You live by the 3 in the big blowout wins and you die by the missed 3 in the big blowout losses.
This team will either end up losing in the first round of the NIT or narrowly losing in the NCAA Elite 8 round. Nothing in between...
This is what's so frustrating about it. It's like when GF sends me those pictures of his bare ass and he's way down in south Florida and I'm all the way up here and.....wait...I mean....so yeah, Pearl's teams can be frustrating.
First, let me say the same as many have already stated. Bruce Pearl is as good as we're going to get at AU. He's a damn good recruiter and a great ambassador for the University. He's made the program competitive.
But, I'll go ahead and say it. We should be better than just competitive. What Buzz said above is spot on. If this team is hitting a bunch of the 3's they jack up, they can whip that ass. (Isn't that true of any team?) If they're not, they are almost unwatchable. They're doing the same things they did his first three years at AU, just doing it with better players.
Pearl was at Milwaukee (Whatever they were called) for 4 years and he won right at 22 games a year with one bad year (16 wins) factored in. He won an average of 24 games a year over 6 seasons at Tennessee with a bad year there as well. Auburn has a shiny, new, badass gym. They're filling it up on a regular basis. The excitement about the program has been at an all time high. He's got a bunch of 4 star players on the court now and 3 more four stars coming in next season. Honestly, he should be putting a better product on the floor than every third game being a shit show.