Auburn navigated the FBI scandal to have the most awkwardly successful college basketball season ever

The longest active winning streak in Division I doesn’t belong to any team ranked in the top 15. It also doesn’t belong to a low/mid-major team that has been feasting on inferior competition since Thanksgiving.

The Auburn Tigers have won 14 consecutive games, a streak which dates back to a loss to Temple in the Charleston Classic semifinals on Nov. 17. The loss remains the only blemish on an otherwise pristine 16-1 record that includes four true road wins and seven total victories away from home.

Bruce Pearl is a guy you reflexively want to root for. The extroverted Auburn head coach is always smiling, always making a dad joke, always doing something that falls in line with the “sports are supposed to be fun” mantra. It’s why he became one of the hottest names in college basketball during his time as the head coach at Tennessee, and why he was able to rebound without issue as a television analyst after an NCAA investigation caused an abrupt ending to his tenure in Knoxville.

On the surface, what Pearl has been able to do with this Auburn team should be the best redemption story in college basketball. That’s especially true when you consider that the team’s signature win to date occurred at Tennessee in the same Thompson–Boling Arena where Pearl first became a star. But as with most everything pertaining to the coach, it isn’t that simple.

In late September, Auburn was one of a handful of programs directly implicated by the FBI probe into college basketball. Tigers assistant coach Chuck Person was one of the four college basketball assistants who were arrested as a result of the FBI’s investigation. Person, who was eventually indicted and hit with six federal charges, was officially fired by Auburn in November.

But the damage didn’t stop there.

In addition to firing Person, Auburn placed video coordinator Frankie Sullivan and special assistant Jordan VerHulst on indefinite administrative leave. It also indefinitely suspended projected starters Austin Wiley and Danjel Purifoy, the two players implicated in the FBI’s investigation into Person. Last week, the NCAA ruled that Wiley is ineligible to play this season but will be allowed to return to action in 2018-19. A similar ruling is expected to be handed out to Purifoy in the near future.

Despite the DNA of Auburn’s program being drastically altered just days before the start of practice, the plight of the Tigers seemed to be an afterthought even as the FBI’s probe made headlines across the country. The reason was simple: Of the handful of teams directly implicated by the FBI complaint that shook the sports world last September, none had lower expectations for 2017-18 than AU.

Auburn went 18-14 last season, finished four games below .500 in the SEC, and saw its season end with an overtime loss to a woeful Missouri team in the first round of the conference tournament. In October, the SEC media picked Pearl’s 2017-18 team to finish ninth in the 14-team league. Keep in mind that this was before anyone knew the team would be without Wiley, widely considered an NBA prospect and the team’s most talented player, and Purifoy, Auburn’s second-leading scorer in 2016-17.

If you’re a voter who approaches the award in its simplest form, then it would be impossible not to have Pearl near the top of your national Coach of the Year short list.

Heading into a season where he was already sitting on something of a hot seat, Pearl has taken a team that was projected to be an afterthought in the SEC and, despite not getting a single minute from two of his best players, has turned it into a 16-1 squad that some are now calling the favorite to win the conference. This doesn’t even take into account the distraction of the FBI probe, the looming NCAA investigation, and the fact that three staffers, including a full-time assistant, were removed from the program just before the start of the season.

What makes Pearl’s work even more remarkable is that the other teams caught in the same web have had a more difficult time untangling themselves. Arizona began the season ranked No. 2 in the country, but has been out of the top 10 since the end of November. Louisville, which famously fired head coach Rick Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich, has fallen from a preseason top-20 team to out of the polls entirely. USC went from a preseason top-10 squad to one that could miss the NCAA tournament entirely. Miami has gone from preseason top 15, to barely hanging onto a top 25 spot. Oklahoma State was expected to be an also-ran in the Big 12 and they have looked the part.

Of this motley crew, only Auburn has overachieved this season, and the Tigers have done so dramatically. But what should be a point of pride for roundball fans in Southeastern Alabama (a rare breed) has brought both temporary gratification and a guarantee of long-term awkwardness.

In early November, it seemed for a moment as though Pearl might not coach a game in 2017-18. Though Pearl apologized publicly to the fans and referred to Auburn’s potential problems with the NCAA as “self-inflicted,” he did not, according to reports, cooperate with the school’s internal investigation into the basketball program. Though those same reports stated that Pearl’s job “could be in jeopardy” if his refusal to cooperate didn’t cease, the head coach has stated throughout the season that his stance with regards to the matter has not changed. If anything, Pearl seems to have grown increasingly defiant as the season has gone on, recently taking public shots at the NCAA after the organization handed down its ruling on Wiley.

As if the situation at Auburn wasn’t already complicated enough, athletic director Jay Jacobs announced in November that he would be stepping down on June 1, or earlier if the school was able to find a suitable replacement. This means that Pearl’s future likely resides in a to-be-determined pair of hands.

The easiest thing for the new AU athletic director would have been for Pearl and company to have the uneventful season everyone had been projecting. Year four for Pearl with the Tigers was supposed to be year four of missing the NCAA tournament, and potentially year four of finishing in the bottom four of the SEC. Toss in Pearl’s history with the NCAA — a history that includes a three-year show cause penalty that forced him onto ESPN from 2011-2014 — and no one would have raised too much of a fuss if Auburn had chosen to once again take its basketball program in an entirely different direction.

But that isn’t the situation. Instead, the Tigers are off to their best start this millennium, and Pearl is rightfully being praised for somehow holding things together long after programs in similar positions have turned into a crumpled and charred mess.

It’s never simple with Bruce Pearl.