In the last four years, college basketball has seen six national championship-winning head coaches announce their retirement from the sport.
The number of active head coaches with at least one national championship on their resume? Six.
The slew of recent retirements has left college basketball — a sport where the head coaches are typically the defining stars — without a defined set of names to lead the game into the first stage of its next era.
Bill Self is still trucking along at Kansas. Same for Tom Izzo at Michigan State. Rick Pitino is doing Rick Pitino things at St. John’s. Dan Hurley has evolved to become not just a two-time national champion, but the sport’s most oft-discussed figure.
But there’s room at the top now that wasn’t there five years ago, and whichever coach goes 2-0 in San Antonio over the coming days will have both a national title to their name and access to the sport’s top-tier of notoriety.
If the coach who gets the job done is Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, that ascension to college basketball’s apex will have felt like a long time coming.
For multiple decades now, Pearl has been one of the sport’s most notable supporting characters. He’s bubbly, he’s energetic, he’s a great interview, he’s controversial, and he wins.
The explanation for why Pearl, now 65-years-old, has never been able to make the leap from bit player to main cast is complicated and requires some backstory.
First, there was a highly-publicized and controversial incident during Pearl’s time as an assistant coach at Iowa in the late ‘80s (Google “Deon Thomas incident” for the full story) that torpedoed any chance he had of becoming a Division-I head coach early in his career. Instead, he spent a highly successful decade at Division-II Southern Indiana, where he won four Great Lakes Valley Conference regular-season titles and led the Screamin’ Eagles to the 1995 Division II national championship.
Pearl finally got his shot in the big leagues when he was hired by Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2001. After four seasons that featured two trips to the NCAA tournament and a Cinderella run to the Sweet 16 in 2005, Pearl was offered the head coaching job at Tennessee.
In Knoxville, Pearl’s national profile skyrocketed almost immediately. His postgame interviews were regularly highlighted on ESPN’s SportsCenter, and his move to show up to a Tennessee women’s game with a Power V painted on his bare chest further endeared him to the sporting public.
In 2007-08, he led the Vols to the SEC regular-season title and the program’s first ever No. 1 ranking in an AP top 25 poll. They would finish that season in the Sweet 16, a feat they would repeat a year later. In 2010, Pearl guided the Volunteers to the program’s first ever regional final appearance.
Everything at that moment in time pointed towards Pearl’s name eventually being mentioned in the same breath as Coach K, Bill Self, Rick Pitino and John Calipari.
And then things came to a screeching halt.
Following the 2009-10 season, multiple reports surfaced alleging that Pearl had invited a handful of top junior recruits to his Knoxville home during the fall of 2008. Pearl vehemently denied these reports. When a picture surfaced of junior recruit Aaron Craft attending a barbecue at Pearl’s home, that denial became impossible to believe. Even so, Pearl initially told NCAA investigators that Craft had never been to his home, this despite being presented with the photographic evidence to the contrary. He subsequently requested a second interview with the NCAA in August, 2010 where he admitted wrongdoing.
Pearl held a tearful press conference that September where he admitted publicly for the first time that he had committed NCAA violations and then lied to the NCAA about those violations. Tennessee responded by docking $1.5 million from Pearl’s salary and taking him and his assistant coaches off the road in recruiting in staggered amounts.
UT didn’t make those punishments effective immediately, however, which would turn out to be a crucial error in judgment.
Four days after the press conference, Pearl and assistant coach Tony James committed a secondary violation when they “bumped “ into recruit Jordan Adams. Adams initially told the NCAA that he and Pearl had a three-minute conversation where Pearl told him about what was going on with the NCAA, downplayed it, and then pointed to his Elite Eight ring and told Adams that he “can get one of these.” Pearl ultimately described the conversation differently, but his major error came in once again not self-reporting the violation immediately.
Then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive suspended Pearl for the first eight conference games of the 2010-11 season. Following the report of another minor violation in early March 2011, Tennessee fired Pearl on March 22. He had coached the entirety of the 2010-11 season without a contract.
On Aug. 25, 2011, the NCAA hit Pearl with a three-year show-cause penalty. Former Tennessee assistants Tony Jones, Steve Forbes, and Jason Shay all received one-year show-cause penalties. In its punishment, the NCAA made it a point to note that it was Pearl’s dishonesty which turned what would have been a minor violation into a major one.
After spending a couple of years maintaining his national profile by taking a job as an ESPN analyst, Pearl was thrown a lifeline by another SEC program in desperate need of a jolt of life.
Four months before the end of his three-year show-cause penalty, Auburn signed Pearl to a six-year deal worth $14.7 million. In doing so, Pearl became the first coach in college basketball history to be hired by another school while saddled with an active show-cause penalty. When the show-cause penalty officially ended at midnight on Aug. 24, 2014, Pearl celebrated by dancing and posing for pictures with about 50 fans outside Auburn Arena.
Despite the program being tied up in the FBI’s investigation into college basketball in late 2017, Auburn made the then-highly controversial decision to stand by their man (the NCAA would ultimately ban the program from postseason play in 2021). Pearl rewarded the loyalty by taking the Tigers to the program’s first NCAA Tournament in 15 years in 2018, and then guiding them to their first ever Final Four a year later.
Pearl’s rocky rise to the top of the sport came just about as close to happening as possible. It took a missed double-dribble call, a controversial last second foul call, and three made free-throws with 0.6 seconds left to keep Auburn from upsetting top-seeded Virginia and playing Texas Tech for the national championship two nights later.
Post-COVID Pearl retained his status as one of college basketball’s most recognizable second-tier coaches.
After serving out their NCAA-mandated punishment in 2020-21 (including a two-game suspension for Pearl), Auburn returned to the NCAA Tournament as a single-digit seed in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The Tigers failed to make it to the tournament’s second weekend in all three years, twice being upset by double-digit seeded mid-majors.
This season has seen Pearl knock harder on the gates to coaching superstardom than any other.
Winners of 21 of their first 22 games, the 2024-25 Auburn Tigers have spent more time at the top of the AP top 25 poll than any other team this season. Pearl’s brash group of seasoned veterans overcame some early season infamy after a pilot was forced to turn the team plane around because of a mid-flight brawl, and ultimately became the first team in program history to be named the NCAA Tournament’s overall No. 1 seed.
While Pearl has a few years of distance between himself and his most recent spat with the NCAA, he’s generated off-the-court headlines in other ways.
Before last November’s presidential election, Pearl tweeted about his fear of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ “socialist, woke progressive beliefs.” A devout member of the Jewish faith, Pearl has also been outspoken throughout the season about the war in Gaza. He showed up to Friday’s Final Four press conference wearing a dog tag, and explained that he does so as a reminder of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
“If the hostages are released, the death and the dying will stop,” Pearl said.
Pearl has also consistently voiced his support for President Donald Trump throughout the season, and offered up headline-grabbing thoughts on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
Predictably, the comments have been received differently by the public. The only certainty about them is that making them in concert with Auburn’s “dream season” have only made Pearl even more visible than he already was.
On Friday, Pearl was named the co-National Coach of the Year by the Associated Press, an award he’ll share with Hall of Famer Rick Pitino. It’s the first time an Auburn head coach has received such an award, and the first time Pearl has been acknowledged in this manner by the AP.
In a career with an unrivaled amount of twists and turns, there’s only one bar remaining for Pearl to clear.
Two wins in San Antonio will vault one of college basketball’s most controversial figures to the status he’s long seemed destined for.
