AUBURN | The 2017-18 SEC Championship banner will already be hanging from the rafters when the stands fill up for the first home game Nov. 6. They held a ring ceremony at last Saturday’s football game.

Bruce Pearl is not about to look back as practice begins with perhaps his deepest and most talented roster in his five seasons at Auburn.

“There's a reason why the windshield in your car, the front window is really big. There's a rearview mirror that's much, much smaller. You can still look back to that rearview mirror, because you have to and you need to. But we're looking forward,” Pearl said.

“There's a reason why we had a ring ceremony at the football game in September. When you come back to Auburn Arena, there will be a banner hanging up there. But we won't be raising it. It'll be there. We've moved past that. I wanted it done before the start of the season.”

Pearl and his players have already dubbed this as a season of unfinished business. Yes, they won only the third SEC regular season championship in school history and returned to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 15 years.

But it’s the way that season ended, a 31-point loss to Clemson in the 2nd round of the Tournament along with some important roster additions that has this team motivated to accomplish even more this year.

“It's really unusual to have unfinished business be something that the team is holding onto when you're coming off a conference championship, the third in 58 years,” Pearl said. “You wouldn't think that would be unfinished business. But I think it has more to do with some of the new guys that weren't part of the team last year — Samir Doughty, Danjel Purifoy, Austin Wiley — as far as being able to play. J'Von McCormick coming in.”

Purifoy and Wiley were both suspended last season. Doughty sat out after transferring from VCU. McCormick is a junior college transfer. Also returning is Anfernee McLemore, who missed the final month of the season with a dislocated ankle and fractured tibia.

“It's been a driving point,” junior point guard Jared Harper said. “Last year we didn't finish the way that we wanted to but of course we faced some injuries. We had a lot of stuff going on but it's just pushed us to motivate us to do what we did the whole year and just to go into this year going into this year doing some similar things.”