College basketball has been hit with a huge coaching retirement decision for a second straight preseason. Auburn’s Bruce Pearl is stepping down from his post, effective immediately, he announced Monday, after CBS Sports reported the news. Pearl’s decision comes less than a year after Virginia’s Tony Bennett shockingly stepped away in October 2024.
After an offseason of considering whether or not to retire, Pearl came to terms with his decision and made it final on Monday morning, sources said. He’d been linked to a potential Senate run in Alabama in recent months as well, but sources had been downplaying the likelihood that Pearl would go into politics this year. Turns out, that was accurate.
Auburn released a video of Pearl announcing his decision to step down, and in it, he revealed he’d stay on with the school in an advisory role — and would not go into politics.
The 65-year-old Pearl has been a head coach dating back to 1992, when he first got a chance running a program at Division II Southern Indiana where, in 1995, he won a D-II national championship. Pearl then coached at Milwaukee from 2001-05, at Tennessee from 2005-11 and, since 2014, has guided Auburn under its greatest run in school history. Pearl leaves on a high note, having taken the Tigers to the Final Four with a No. 1 seed last season. He also took Auburn to its first Final Four in 2019.
His career record ends at 706-268.
Pearl’s departure means college basketball coaching is losing one of its most prominent people. Pearl has been a high-profile presence both in terms of his winning and his willingness to provide a quote for the media, even well before he got to Auburn in 2014.
Arrived at Auburn after controversy
Pearl’s path to Auburn was clouded in controversy, and in fact he had two cases that pushed him outside of Division I before the most fruitful stage of his career. He received a three-year show-cause penalty from the NCAA in 2011 as his unprecedented run of success at Tennessee — where he took the Vols to No. 1 for the first time, in 2008 — came to an end after an investigation found he lied to NCAA investigators about the program’s impermissible contact with prospects. That punishment came as a result of Pearl hosting then-recruit Aaron Craft for a cookout at his home in the late 2000s. Pearl was forced to leave coaching for three years as a result.
That was the second time Pearl was wrapped up in an NCAA investigation, along with a recruiting scandal as an assistant at Iowa in the late 1980s involving Deon Thomas, who signed with Illinois. Pearl’s role centered around him secretly recording a phone conversation with Thomas, as he tried to entrap the player into admitting Illinois offered him $80,000 and a car to choose the Illini over playing at Iowa, where Pearl was an assistant at the time. Pearl subsequently went to D-II Southern Indiana as a head coach and built a national power.
Flash forward to 2014 — after success at Milwaukee and his rise-before-the-fall at Tennessee — and Auburn was a program mired in apathy. The team had posted just one winning record in SEC play from 2001-17. It was one of the three or four worst high-major jobs in the sport. After sitting on the sidelines due to NCAA punishment, Pearl needed a job and Auburn needed hope.
So Auburn made the move, and in doing so, made a decision that would lift it to one of the 10-15 best programs in the sport over the ensuing 11 years.
Turned around the Tigers
Pearl landed at Auburn’s private airport on March 18, 2024, to cheers from win-starved students, who yelped, “Let-Bruce-loose! Let-Bruce-loose!” — an acknowledgement of the NCAA punishments that had led him to that tarmac that afternoon.
“Hey!” Pearl said in his first public statement to the Auburn faithful. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I want this same reception when we come back with an SEC championship! War Eagle!”
Pearl would go on to capture his first SEC championship in 2018, then win four more in the ensuing years. He turned Auburn from an SEC doormat into a championship-level program. Pearl’s teams were excellent at defending the rim, annually ranking near the top of the country in block percentage. He recruited the transfer portal at an extremely high level, helping bigs like Walker Kessler and Johni Broome turn into the best versions of themselves.
He recruited seven NBA picks from 2019-2025, including 2022 No. 3 overall pick Jabari Smith Jr.
Pearl also elevated Auburn into a new zip code on the recruiting trail. A stunning stat that speaks to how things changed on the Plains: The top 11 players that Auburn has landed in the internet era were all recruited by Pearl.
Steven Pearl expected to take over
Now, Auburn shifts into a new era. Steven Pearl, Bruce’s son, is being promoted to full-time head coach. Steven Pearl is 38 and has only ever coached in college while working for his father.
Each Auburn player will have a 30-day window to enter the transfer portal due to the coaching change. The Tigers lost all but one rotation member from last year’s Final Four club, but Auburn still has a talent-laden roster, headlined by lone returner Tahaad Pettiford. The sophomore lefty is slated to be one of the SEC’s top guards. Auburn also has ballyhooed transfer forwards in KeShawn Murphy (from Mississippi State) and Keyshawn Hall (from UCF), who would have serious markets if they choose to hit free agency.
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