Auburn basketball: Sharife Cooper to be featured on ESPN Film Session

NBA hopeful Sharife Cooper will be featured on ESPN’s Film Session with Mike Schmitz according to the ESPN analyst’s verified Twitter account. The former Auburn basketball floor general will be featured in a national spotlight ahead of the 2021 NBA Draft in July as part of an ongoing focus on prospects hoping to go pro.

Cooper has been pegged as a first-round pick ever since being recruited as a 5-star prospect out of high school. Bruce Pearl landed the Georgia product in a growing effort to dominate recruitment in the Peach State, but he didn’t get to deploy his backcourt weapon until conference play had already started.

It was a weird season for every team in the country as packed arenas full of screaming fans were replaced with limited/no capacity games. For Auburn basketball, it was especially weird, as they were unable to defend their SEC crown from 2019 after the 2020 tournament was canceled. The NCAA came down on Pearl hard for dealings with Cooper’s father, who runs a sports agency, and there was no postseason to play for.

Worse yet, Tiger fans couldn’t even see their potential future NBA star alumni Cooper until the 12th game of a shortened pandemic-stricken year.

The trying 2020-21 calendar is nearing its conclusion for the Auburn athletics program, which has seen a school-wide struggle in the major team sports across the board. Football was a game over .500, baseball doesn’t currently qualify for the SEC tournament, softball was eliminated, and women’s basketball fell far below expectations and dismissed their head coach.

Pearl has added a slew of transfers in Walker Kessler, Wendell Green Jr., Zep Jasper, and Desi Sills, while Jabari Smith–a projected top-5 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft–is the featured class of 2021 addition.

The future is blinding, but Cooper was one of the few bright spots in 2020-21, and Schmitz has a chance to showcase his game to a wider audience who might not have paid attention to Auburn basketball’s season because of the lack of stakes.