There's good news in Bruce Pearl's retirement as head basketball coach at Auburn, which is that he says he will not run for public office. The bad news is that Bruce Pearl says a lot of things, and does not have a history of trustworthiness. The good news is he didn't have to make that pledge, because he has always been unapologetically brazen about what he wants and how he wants it. The bad news is that his brazenness let him retire a month before the start of the next season and name his own son Steven as his successor, after a search process that stretched across an entire family dinner.
There’s not a whole lot here to like, but at some point there’s nothing to do but tip your cap. I mean, if you're gonna go, go out knowing that nobody's going to stop you from being you in the way you want to be, right? Two trips to the Final Four gets you that much play in the SEC, even if basketball isn't and never will be football there. Had Bruce Pearl been a football coach, he could have kept the job and run for governor simultaneously, and the only person who could have stopped him would be Nick Saban. Pearl's history can be encapsulated this way: It isn't what you do that defines you so much as what other people can stop you from doing, even while you're doing it.
Pearl's history as a happy-go-lucky ne'er-do-well is well documented, going back to the time when Pearl, who was then an assistant at Iowa under Tom Davis, secretly recorded a phone call with mega-recruit Deon Thomas. In that call, Pearl asked Thomas if he had been bribed to go to Illinois instead of Iowa; when Thomas implied that he had, Pearl turned the recording over to the NCAA. Thomas had a fine career at Illinois; Pearl’s random act of snitching nearly torpedoed his career, but didn't.
It is a fact that Pearl is a good basketball coach, and also that college sports is a rotten sort of meritocracy. He got work, and won, and got more prestigious work, and won, and continued to act exactly like Bruce Pearl the whole time. While the head coach at Tennessee, he invited recruit Aaron Craft to a cookout at his home even though it was against NCAA rules; not only did Pearl lie about this to the NCAA, even as pictures surfaced disproving that lie, but he encouraged Craft's father to do the same. Pearl got a show-cause penalty from the NCAA for that, but still got the job at Auburn, where he would go on to receive a two-game suspension from the NCAA in 2021 for failing to adequately supervise (yeah, right) associate head coach Chuck Person, and because he "did not promote an atmosphere of compliance." He also won a lot of games and made those Final Fours, and as a result could have kept the job for as long as he wanted. He did. Pearl's attitude was then as it is now: Whatcha gonna do about it?
And we have our answer, yet again. Pearl delivered his end of the bargain, just as he did at Southern Indiana, Milwaukee, and Tennessee—he made Auburn a national power in basketball. In return, Pearl became so powerful that he got to play the nepo card with the job he made his own, passing it to a son who has never been hired for a coaching job by anyone other than his dad. Steven got a five-year deal as his father’s successor; Bruce can now do whatever he wants in what passes for his retirement.
Which of course could be anything including, yes, running for the sort of high public office he has said he would not consider. “I thought and prayed about maybe running for United States Senate,” Pearl said, “maybe to be the next great senator from the state of Alabama.” Given that the state has already put one dodgy Auburn washout into that office, it was an obvious temptation. In that same statement, Pearl said that he resisted it. “That would have required me leaving Auburn. Instead, the university has given me an incredible opportunity to stay here, and be Auburn’s senator.” A lovely sentiment, until you consider what the Senator from Texas A&M might be like.
In other words, if Pearl changes his mind and does try to be the next Tommy Tuberville, it will be because the good lord above convinced him that he needed to do what was right for him. It would be hard to pitch that as a miracle, given that Pearl has already and always done exactly that. And who is he to contravene the advice of said god, except himself? That's the beauty of claiming a direct line to the deity: The advice you get tends to be what you wanted all along.
You can draw your own comparisons to everything else that’s happening in the country right now along those lines, but also these are the rules in college sports as they have always existed. You get whatever you ask for, until you don't; if you win enough, you will come to expect it without asking. Pearl played the game by the rules as they exist rather than the ones we might assume or just hope exist—do whatever, admit nothing until absolutely necessary, and when you do, rely on the desperation of the ambitious to win you another chance to run the same game again in another town.
Pearl did say he was done doing the thing that made him him. “I told myself that when I got to the point when I could not give it my all, or I wasn’t necessarily 100 percent, where I couldn’t be the relentless competitor that you expected of me, that it was going to be time," Pearl said in his retirement statement. "And as hard as it is to say this, I reached the realization that it was time for me to step aside.”
Expect this to remain valid until Pearl decides that it isn’t. We'll give it until Christmas—the time when prayers get answered if you watch enough Hallmark movies, and believe hard enough that what you want to happen to you is just what you deserve. Go in with that mindset, and a realistic sense of what your bosses will allow you to get away with, and eventually you will realize that you were right all along, if only because nobody had the stones to tell you were wrong.
