Last season, Auburn opened the season with a neutral-court loss against Baylor. They then won 16 of their next 17 games, started 5-0 in the SEC, and looked like so many Bruce Pearl teams have in the past. They were fast, erratic, and played with a ton of swagger.
If you checked under the hood, only six of those 16 wins were against teams in the top 100 in KenPom, and all six came on the Plains. It’s not like Pearl was purposefully avoiding good teams. They faced three more top-100 teams before SEC play arrived, but none were in a truly hostile environment.