If you ask Dylan Cardwell about Johni Broome’s three pointer that he hit coming out of the locker room post injury to stick the dagger in Tom Izzo and Michigan State, he’ll tell you that he deserves an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary. But that triple that Broome hit is a microcosm of this Auburn season, as with a double figure lead in the second half Broome went to the locker room with an injury to his right arm and at that point it could have been very easy for the Tigers to collapse, but as they’ve done all year they weathered the storm until he returned, never surrendering their lead and punching their ticket to the Final Four.
The expectations this season for Auburn have been increasing as the year went along and by the time the Tigers were named a one seed for the NCAA tournament, the expectation was that Auburn would compete for a national championship and with that hanging in the balance on Sunday night, they never faltered. The age old question about when a team has a mix of portal pieces, returners and freshman is whether they will gel or not and on Sunday night Auburn showed their connectivity.
When Johni Broome went down last night, the remaining 6 rotation players for Auburn stepped up and the combination of retained talent, portal pieces and freshman came together and willed auburn to victory, something Auburn Coach Bruce Pearl believes is just a culmination of putting the right pieces together that are able to step up when needed.
“I think that both are important. There’s such a foundation in this team with Dylan Cardwell or Chris Moore, guys that have been there four and five years.
Johni has been there three years. I think that one of the things that they talked about yesterday was I told these guys, look, I’m going to bring in good guys. So you bring in Chaney Johnson, you bring in Denver Jones, you bring in Chad Baker-Mazara, and it tells the guys that are left, he did bring in good guys and guys that were willing to make sacrifices and want to try to become a great team.
We’ll continue to recruit really good high school players that want to be coached and developed, and we’ll continue to jump in the portal and get guys that want to be an Auburn man and play the way we play,” Pearl said.
2 players with different paths stepped up to defend the paint when Broome went down, as Cardwell has spent 5 seasons at Auburn, while Johnson transferred in 2 years ago from Alabama Huntsville. It didn’t matter where they came from, or that they weren’t scoring in double figures, their job was to match Michigan State’s physicality and maintain the lead that they had built prior to Broome’s injury and they did.
If Auburn let Michigan State get on a run and flip the script on who’s dominating the paint, that very well could have allowed them to comeback yesterday, but they didn’t and it’s a testament in their culture that they stepped into their roles and excelled while their star was sidelined. If you ask Dylan Cardwell, the reason they held onto that lead however was just simply their dog mentality.
“We them boys, we them dogs, for me, it was just cool to just see how we all bought in. We all stepped up, Chaney made some big layups, we needed it,” Cardwell said.
Auburn is now just 2 wins away from winning its first National Championship game in school history and they are the only remaining team in the field to have never played in the championship game before. Even in his post game presser yesterday, Auburn Coach Bruce Pearl called AU a football school, while also noting that they can be an everything school and a national championship win could definitely change the narrative on the Plains.
The school has played in the National championship game once before, losing in 2019 to Virginia, who ended up defeating Texas Tech in the National Championship game that year, so this year is an opportunity to make history for Pearl and co, but they will have a tall task in the red-hot Florida Gators standing between them and destiny. This team has a special factor to it according to veteran guard Denver Jones and that is their camaraderie just, which has allowed everyone to accept their role and heading into the final four could be one of their biggest strengths.
“Honestly, we got a lot of great guys. Man, that’s just a testament to our coaches, just recruiting. Man, started recruiting some great guys, like Miles, I was a transfer of me, shady, Chad, turtle. We recruited some great guys, man, we molded together a championship team. Like I feel like our camaraderie just came just from us hanging out a lot of Bible studies, just us hanging around, just doing team stuff and playing the game, talking smack to each other and doing everything that you would do with your brothers,” Jones said.
Auburn will look to put that camaraderie to the test against Florida in the Final Four on Saturday night, a battle between two of the best teams in the SEC and country as a whole, with the winner getting a spot in the National Championship and the loser falling just short of their dreams.