FILE – Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl celebrates with a net after the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament against Michigan State, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
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Bruce Pearl’s options were limited. Yes, he had excelled as a men’s college basketball coach for two decades. But when Auburn offered him its head coaching position in 2014, Pearl had been out of the sport for three years after receiving a stiff NCAA penalty for alleged recruiting violations at Tennessee. Despite the job’s difficulty, Pearl had to say yes. And the Tigers are surely glad he did.
Pearl, who resigned on Monday afternoon, resurrected his career at Auburn and made a football school actually care about basketball. He did so by winning lots and lots of games and by selling the sport to students and alumni alike. Now, the job is much easier for his son, Steven Pearl, who was named Auburn’s head coach. Steven Pearl, who had worked for his father since he arrived 11 years ago, signed a five-year contract.
In a video posted on X on Monday, Bruce Pearl said he had considered running for the U.S. Senate seat that former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville is vacating to run for governor. However, Pearl said he would not run for the Senate. Instead, he will remain at Auburn as a special assistant to athletics director John Cohen.
“I’ve been a part of college basketball for almost 50 years,” Pearl said. “And the truth is, it’s time. I told myself that when I got to the point where I could not give it my all or I wasn’t necessarily 100% where I couldn’t be the relentless competitor that you expected of me, that it was going to be time.”
Pearl, who grew up in Boston, was the men’s basketball manager in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Boston College, his alma mater. After graduating college in 1982, he joined former BC coach Tom Davis’s staff at Stanford. He later followed Davis to Iowa in 1986 and got his first head coaching job in 1992 at Southern Indiana, a Division II school. Pearl won at least 22 games and made the NCAA tournament in each of his nine seasons at Southern Indiana, including winning the national title in 1995.
Pearl then spent four seasons at Milwaukee before leaving for Tennessee in 2005. The Volunteers made the NCAAs in each of Pearl’s six seasons and rose to No. 1 in the Associated Press poll in February 2008, the first time they had ever achieved that feat. But in March 2011, Tennessee fired Pearl after the NCAA alleged he had participated in unethical conduct for lying about recruiting violations.
When Pearl took over at Auburn in 2014, the Tigers were coming off five consecutive below-.500 seasons and hadn’t finished above 10th in the Southeastern Conference since 2009. It wasn’t a sudden turnaround for Pearl, who missed the NCAAs in his first three seasons at Auburn. But starting with the 2017-18 season, the Tigers qualified for the NCAAs each season except for 2020 when the tournament was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and 2021 when they went 13-14 in a season when players continued to miss games due to Covid.
Pearl led Auburn to No. 1 rankings in 2022 and 2025, the only times the Tigers have been the nation’s top team. And he coached the Tigers to their only Final Four appearances in school history in 2019 and 2025. He is Auburn’s all-time leader with 232 victories and is the driving force behind making its home arena one of the loudest in all of college basketball.
Pearl’s final season ended up being his best, as the Tigers won a school-record 32 games, finished first in a loaded SEC and lost in the Final Four to Florida, the eventual national champion. During the offseason, there had been speculation that Pearl could enter the Senate race, as he had been vocal about politics and his Jewish faith. But in Monday’s video announcing his retirement as coach, he said the school offered him a chance to be “Auburn’s Senator,” a role he’s eager to embrace.
“As an ambassador at Auburn, I’m going to do everything I can to keep helping Auburn be the very best version of what it possibly can be,” Pearl said. “I’m trying to lead, trying to be an Auburn man and let this continue to be the best everything school anywhere in the country.”
Pearl noted that he planned on attending Auburn sporting events and joked he’s “going to try to stay off the refs and the umps as best I possibly can, but I’m going to be loud and I’m going to be proud.” He will also no doubt be there for his son, Steven, who played for his father at Tennessee and coached alongside him for more than a decade but has never held a head coaching job.
“For me now, it’s time to take off that jacket, the one that Brandy (Pearl’s wife) and my family encouraged me to put on and pass that jacket on to somebody else who is uniquely qualified to maintain the level of success of this basketball program,” Bruce Pearl said.
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