One week in, we officially have a new No. 1 team in the country on KenPom.
That crown belongs to the Auburn Tigers, who opened the season with a 51-point drubbing of a perennially excellent Vermont Catamounts team and followed with a pseudo-road win against the preseason KenPom No. 1 Houston Cougars. The Tigers came in at No. 5 in Monday’s AP poll, and that may well have underrated them based on what they showed in the season’s opening week. It’s early to stake this claim, but this Auburn team has a very strong case as the best team in college basketball.
Auburn entered the Houston game in the headlines for the wrong reasons after two players, freshman Jahki Howard and senior Ja’Heim Hudson got into a fight during the team’s charter flight to Houston that caused the plane to return to Auburn. The team took off again later Friday night, but Hudson and Howard were left behind.
The on-flight fracas did little to derail Auburn on the floor, though. The Tigers put together a near-flawless second half Saturday night, scoring 31 points in the game’s final 10 minutes against what may well be the sport’s best defense to rally from nine down and seal an incredibly impressive victory. The star of the show was freshman guard Tahaad Pettiford, whose audacious shot-making ability was on full display with 21 points and five made threes to ignite the comeback. Pettiford, in many ways, is the ideal Bruce Pearl guard: bursting with confidence, dynamic with the ball in his hands and capable of heating up in a big way from beyond the arc. Point guard play was the major question coming into the season for Auburn after Tre Donaldson and Aden Holloway transferred out in the offseason, and Pettiford very much looked the part Saturday night.
It also helps to have Johni Broome, whose national player of the year candidacy hasn’t been talked about nearly enough. Broome is the most complete big in the country, a dominant low-post threat who has expanded his shooting range beyond the three-point arc, while being the anchor of the best rim defense in the country a year ago. He had 20 points and five blocks Saturday, and Houston could do little to slow him despite featuring an elite defensive frontcourt anchored by J’Wan Roberts.
“He’s an absolute monster down there,” Pearl said postgame.
Auburn was a top-five team in KenPom a year ago, but stumbled in its biggest games on the schedule. Entering the SEC tournament, the Tigers had just four wins against eventual NCAA tournament teams, all of which came on Auburn’s home floor. To tally a win like this against the winningest program in the country over the last four seasons away from home is a sign this Tigers team has leveled up. They may not get 21 from Pettiford every night, but the combination of Pettiford, JP Pegues and Miles Kelly looks like a clear upgrade over last season’s Auburn backcourt … and with Broome and Dylan Cardwell still anchoring things down low, that’s a scary sign for the rest of country. Auburn still has games against Duke, Ohio State and Purdue in the nonconference, as well as a trip to the loaded Maui Invitational that tips off with a matchup against Iowa State. Opportunities will be plentiful, but the Tigers passed their first test with flying colors.
And as for the plane incident? The team at least seems ready to laugh it off. Broome mimicked an airplane while running around the floor after the win, and in the locker room, Cardwell announced on Instagram Live, “When you lock a bunch of dogs up on a plane, what did you expect to happen?”
Outside of Auburn, no team had a better first week of the season than the North Florida Ospreys. Picked seventh in the Atlantic Sun preseason poll, North Florida is now 3–0, including high-major wins at South Carolina on opening night and at Georgia Tech on Sunday. Before those wins, UNF had just two total wins over high-major teams in program history, and none against the ACC or SEC.
Against the Gamecocks, the Ospreys out-toughed an SEC squad fresh off a 25-win campaign in 2023–24, racking up 15 offensive rebounds and rallying from five down with four minutes to go for a gutsy road win. At Georgia Tech, UNF’s offense was electric, running up a ridiculous 105 points on 1.35 points per possession against a Yellow Jackets team with high expectations.
And most impressive? Matt Driscoll’s team is doing all this with a very young team. Freshman Josh Harris had 22 points and seven boards against GT, while sophomores Jasai Miles (18 points, 11 rebounds, four assists) and Jaylen Smith (15 points, six rebounds, five assists) also shined. The Ospreys lost star guard Chaz Lanier to Tennessee in the portal this spring but appear to be on an upward trajectory regardless.
“In this new landscape of college athletics, everybody’s worried about this, that and the other, when in reality, our job as professionals, coaches, mentors, role models, everything that we are about is for these student-athletes,” Driscoll said after the Georgia Tech win. “If you continue to pour into them, it doesn’t matter how often you flip it, how many are new, how many are young, how many are old. What matters is how you pour into them.”
Perhaps the most pressurized game of the week tips Tuesday night in Philadelphia, with Villanova going on the road to take on Saint Joseph’s in a classic Big 5 showdown. To say Villanova head coach Kyle Neptune needs a win in this game would be an understatement. Neptune has been plagued by bad losses in his three years at the helm of the program, including last week’s disastrous defeat at home against Columbia.
Jay Wright’s handpicked successor is 37–34 since taking over without an NCAA tournament berth, and will enter a dangerous matchup against a St. Joe’s team that beat them a year ago and is loaded with talent. Patience is already wearing thin, and another bad showing against an in-city rival from a lower-level conference would only add to the heat Neptune is feeling. It may not be as simple as NCAA tournament-or-bust for Neptune, but if nothing else, the Wildcats desperately need to look like they’re making strides, not continuing the post-Wright backslide. Another Big 5 loss would be a clear indicator of the latter.
One thing to watch for each team in Tuesday’s Champions Classic:
- Michigan State: Can the Spartans’ frontcourt hold up against a loaded group of Jayhawks forwards? Longwood transfer Szymon Zapala won the starting center job in the offseason, but so far Tom Izzo has heavily cycled through his four true frontcourt players in Zapala, Xavier Booker, Jaxon Kohler and Carson Cooper. The test will be much steeper against Kansas than it was against Monmouth or Niagara.
- Kansas: Can Bill Self get AJ Storr going? Storr was Kansas’s biggest-ticket portal addition, but seems to be playing catch-up to fit into Self’s system. The best version of the Jayhawks likely involves Storr on the floor, but adapting his high-volume offensive approach to playing off the ball as a role player has been a challenge. A big game here could deliver a much-needed confidence boost.
- Duke: Are the Blue Devil freshmen ready for the big stage? It’s one thing for Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach to shine against Maine and Army. It’s another against Kentucky in prime time. Six of Kentucky’s top seven are in at least their fourth year of college basketball, and facing a team that experienced at 18 or 19 years old is a major challenge.
- Kentucky: Who’s the Wildcats’ closer? Mark Pope’s team can clearly score, breaking 100 in its first two games of the season and looking like one of the nation’s top shooting teams. But how does the Wildcat offensive hierarchy shake out in a high-level game like this, especially down the stretch? I’d circle Wake Forest transfer Andrew Carr, but there isn’t a traditional “alpha” on this UK roster.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Auburn Off to Impressive Men’s Basketball Start With Loaded Nonconference Schedule Ahead.
