Hawkeye men to play Bruce Pearl’s Auburn team in NCAA tournament

Iowa is No. 8 seed in Midwest Region, plays Thursday in Birmingham, Ala. If it wins, it likely gets top-seed Houston Saturday.

Mike Hlas

Mar. 12, 2023 5:19 pm, Updated: Mar. 12, 2023 9:15 pm

Auburn men’s basketball Bruce Pearl reacts to a call in his team’s March 4 game against Tennessee in Auburn, Ala. (Butch Dill/Associated Press)

IOWA CITY — Home-state advantage? Maybe not overwhelmingly so.

Not many No. 9 seeds in the NCAA men’s basketball tourney start the event just 110 miles from their campuses. Auburn will do so Thursday when it meets No. 8 Iowa (5:50 p.m., CT, TNT) in a Midwest Region first-round game at Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Ala.

“What you’ve got to know,” Hawkeye senior guard Connor McCaffery said, “is we’re playing in Birmingham and Alabama’s there, so they’re going to be rooting for us. Because they hate Auburn.”

We’ll see how many ‘Bama fans stick around for the evening session after their team plays a No. 16 seed that afternoon. Then again, it is Alabama-Auburn, and the enemy of the Crimson Tide’s enemy is their friend.

Did someone mention Bruce Pearl? It’s been 31 years since he was an Iowa assistant coach under Tom Davis, but he was on the staff the last time (1987) the Hawkeyes went as deep in the NCAAs as the Elite Eight.

The style of his Auburn Tigers shouldn’t be as unfamiliar to Iowa as a typical first-round NCAA foe would be. First-year Iowa assistant coach Matt Gatens worked for Pearl at Auburn from 2017 to 2019 before becoming an assistant at Drake.

Asked if Gatens will be responsible for the scouting report on the Tigers, Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said “That’s probably a good guess.”

The winner will play in Saturday’s second round against the victor of Thursday’s game between No. 1-seed Houston and No. 16 Northern Kentucky. The Midwest semifinals and finals are in Kansas City, Mo., the following week.

This is the fourth-straight NCAA tournament appearance for the Hawkeyes. Auburn is in the event for the fourth time in the last five tournaments. The Tigers reached the Final Four in 2019. They won the Southeastern Conference regular-season title last year.