AUBURN | Auburn didn’t just win two SEC road games last week. It won both by double-digits and led wire-to-wire in both games.
They never trailed.
That’s a heck of an accomplishment for this team regardless of situation or opponent.
Being 16-3 overall and 6-1 in the conference is not something I thought this team could accomplish after the loss at Georgia Jan. 4.
But Auburn has continued to improve in so many areas like shooting, rebounding, limiting turnovers, transition offense and 3-point defense.
It’s another outstanding job by Bruce Pearl and his staff, and the players for continuing to work on their craft.
That improvement will have to continue because there’s a storm coming. The schedule is about to get much tougher starting with Wednesday night’s game against Texas A&M.
AU’s final 11 conference games include home-and-aways with Texas A&M, Tennessee and Alabama, a rematch with Georgia at home and away games at Vanderbilt and Kentucky.
The league record of AU’s first seven SEC opponents is 13-34. The last 11 are 31-15.
On top of that, Auburn hasn’t won at Kentucky since 1988, has an 18-51 record at Vandy, 8-46 at Tennessee and 9-52 at Alabama.
Yeah, it’ll be find-out February for this Auburn basketball team.
I was ready to rule this team out of competing for one of the top 3-4 spots in the SEC just a few weeks ago.
But this is a different team now. And if it continues to improve, I wouldn’t rule anything out.
***
In today’s musical journey, we go back 37 years for the who’s who of Hall of Fame inductions, which concluded with one of the greatest jam sessions of all time. On Jan. 23, 1986, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted its first class, which included some of the greatest artists of all time: Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers. Other inductees included disc jockey Alan Freed, record producer John Hammond and blues musician Robert Johnson, country/pop musician Jimmie Rogers, record producer Sam Phillips and pianist Jimmy Yancey. Presley, Holly, Cooke, Johnson, Rogers and Yancey were inducted posthumously, but the rest were there along with John Fogerty, Billy Joel, Keith Richards, Neil Young, Steve Winwood, Hank Williams Jr., Roberta Flack, Julian and Sean Lennon and Quincy Jones. Just about all the musicians present got together for an all-star jam at the end, which featured “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Great Balls of Fire” and “The Twist.”
The original idea for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came from Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. He formed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983 along with Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner, record executives Seymour Stein, Bob Krasnow and Noreen Woods and attorneys Allen Grubman and Suzan Evans. They chose Cleveland as the home in 1986, which pledged $65 million in public funds. The museum, located in downtown on the shore of Lake Erie, opened in 1995. Most of the induction ceremonies have taken place at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York including the first one and in Cleveland. It’s been in Los Angeles three times but currently rotates between New York and Cleveland. As of 2022, there have been 365 inductees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The building has 55,000 square feet of exhibition space, has a 162-foot tower, offices, store and cafe.
