AUBURN — In an look on the SEC Community’s broadcast of Auburn basketball’s contest with Oklahoma on Tuesday night, Charles Barkley talked for 10 minutes on a slew of subjects. However the former Auburn nice gave his opinion on this yr’s faculty basketball panorama — and the place his Tigers sit inside it.
“I’m watching like three faculty video games a day proper now and I’ll say this: Duke, Auburn, they’ve separated themselves in my view from the remainder of the nation,” Barkley mentioned. “(Houston coach) Kelvin Sampson is a good coach. They’re up there too. … It’s going to be very fascinating to see the way it’s going to end up. The SEC is loaded.”
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Barkley, in attendance for Tuesday’s matchup, considerably foreshadowed Auburn’s unimaginable 2024-25 season, saying at a golf occasion in September in Opelika that what caught out to him about this yr’s crew was “the expectations.”
“Final yr was good and dangerous,” he mentioned. “Profitable the (SEC) event was super, however shedding within the first spherical, that sucked. You recognize, we’re at a spot now the place we now have expectations. I feel Bruce (Pearl) understands that. I really assume that is a fantastic factor. Nicely, it is a blessing and a curse.
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“Like, now folks complain after we make March Insanity and do not advance. It is a robust scenario to be in. However Bruce has raised the extent of this system a lot. Like I say, it is a double-edged sword.”
Adam Cole is the Auburn athletics beat author for the Montgomery Advertiser. He might be reached through electronic mail atacole@gannett.com or on X, the platform previously often called Twitter,@colereporter.
