One of my favorite memories of the NCAA Tournament Selection Show — which is always a little more fun when something goes wrong — came in 2006 when George Mason was, surprisingly, one of the final teams to be selected for the tournament. The late Billy Packer, who was essentially the face of CBS’s tournament coverage at the time, was apoplectic, saying George Mason had no business in the tournament and openly mocking the school and the team on air, during what should have been the school’s happiest moment.
Packer was pilloried for the remark, which felt at the time like The Establishment kicking sand in the face of the little guy, even before George Mason made it all the way to the Final Four. Packer, being Billy Packer, didn’t back down, later referring to George Mason graduates as “those with a 400 SAT,” a truly amazing thing for someone to say out loud.
Packer would retire from CBS two years later, and the selection show has been pretty milquetoast since then (save 2016, when the bracket leaked early). But if we learned anything from this year’s show, it’s that, in the years to come, this isn’t going to be just the NCAA Tournament Selection Show. It’s going to be The Bruce Pearl Show, With Brackets.
It is, truly, remarkable that Bruce Pearl — Bruce Pearl! — is the man who is the dead-center television showcase during the sport’s signature event. I mean, what a journey. This was a man literally banned by the sport who is now, and I suspect moving forward, going to be its public face, right there talking to the camera during the three weeks college basketball has the sports world’s undivided attention.
I can think of no better metaphor for the state of college basketball (and, really, the world).
In the last week leading up to Selection Sunday, the primary conversation in men’s college basketball has been, “Should Miami (Ohio) make the tournament?” This was a ridiculous debate, not because Miami was so obviously an incredible team (the underlying statistical metrics argued they weren’t even the best team in the MAC, a conference that hadn’t had multiple teams in the tournament in 27 years), but because Miami had just completed an undefeated regular season, something that has been done only six times in the last 45 years.
Not having the RedHawks in the tournament — a tournament with 68 freaking teams in it — would have essentially argued not just that their regular season accomplishment meant nothing, but that the regular season, anyone’s regular season, was in fact pointless: It would tell college basketball fans across the country that there was no reason for any of them to pay attention until March, something non-college basketball fans already do, but nonetheless is not exactly the message you want to send to your most loyal customers.
Leaving Miami (Ohio) out of the tournament would have been the exhausting “James Madison Shouldn’t Be Here!” discourse during this year’s College Football Playoff, only much, much dumber. (And that discussion was pretty dumb already.)
Enter Bruce Pearl.
Pearl proclaimed that the RedHawks didn’t belong in the tournament.
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“They’re not built for the grind of a Big Ten or even a Big East. In the Big East Conference this year, they’d finish in the lower half,” Pearl said to Barstool Sports in February. “They may not finish last. But I tell you what: I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure. Who is the last-place team? It would be DePaul. It would be Marquette. I don’t know.”
Pearl later told The Athletic that he thought Miami (Ohio) was deserving of a bid as a one-loss team, but did not think it was one of the 37 best teams up for an at-large bid.
Who should be in the tournament? Could Pearl possibly interest you in Auburn? That’s the school he not only coached for a decade but also set up for his son to coach when he left. He is still getting paid by Auburn while offering his takes. The number of conflicts of interest for Pearl here bends toward the infinite. It would have been a disaster for the overall health of the sport if a 17-16 Auburn had gotten in over a one-loss (or zero losses, which is how many the RedHawks had when Pearl made his comments) Miami. But if we know anything about Pearl, we know that his concern is never an “overall” anything: His concern is always Bruce Pearl getting what Bruce Pearl wants. It is, in fact, his signature trait.
As someone who grew up an Illinois basketball fan in the 1990s, I’ve been trying to solve the Pearl riddle for most of my life, from all the way back when he was an assistant coach for Iowa, where, frustrated that he was unable to land prized recruit Deon Thomas (who is now 55 years old), he doctored allegations in such a venal, chaotic way that it ruined several people’s lives and careers for decades, including his own. (The definitive account of the Bruce Pearl-Deon Thomas fiasco was reported by Daniel Libit at Deadspin more than a decade ago; the scandal led to Pearl being cast out of the sport for nearly a decade before clawing his way back from Southern Indiana and Wisconsin-Milwaukee to Tennessee and ultimately Auburn.)
What I couldn’t understand about Pearl, for years, was how cheerfully shameless he was. No matter what happened to him, no matter what he was caught doing, Pearl always, always doubled down. He always assumed it would all work out for him.
This struck me as no way to live. It was less about the obvious moral failings involved — though there was that — and more about how this sort of strategy seemed so clearly doomed to fail. The old joke about Pearl was that while every other successful coach was driving 80 in a 65 mph zone, Pearl was driving 125 mph. Sure, he’d likely get caught at some point, but not, the way he saw it, if he simply got where he was going before you did.
But that can only work so many times. After too many scandals — and Pearl has so, so many — polite society has no choice but to cast you out. You can’t outrun the police car forever. Eventually, the world finds you out.
Nope. Pearl was right, and I was wrong. Pearl knew that he didn’t need to hide his deeds from the world. He just needed the world to catch up with him — to realize that pretending there was some sort of society that held us all together was a chump’s game. Pearl broke every rule. But he was smart enough to realize the world was starting, it turned out, not to care about rules anymore. Nobody checks for speeding anymore. Nobody cares!
And it worked. It all worked. We spent two weeks having exhausting debates about Miami vs. Auburn, the RedHawks ended up (absurdly) being almost the last team in the tournament and, most importantly, we were all talking about Pearl. And there he was again, the main character on the studio show, the biggest moment in college basketball. How Pearl would react to Auburn not making the tournament became the primary storyline of the show, to the point that Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis and Adam Zucker referenced it throughout the broadcast, culminating in Pearl, in a moment that was indeed ripe with potential tension, at last breaking down the bubble that had just popped for his son’s (and his) team.
Pearl played the magnanimous card, defending the Tigers’ resume but laying off the RedHawks and playing the disappointed dad. He will remain at the center of the conversation and the sport. The man who was kicked out of his sport for lying to the NCAA, who was banished to the Division II wilderness for setting up an 18-year-old kid because he lost a recruiting battle, who was fired from one SEC job for breaking rules just to hop to another one when they decided all they cared about was winning, is now the face of the college basketball.
It has been quite the journey. For Pearl, and for all of us.
