Bruce Pearl: SEC basketball schedule 'reminds me a little bit of football'

Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl compared apples to oranges this week, saying the basketball schedule in the SEC reminded him of football.

It’s tough to compare two different sports in that aspect, but he might be far off as far as the quality of basketball is concerned. Currently, the No. 1 team in the country, Auburn is joined by nine other SEC teams in the latest AP Poll Top 25.

Despite being the best team in basketball right now, Auburn has a grind of a schedule, similar to the sentiment from the football season.

“It does remind me a little bit of SEC football, in a sense that if you look at, just take Georgia and Ohio State, you know, Ohio State has a couple of big games in the Big Ten, you know, obviously, Michigan’s a big game, Penn State’s a big game, you know,” Pearl said to Coach K on Sirius XM. “But, you know, I don’t know the strength of the football conference. It’s not like the SEC and so every single Saturday, you got a chance to get physically whooped, mentally whooped. 

“And if you look at the number of games that Georgia had to play, for example, you know, during the course of the regular season. Meanwhile, you know, some of the teams that were in it, like Ohio State, or even Notre Dame, man, they were excited in January about playing great teams because they only played one or two great teams during the course of the regular season.”

Pearl furthered the argument based on matchups between SEC teams as to why it’s so difficult to win in the league.

“We’ll have to see what that does, how that plays out, whether or not we’re worn out physically, whether we’re worn out mentally, but that’s the deal,” Pearl said. “And matchups matter. You know, there’s certain people who think it’s about, well, you didn’t them ready to play. What we do works better against some people than it does others. And some people’s stuff bothers us more than it bothers everybody else. So, matchups matter.”

Pearl and Auburn have had some close calls during the year, but are 18-1 this season going into Wednesday. LSU (12-7) is unranked, but they’ll host Auburn with a chance to pull off an upset.

After all, the SEC schedule is brutal per Pearl.