody gets through playing, and I just want you to know you’re not my No. 1 guy.

“In 48 hours, I may regret telling you that, because you may be my No. 1 guy, but I don’t want to close any doors for you while you’re waiting on me, because I’ve still got a No. 1 guy, but I just don’t know if I can get him or not.”

Family matters

Steven Pearl turned to his father, a puzzled look on his face taking shape as they sat in a car somewhere on I-75 between Knoxville and Atlanta.

The father and son were riding together, along with Jordan Howell — a former Tennessee player under Bruce Pearl and at the time a coworker of Steven’s at Stryker Corp in Knoxville — on their way to Atlanta. It was the week of the SEC Tournament in 2014; Howell and the younger Pearl were planning to watch their alma mater at the Georgia Dome, while Bruce Pearl had business to tend to for H.T. Hackney before flying to Bristol for his ESPN duties.

Bruce Pearl, seemingly out of the blue, posed a question to Howell: “Jordan, how good of a job is the Auburn job?”

Howell grew up in Auburn but went to high school in Madison. His brother, Brett, spent two seasons at Auburn under Cliff Ellis. His father, Rex, played at Auburn in 1966, while his uncle Alex was a two-year starter, team captain and an All-SEC selection in 1967. Howell knew Auburn well, and he knew what the job could be.

Howell explained the success the program had under Sonny Smith in the 1980s and with Ellis in the 1990s, rattling off the accomplishments of guys like Charles Barkley and Chris Porter. The program had fallen on hard times under Tony Barbee, but the potential was there for success.

“It’s just got to be the right coach,” Steven Pearl said. “Jordan was like, ‘BP, you would kill it down there.’ That was the first I heard of Auburn from BP. I didn’t know that was something that was of interest to him.”

While Jay Jacobs was vetting Pearl as his top candidate for the job, Pearl was doing his due diligence on Auburn. He had been out of coaching for three years, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get back in the game. The timing of the show-cause — set to expire Aug. 23, 2014 — made a potential return feel like it was still a year away from happening, if at all. That, along with his three other jobs, pushed the idea to the back of his mind.

The conversations that week with Jacobs, as well as the late-night advice from his wife Brandy after the initial interview, made the idea of a return feel more real. The more he thought about it, the more it piqued his interest.

Pearl could have waited another coaching cycle and landed in a better situation on paper than the one he would take over at Auburn, but there was something about the program that appealed to his sensibilities. He liked the idea of a challenge — of building something special at a program that was down on its luck.

“It would mean way more than doing it at another place that already had a bunch of history and a bunch of success,” Steven Pearl said. “I think BP wanted to take on that challenge of doing it here, because I think it makes it more special when you do it at a place that doesn’t have a ton of history.”

Before he could fully entertain the idea, Pearl needed his family’s full support before he could make that commitment; if just one of them pushed back against the idea, it was going to be a no-go.

“Getting fired at Tennessee was very painful. Still is,” Bruce Pearl told AL.com, pausing for 10 seconds as he tried to fight back tears. “I didn’t know if I ever wanted to put my family through that again.”

He readily admits he made mistakes at Tennessee. He knows he shouldn’t have had two verbally committed prospects over to his house for a cookout with about 100 other people, including his team and family. It was a secondary NCAA violation made worse by subsequently lying to NCAA investigators about it.

“We didn’t handle it the right way,” he said. “We panicked going into our NCAA interviews without attorneys. Why? Because who does that?... We didn’t tell the truth about that one incident. We all panicked. Came back, told the NCAA right away, man, ‘You guys got to come back; we didn’t tell you the truth.’ At that point, it was too late.”

That panic cost him his job at Tennessee, where he had unprecedented success, and made him a coaching pariah. The NCAA handed down its penalty five months after his firing, adding insult to injury. Losing his job hurt, so did the show-cause; neither was as painful as the feeling of letting down those closest to him.

“There was definitely part of him that didn’t want to have to deal with that heartbreak again, having lost a job and how he felt he let so many people down — his entire assistant coaching staff, the entire fanbase, the university,” Steven Pearl said. “He took that very hard on himself. Having to deal with that pain again, if that were to ever happen again, was something that obviously he just didn’t want to do.

“I think that was part of why he didn’t want to get back into coaching. But when you’re away from something for a few years, you start to miss certain pieces of it.”

His family could sense the void in his life. They each felt it too, to some degree.

Basketball was a fixture in the Pearl household. March was particularly meaningful; the family always gathered for conference tournaments and the NCAA Tournament. They all enjoyed the feeling of being around and supporting a program, and they missed that part of their lives.

When Bruce Pearl returned to Knoxville from Bristol that Monday, his entire family was waiting for him: Brandy, Steven, his other son Michael and his daughters, Jacqui and Leah. They hugged when he walked in the door. Then they sat down and talked about the Auburn opportunity.

The conversation didn’t take long.

“My siblings were 100 percent on board right away because they had missed that part of their lives,” Steven Pearl said. “It was a pretty easy conversation as far as the family goes. They were 100 percent in… and as soon as that was the case, he was ready to go.”

An early birthday surprise

Jay Jacobs stood in the parking lot of a gas station in Knoxville, looking down at his GPS. Auburn’s athletics director was nervous but resolute, a sense of calm falling over him as he spoke on the phone.

It was about 7 p.m. on Monday, March 17, 2014. Jacobs and David Benedict took the Auburn jet up to Tennessee, landing at a tiny airport an hour or so outside of Knoxville; they didn’t want anyone to know where they were headed. A rental car with half a tank of gas was waiting for them when they landed.

They drove to Knoxville, uncertain of their destination but sure of their purpose. They were there to offer Bruce Pearl the Auburn head coaching position, but they didn’t know his address. All Jacobs recalled was a nearby landmark — a country club or some restaurant Pearl mentioned in conversation. When they stopped for gas, Jacobs pulled out his phone and called Pearl.

He asked Pearl where he was; Pearl told him he was at home with his family. Jacobs asked for his address and punched it into his GPS as Pearl asked him where he was. Unbeknownst to Pearl at the time, Jacobs and Benedict were 1.7 miles away.

“He wasn’t expecting me,” Jacobs told AL.com. “I just knew that’s the guy from the very beginning, from a few weeks back, that I thought was our guy that would make a difference at Auburn…. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted him to know the commitment we had and how much we wanted him at Auburn, so I had no idea how it was going to go.”

Pearl recalls that day a bit differently (“I called him and said, ‘Jay, is that job still open?’ He said it is, so I said, ‘Get your ass over to Knoxville. I’m ready.’”) The exact details are disputed; such is the nature of memory — no two people remember specific events the same. Regardless of whose version you believe, the outcome was the same, with Pearl telling Jacobs and Benedict to swing by his house that night.

When the Auburn administrators arrived, Pearl’s entire family was there, as were the Pearls’ trusted friends Steven and David Gruber, Milwaukee-based attorneys who have long advised Pearl — who has never relied on an agent — during contract negotiations. The group gathered around the kitchen island over those boxes of deluxe pizzas and some beers, casually coming to terms on a six-year contract to make Pearl Auburn’s next coach.

Surrounded by family and friends, Pearl was a different man standing in the kitchen that night than the one Jacobs met with in Bristol three days earlier. He was loose and vibrant; he was the man most people recognize him as today. He told Jacobs then: “If you get me, you get all of me.”

It was exactly what Jacobs believed Auburn needed.

“I told Jay he would never look back and second-guess that decision, that I would go to work, and I would reward him for that decision,” Pearl said. “I was positive of that.”

The finer details of the contract still needed to be hashed out, but the framework was done. Once the deal was agreed upon, Steven Pearl — who was staying with his dad at the time while work was being done on his own home — raced downstairs to his work computer and printed it out. Both sides signed off, and on the eve of Bruce Pearl’s 54th birthday, the celebration got an early start.

The following morning, Jacobs flew back to Auburn, accompanied by his new head coach. When Bruce Pearl stepped off the jet at Auburn University Regional Airport, he was greeted by a mob of Tigers fans eagerly awaiting his arrival. He approached them and jumped up and down in celebration, a mosh pit of jubilation momentarily engulfing him.

Jacobs watched from the tarmac, that moment confirming to him that Pearl was exactly what Auburn basketball needed.

In the eight years since, Pearl has delivered on his promise to Jacobs. He has resurrected Auburn from one of the worst programs in the country to one of college basketball’s new bloods. It has been enough to earn him an eight-year extension in late January that is aimed to keep him on the Plains “for life.”

“Auburn was the right place at the right time, and Bruce Pearl was at the right place at the right time to lead this program,” Jacobs said.

Under Pearl, the Tigers have won at least 25 games in four of the last five seasons while establishing one of the top homecourt advantages in the country. They’ve won two SEC regular-season titles and an SEC Tournament championship. They’ve appeared in three of the last four NCAA Tournaments and made a Final Four for the first time ever. They ascended to the top of the AP poll for the first time in program history this season, and now with the most talented roster the Plains has ever seen and led by a potential No. 1 overall pick in Jabari Smith, they’re eyeing another deep tournament run with championship aspirations after earning a No. 2 seed — the second-highest in program history — in this year’s field.

“We had so far to come — probably further than anyone,” Jacobs said. “We had quite a hill to climb. What we got far exceeded what we were hoping for. We were hoping for stability and people caring about Auburn men’s basketball again…. I don’t know of anybody else in college basketball that could’ve done what Bruce has done at Auburn.”

Two weeks ago, Pearl stood under the lettering adorning the main entrance of the newly rededicated Neville Arena. He recalled how when he was at Tennessee, he always dreamt of accomplishing enough with the program that one day they would rename the entrance of Thompson-Boling Arena in his honor. They’d call it “the Pearly Gates,” he suggested, pausing for a beat.

“Instead, they showed me the door,” he said.

At Auburn, Pearl could get that and more.

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.

 

[gravejd 3,270]

Not sure if best ever but that was a great article. Thanks for posting!

[casatiger 513]

Just awesome.

[80Tiger 899]

I know he has been reviled on this board, but kudos to Jay Jacobs for knowing what Auburn needed then going out and getting it done.

[aubiefifty 16,740]

5 hours ago, AUDevil said:

Sometimes the only thing standing in the way of our redemption, restoration, and destiny is being able to forgive ourselves.

https://www.al.com/auburnbasketball/2022/03/the-search-that-resurrected-auburn-basketball-and-bruce-pearls-career.html?outputType=amp

 

Growing up in a kosher household in Boston, Bruce Pearl never really acquired a taste for dairy.

Even as an adult, Pearl generally avoided cheese. He’d order a chicken parmesan, hold the parmesan, as mixing meats and cheeses wasn’t part of his diet. Over the years, though, there was something he’d make an exception for — pizza; particularly an everything pizza — a perfect pie smothered in a smorgasbord of meats and veggies, held together by a bubbling layer of cheese. It became his go-to order.

It’s fitting, then, that perhaps the most consequential decision in Auburn basketball history, and one of the most important decisions of Pearl’s career, was hashed out around a kitchen island with a few boxes of — what else? — deluxe pizzas from Marco’s sprawled across it eight years ago. That was the night then-Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs got Pearl to agree to become the Tigers’ new head coach, setting the program on a path to never-before-seen prosperity on the Plains — two SEC regular-season titles, an SEC Tournament crown, three NCAA Tournament berths, a Final Four appearance, the program’s first-ever No. 1 ranking and a No. 2 seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament.

“It’s just one of those things that just doesn’t come along very often,” Jacobs told AL.com. “And when it does, and the skillset of the individual meets the need of the university, those are really hard things to come by. When they do, you have a chance to be No. 1 in the nation and a top seed and selling out basketball games — before you start winning a lot of them — because people care.”

Three key endorsements

David Benedict had only been at Auburn for a couple of weeks when the 2014 “Snowpocalypse” brought much of the state to a standstill.

He was still settling into his new role as Auburn athletics’ chief operating officer when the state was rocked by that winter storm on Jan. 28, 2014. Highways iced over, making it nigh impossible to commute. Among the consequences of the blizzard was a postponement of sporting events, including that week’s rivalry game between Auburn and Alabama on the hardwood, which was pushed from Jan. 29 to Jan. 30 at Auburn Arena.

The Tigers and the Tide were mired in mediocrity, both below .500 entering the rivalry game—Auburn at 8-9 and winless in the SEC in Tony Barbee’s fourth season; Alabama sitting at 9-10 overall and 3-3 in league play under fifth-year coach Anthony Grant. That week, Jacobs acknowledged to Benedict, his new right-hand man, that a change may be necessary at season’s end. The program was taking a step back under Barbee, and if things didn’t improve over the next month or so, something had to be done.

He already had one name in mind if it came to that. He confided in Benedict that he would try to hire Bruce Pearl, the former Tennessee coach cast aside by the sport while serving out a three-year NCAA show-cause penalty.

“Bruce was the guy that was the coach I had on my mind for several weeks,” Jacobs told AL.com. “We had a history of hiring coaches that maybe weren’t at the same level…. I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to hire somebody that had a proven background of winning at different levels and could compete in the SEC.”

Pearl fit that bill. He won a Division-II title at Southern Indiana in 1995, led Milwaukee to multiple Horizon League championships and a pair of NCAA Tournament bids — including a Sweet 16 run in 2005 — then guided Tennessee to six straight tournament appearances, including three Sweet 16 trips and an Elite Eight berth. He was on the market, out of coaching since March 2011 but splitting his time between three jobs. He was vice president of marketing for H.T. Hackney, a Knoxville-based wholesale grocery distributor; he also did radio for Sirius XM and was a college basketball analyst for ESPN.

 

After Auburn’s season ended with an opening-round SEC Tournament loss to South Carolina on March 12, Jacobs fired Barbee back at the team’s Atlanta hotel later that night. The next day, he was on the phone with Pearl about his interest in the job — but not before reaching out to three people who figured prominently in Pearl’s recent and checkered past.

Jacobs contacted Mike Hamilton, a close friend of his who was Tennessee’s athletics director during Pearl’s tenure with the Vols, to confidentially ask him about Pearl. Hamilton fired Pearl following the NCAA violations that produced his show-cause penalty, and those issues within the program ultimately caused Hamilton to resign from his post a few months later. He was still a big fan of the coach despite that, and he conveyed that to Jacobs while giving him his recommendation.

Then Auburn’s athletics director spoke with Dave Didion, who recently returned to the Plains as assistant athletics director for compliance following a five-year stint as the NCAA’s director of enforcement. Didion knew Pearl well; he oversaw the NCAA’s investigation into Pearl’s transgressions at Tennessee that cost the coach his job. Jacobs called Didion that Thursday and asked him flat out: Would you hire Bruce Pearl?

Without hesitation, Didion told Jacobs he would hire the coach.

“Quite frankly, it shocked me a little bit, because Dave is a black-and-white guy when it comes to the rules,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs wanted Didion to elaborate on his thinking. Why would he, of all people, be on board with hiring Pearl to lead Auburn’s program?

“Because Jay, he made a mistake,” Jacobs recalled Didion telling him. “He was remorseful for it immediately. I just believe people like that — he’s a good person — once they make a mistake, I don’t think they’ll ever make the same one again.”

That conversation led Jacobs to Mike Slive, then commissioner of the SEC. Jacobs had yet to speak with Pearl, and he didn’t know what interest, if any, he would have in Auburn, but he wanted Slive’s thoughts on the prospect of Pearl returning to an SEC program after his downfall at Tennessee.

“The commissioner’s exact words were: ‘It is time for Bruce Pearl to be back in the SEC,’” Jacobs said.

After vetting Pearl and getting the blessing of those three figures, Jacobs ran the idea by Auburn president Jay Gogue, who told the athletics director that if those three were on board with pursuing Pearl, then go out and get who he believed was the best coach Auburn could hire.

“Those conversations ring in my ear every time we talk about it,” Jacobs, now an executive associate athletics director at Florida, said in February.

If the jacket fits, wear it

Bruce Pearl’s initial interview for the Auburn job was far from a home run, and it certainly wasn’t what Jacobs expected when he and Benedict flew to Bristol, Conn.

The trio met at the DoubleTree across the street from ESPN’s campus sometime after 10 p.m. on Friday, March 14. Pearl was scheduled to be in studio the next day, providing on-air analysis during conference championship weekend. The conversation that night included very little discussion about the Auburn job, instead turning into a quasi-therapy session for Pearl as he wrestled with the idea of returning to the sideline.

“Quite frankly, the interview didn’t go very well,” Jacobs said. “Bruce was struggling to consider himself a viable candidate.”

It had been nearly three years since Pearl last coached a game. A little more than five months remained on his show-cause penalty. He was juggling three jobs, two of which at least kept him connected to the sport, though still at arm’s length from the profession he poured three decades of his life into.

With how things unraveled at Tennessee, Pearl was still grappling with the fallout—not just the impact it had on his own reputation, but how it affected his family, his former players, the Tennessee program and its fans. He became emotional as he spoke with Jacobs and Benedict, both of whom were taken aback by the coach’s candidness and vulnerability.

“He had a lot of remorse and embarrassment for his family because of what went on at Tennessee,” Jacobs said. “He was really more or less talking to himself about how could he do this? How could he get through the show-cause? Quite frankly, it wasn’t the interview that you have with the guy who was trying to become your next head coach.”

The meeting ended after midnight. Jacobs was looking for answers; something didn’t match up. He wondered if he missed something in his prior assessment of the coach, because the man he just finished meeting with wasn’t mentally ready to step into the void at Auburn. Benedict assured Jacobs that his initial evaluation of Pearl as a candidate was correct; it’s just that Pearl wasn’t in a headspace to accept any coaching job at that point. He still needed to convince himself that he deserved another chance on the sideline.

“I may have bombed it in his eyes, but I didn’t think I bombed it; I was just honest,” Pearl said.

Pearl was back in his hotel room when he received another call at 2 a.m. It was Jacobs. He wanted to sit down with Pearl again in the morning to discuss the job. Auburn’s athletics director needed to be sure he had the right read on the candidate he for weeks had envisioned for the job.

“When he got emotional in the first interview, I heard the guilt, but I heard the remorse even louder,” Jacobs said. “That made me want him more, because he was in a place that other people — Dave Didion, Jay Gogue and Mike Slive — wanted to forgive him, and he wasn’t willing to forgive himself because he was being so hard on himself. That’s why I wanted to talk to him again, because we all deserve second chances, and I wanted him to have a second chance.

“And I wanted him to be at Auburn. With that emotion and the way he cared, I knew he was Auburn. I knew 100 percent he was Auburn, and I had to convince him that he was.”

After Jacobs set up the next morning’s meeting, Pearl called his wife Brandy from his hotel room. He told her about that night’s interview and how he was noncommittal about a return to coaching. Brandy offered him a piece of advice heading into the morning meeting with Jacobs and Benedict.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Brandy told him. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, wake up as Auburn’s basketball coach and see how that feels. Go downstairs and have a cup of coffee—not as the vice president of H.T. Hackney, not as an ESPN color commentator; you are my husband, and you are Auburn’s coach. How does that feel? Try that on. Then take it off; take that jacket off, then put your jacket on you got right now working these three jobs and tell me how you feel.”

Pearl tried that proverbial jacket on for size that Saturday morning and met with Auburn’s administrators. His attitude in the interview was a 180 from the night before, and it was immediately noticeable.

“It felt good,” Pearl said. “It felt like the jacket fit.”

There was only one problem: Jacobs wanted to offer Pearl the job on the spot, but Pearl didn’t want to accept any offer until getting approval from his entire family. He still had to work in Bristol through the weekend and wouldn’t be back in Knoxville until Monday. Forty-eight hours is a lifetime during a coaching search, and while Pearl was the top candidate, Jacobs had other coaches to interview. He and Benedict already met with another candidate in New York before flying to Bristol, and there was a chance the job wasn’t going to be open by the time Pearl was prepared to make his decision.

Jacobs called the other candidate—at the time a mid-major coach who has since moved up to successfully lead a Power 5 program—that weekend and explained the situation: “I know you’ve got other opportunities, or I think you will as soon as everybody gets through playing, and I just want you to know you’re not my No. 1 guy.

“In 48 hours, I may regret telling you that, because you may be my No. 1 guy, but I don’t want to close any doors for you while you’re waiting on me, because I’ve still got a No. 1 guy, but I just don’t know if I can get him or not.”

Family matters

Steven Pearl turned to his father, a puzzled look on his face taking shape as they sat in a car somewhere on I-75 between Knoxville and Atlanta.

The father and son were riding together, along with Jordan Howell — a former Tennessee player under Bruce Pearl and at the time a coworker of Steven’s at Stryker Corp in Knoxville — on their way to Atlanta. It was the week of the SEC Tournament in 2014; Howell and the younger Pearl were planning to watch their alma mater at the Georgia Dome, while Bruce Pearl had business to tend to for H.T. Hackney before flying to Bristol for his ESPN duties.

Bruce Pearl, seemingly out of the blue, posed a question to Howell: “Jordan, how good of a job is the Auburn job?”

Howell grew up in Auburn but went to high school in Madison. His brother, Brett, spent two seasons at Auburn under Cliff Ellis. His father, Rex, played at Auburn in 1966, while his uncle Alex was a two-year starter, team captain and an All-SEC selection in 1967. Howell knew Auburn well, and he knew what the job could be.

Howell explained the success the program had under Sonny Smith in the 1980s and with Ellis in the 1990s, rattling off the accomplishments of guys like Charles Barkley and Chris Porter. The program had fallen on hard times under Tony Barbee, but the potential was there for success.

“It’s just got to be the right coach,” Steven Pearl said. “Jordan was like, ‘BP, you would kill it down there.’ That was the first I heard of Auburn from BP. I didn’t know that was something that was of interest to him.”

While Jay Jacobs was vetting Pearl as his top candidate for the job, Pearl was doing his due diligence on Auburn. He had been out of coaching for three years, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to get back in the game. The timing of the show-cause — set to expire Aug. 23, 2014 — made a potential return feel like it was still a year away from happening, if at all. That, along with his three other jobs, pushed the idea to the back of his mind.

The conversations that week with Jacobs, as well as the late-night advice from his wife Brandy after the initial interview, made the idea of a return feel more real. The more he thought about it, the more it piqued his interest.

Pearl could have waited another coaching cycle and landed in a better situation on paper than the one he would take over at Auburn, but there was something about the program that appealed to his sensibilities. He liked the idea of a challenge — of building something special at a program that was down on its luck.

“It would mean way more than doing it at another place that already had a bunch of history and a bunch of success,” Steven Pearl said. “I think BP wanted to take on that challenge of doing it here, because I think it makes it more special when you do it at a place that doesn’t have a ton of history.”

Before he could fully entertain the idea, Pearl needed his family’s full support before he could make that commitment; if just one of them pushed back against the idea, it was going to be a no-go.

“Getting fired at Tennessee was very painful. Still is,” Bruce Pearl told AL.com, pausing for 10 seconds as he tried to fight back tears. “I didn’t know if I ever wanted to put my family through that again.”

He readily admits he made mistakes at Tennessee. He knows he shouldn’t have had two verbally committed prospects over to his house for a cookout with about 100 other people, including his team and family. It was a secondary NCAA violation made worse by subsequently lying to NCAA investigators about it.

“We didn’t handle it the right way,” he said. “We panicked going into our NCAA interviews without attorneys. Why? Because who does that?... We didn’t tell the truth about that one incident. We all panicked. Came back, told the NCAA right away, man, ‘You guys got to come back; we didn’t tell you the truth.’ At that point, it was too late.”

That panic cost him his job at Tennessee, where he had unprecedented success, and made him a coaching pariah. The NCAA handed down its penalty five months after his firing, adding insult to injury. Losing his job hurt, so did the show-cause; neither was as painful as the feeling of letting down those closest to him.

“There was definitely part of him that didn’t want to have to deal with that heartbreak again, having lost a job and how he felt he let so many people down — his entire assistant coaching staff, the entire fanbase, the university,” Steven Pearl said. “He took that very hard on himself. Having to deal with that pain again, if that were to ever happen again, was something that obviously he just didn’t want to do.

“I think that was part of why he didn’t want to get back into coaching. But when you’re away from something for a few years, you start to miss certain pieces of it.”

His family could sense the void in his life. They each felt it too, to some degree.

Basketball was a fixture in the Pearl household. March was particularly meaningful; the family always gathered for conference tournaments and the NCAA Tournament. They all enjoyed the feeling of being around and supporting a program, and they missed that part of their lives.

When Bruce Pearl returned to Knoxville from Bristol that Monday, his entire family was waiting for him: Brandy, Steven, his other son Michael and his daughters, Jacqui and Leah. They hugged when he walked in the door. Then they sat down and talked about the Auburn opportunity.

The conversation didn’t take long.

“My siblings were 100 percent on board right away because they had missed that part of their lives,” Steven Pearl said. “It was a pretty easy conversation as far as the family goes. They were 100 percent in… and as soon as that was the case, he was ready to go.”

An early birthday surprise

Jay Jacobs stood in the parking lot of a gas station in Knoxville, looking down at his GPS. Auburn’s athletics director was nervous but resolute, a sense of calm falling over him as he spoke on the phone.

It was about 7 p.m. on Monday, March 17, 2014. Jacobs and David Benedict took the Auburn jet up to Tennessee, landing at a tiny airport an hour or so outside of Knoxville; they didn’t want anyone to know where they were headed. A rental car with half a tank of gas was waiting for them when they landed.

They drove to Knoxville, uncertain of their destination but sure of their purpose. They were there to offer Bruce Pearl the Auburn head coaching position, but they didn’t know his address. All Jacobs recalled was a nearby landmark — a country club or some restaurant Pearl mentioned in conversation. When they stopped for gas, Jacobs pulled out his phone and called Pearl.

He asked Pearl where he was; Pearl told him he was at home with his family. Jacobs asked for his address and punched it into his GPS as Pearl asked him where he was. Unbeknownst to Pearl at the time, Jacobs and Benedict were 1.7 miles away.

“He wasn’t expecting me,” Jacobs told AL.com. “I just knew that’s the guy from the very beginning, from a few weeks back, that I thought was our guy that would make a difference at Auburn…. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted him to know the commitment we had and how much we wanted him at Auburn, so I had no idea how it was going to go.”

Pearl recalls that day a bit differently (“I called him and said, ‘Jay, is that job still open?’ He said it is, so I said, ‘Get your ass over to Knoxville. I’m ready.’”) The exact details are disputed; such is the nature of memory — no two people remember specific events the same. Regardless of whose version you believe, the outcome was the same, with Pearl telling Jacobs and Benedict to swing by his house that night.

When the Auburn administrators arrived, Pearl’s entire family was there, as were the Pearls’ trusted friends Steven and David Gruber, Milwaukee-based attorneys who have long advised Pearl — who has never relied on an agent — during contract negotiations. The group gathered around the kitchen island over those boxes of deluxe pizzas and some beers, casually coming to terms on a six-year contract to make Pearl Auburn’s next coach.

Surrounded by family and friends, Pearl was a different man standing in the kitchen that night than the one Jacobs met with in Bristol three days earlier. He was loose and vibrant; he was the man most people recognize him as today. He told Jacobs then: “If you get me, you get all of me.”

It was exactly what Jacobs believed Auburn needed.

“I told Jay he would never look back and second-guess that decision, that I would go to work, and I would reward him for that decision,” Pearl said. “I was positive of that.”

The finer details of the contract still needed to be hashed out, but the framework was done. Once the deal was agreed upon, Steven Pearl — who was staying with his dad at the time while work was being done on his own home — raced downstairs to his work computer and printed it out. Both sides signed off, and on the eve of Bruce Pearl’s 54th birthday, the celebration got an early start.

The following morning, Jacobs flew back to Auburn, accompanied by his new head coach. When Bruce Pearl stepped off the jet at Auburn University Regional Airport, he was greeted by a mob of Tigers fans eagerly awaiting his arrival. He approached them and jumped up and down in celebration, a mosh pit of jubilation momentarily engulfing him.

Jacobs watched from the tarmac, that moment confirming to him that Pearl was exactly what Auburn basketball needed.

In the eight years since, Pearl has delivered on his promise to Jacobs. He has resurrected Auburn from one of the worst programs in the country to one of college basketball’s new bloods. It has been enough to earn him an eight-year extension in late January that is aimed to keep him on the Plains “for life.”

“Auburn was the right place at the right time, and Bruce Pearl was at the right place at the right time to lead this program,” Jacobs said.

Under Pearl, the Tigers have won at least 25 games in four of the last five seasons while establishing one of the top homecourt advantages in the country. They’ve won two SEC regular-season titles and an SEC Tournament championship. They’ve appeared in three of the last four NCAA Tournaments and made a Final Four for the first time ever. They ascended to the top of the AP poll for the first time in program history this season, and now with the most talented roster the Plains has ever seen and led by a potential No. 1 overall pick in Jabari Smith, they’re eyeing another deep tournament run with championship aspirations after earning a No. 2 seed — the second-highest in program history — in this year’s field.

“We had so far to come — probably further than anyone,” Jacobs said. “We had quite a hill to climb. What we got far exceeded what we were hoping for. We were hoping for stability and people caring about Auburn men’s basketball again…. I don’t know of anybody else in college basketball that could’ve done what Bruce has done at Auburn.”

Two weeks ago, Pearl stood under the lettering adorning the main entrance of the newly rededicated Neville Arena. He recalled how when he was at Tennessee, he always dreamt of accomplishing enough with the program that one day they would rename the entrance of Thompson-Boling Arena in his honor. They’d call it “the Pearly Gates,” he suggested, pausing for a beat.

“Instead, they showed me the door,” he said.

At Auburn, Pearl could get that and more.

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.

 

great article but is it legit? you know we have dozens of folks who claim al.com never says anything nice about Auburn. grins. thanx for posting. as an aside i wish pearl would write a book. I would bet my home it would be very entertaining.