AUBURN | Auburn couldn’t have picked a better time to play its best game of the season.
The Tigers 85-63 dismantling of Tennessee in Knoxville is the largest margin of victory in an SEC road game since 2017 and the largest win in 56 games against the Volunteers in Knoxville. Even Bruce Pearl was taken a little off guard.
“That’s the best we’ve played and that’s the way you want to be playing at the end of the year. I didn’t necessarily see that coming, but that’s the best we’ve played,” Pearl told the Auburn Network after the game.
Auburn clearly shot the ball well, better than it has on the road all season, but that was because they passed the ball effectively and took good shots. They attempted 32 3-pointers but also had 20 layups and two dunks, dominating the boards 42-26.
That’s a recipe for success for this Auburn team and if they can make it a habit, it will take them a long way in March.
The first test will come Friday night against the winner of Texas A&M and Missouri — two teams Auburn lost to during the regular season. But you better believe Pearl was thrilled when Kentucky rallied from an 18-point deficit to beat Florida Saturday night, giving the Tigers the No. 2 seed in the SEC Tournament.
Had the Gators hung on, AU would have been the third seed and played the late game Friday night and then a semifinal game early Saturday afternoon, which is not an easy path to winning the tournament.
That this team finished second in the SEC after losing Bryce Brown, Jared Harper and Chuma Okeke says a whole lot about the program Pearl and his staff have built. I imagine we’ll be saying something similar a year from now after replacing five seniors and probably their top freshman.
There’s still a long way to go, but one day we may look back on the Bruce Pearl era as the single greatest in any sport in Auburn history.
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That’s eight consecutive wins for Auburn’s baseball team with sweeps over Wright State, Alabama A&M and Chicago State. Not the greatest competition but not the worst either.
In fact, Wright State took 2 of 3 at No. 11 Tennessee this weekend with a 5-4 win Friday, 3-1 loss Saturday and 6-3 win in the rubber game Sunday. The Raiders also have a win at No. 1 Louisville. UCF, which swept AU two weeks ago, is now 15-2 after sweeping Butler. The Knights play Miami Wednesday and Florida State for two games next week.
Auburn has clearly improved since the UCF series. In the eight wins, AU has out-scored its opponents a whopping 86-16. They’ve played with more of an edge, which you could see firsthand when Tanner Burns demonstrably yelled into the CSU dugout Friday night in response to a lot of chatter coming from their side. Scoring 13 of 16 runs with two outs Saturday, being aggressive on the base paths, squeeze bunts and sacrifice flies are all signs of a team doing the little things right.
Getting Steven Williams and Kason Howell back in the lineup has been a big boost too, and Williams should be back in right field by the Texas A&M series this weekend, which will allow Butch Thompson to insert another powerful bat in the lineup at designated hitter.
Auburn’s next big test will come Tuesday night against a 10-5 Georgia Tech team that took 2 of 3 from Virginia Tech last weekend. A 13-3 Wofford team visits Wednesday and then the Aggies, off to a 14-3 start, will visit Plainsman Park for what should be a very competitive opening SEC weekend series.
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In today’s musical journey we go back exactly 23 years and the untimely death of one of the greatest hip hop artists of all time. The Notorious B.I.G. was killed in a drive-by shooting on March 9, 1997, six months following the murder of Tupac Shakur during the peak of the East Coast-West Coast feud. Both murders remain unsolved.
Christopher George Latore Wallace was born and raised in Brooklyn as the only child of Jamaican immigrants. His father left when he was two years old and his mother worked two jobs to support him. He attended Catholic school where he was a standout in English classes and earned the nickname Big because of his size. He started dealing drugs at age 12 and eventually attended the same technical high school in Brooklyn as Jay-Z, DMX and Busta Rhymes. He had several run-ins with the law as a young adult including serving nine months in jail for dealing crack cocaine in 1991.
He made his first demo tape following his release from jail under the name of Biggie Smalls in reference to a character in the 1975 film Let’s Do It Again. He was signed to Uptown Records by Sean “Puffy” Combs in 1992 and then quickly followed Combs when he started his own label, Bad Boy Records, in 1993. A big early break came when he was featured on a remix of Mary J. Blige’s Real Love under the name The Notorious B.I.G. for the first time. The single peaked at No. 7 on the Hot 100 chart. In 1994, he married Faith Evans and released his first album, Ready to Die. The album eventually went double platinum with the song, Big Poppa, reaching No. 1 in the U.S.
The next two years saw Wallace collaborate with a number of other artists including Michael Jackson, and the beginnings of the East-West feud when Shakur accused Wallace, Combs and Andre Harrell of having prior knowledge of Skakur being robbed and shot five times at Uptown Records in Manhattan. Wallace later said it was a coincidence that he and Combs were in the same studio that night. In June of 1996, Shakur released Hit ‘Em Up, in which he claimed to have had sex with Faith Evans and Wallace copied his style. Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas three months later.
In 1997, The Notorious B.I.G. started work on his second album, Life After Death. In Los Angeles to promote the album and new single, Hypnotize, he was shot four times sitting in a suburban at a red light after leaving a a Soul Train Music Awards after-party at the Peterson Automotive Museum. He was just 24 years old. The Notorious B.I.G. is ranked by MTV as the third-greatest MC of all time and Rolling Stone has referred to him as the “greatest rapper that ever lived.” Life After Death was released 16 days after Wallace’s murder and became one of the few hip-hop albums to be certified Diamond by the RIAA. He had an estimated net worth of $20 million when he died and his estate is worth over $160 million today.
