Anyone who followed Bruce Pearl as Auburn’s head men’s basketball coach was going to be in a position to win big, and immediately after all that he had accomplished during his time on the Plains.
The fact that it was Pearl’s son, Steven, who took over the job with no head coaching experience under his belt raised the pressure to an nth level. No matter how well the younger Pearl does during his time in charge of the Tigers, he will always be compared to his father. For Steven, he had to find his own path as the head coach of a team, and Bruce encouraged him to do so. He gave him one piece of advice: don't be me.
"Steven didn't try to be me,” Bruce Pearl told Auburn Undercover’s Nathan King. “He tried to be him. He may have taught what we taught … but he's not trying to be me. He's trying to be him."
How Steven became the head coach, with his father suddenly retiring on the first day of practice last season, made it a bumpy transition, and that led to a rocky season that saw the Tigers underperform, missing the NCAA Tournament after finishing the regular season a game over .500 and with a losing record in the SEC. Still, Pearl’s squad responded, winning five straight games to bring home the NIT title.
Bruce Pearl to Steven Pearl: Don't try to be me
Bruce put that accomplishment into perspective.
"If you turned the clock back 15 years, right before I got there, how would that Auburn fanbase have responded to 22 wins and an NIT championship?" Bruce said.
And, as the father of the current coach and former head coach, with Bruce taking a new position in the athletic department, it would have been easy to be an armchair coach, attending practices whenever he wanted and even getting in the way of Steven leading the team.
That wasn’t how Bruce operated this past season, and it won’t be his style in the future.
"I did not need to be around," Bruce said. "I didn't need to be at practice. He and his staff needed to do their own thing. And what else was I going to tell him that he hadn't learned from me from playing for five years at Tennessee and coaching with me for 11 years at Auburn? It's been 16 years of all day, every day."
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