Dylan Cardwell on Auburn embracing road environment: ‘We got some guys that ain’t right in the head’

Sometimes to play insanely well, a team needs some insane players. After Auburn‘s 92-82 win over Ole Miss on Saturday, Tigers center Dylan Cardwell pulled back the curtain on his team’s unusual attitude about playing on the road.

“BP recruited some killers, man. We got some guys that ain’t right in the head,” Cardwell said. “Tahaad Pettiford and [Chad Baker-Mazara], they love a hostile environment and I’ve never seen a group of guys embrace this. There’s teams that sometimes we would rather play on the road. It’s more enticing.

“We love our fans. We love having witnesses in the stadium. But sometimes on the road, these guys just get going. Like, Miles Kelly, he hit some big 3’s. Denver Jones gets going. Everybody just gets going on the road. This is the first time I’ve really been on in my whole where it’s like these guys embrace the toughness and that was kind of our M.O. heading into the season, just embrace the schedule that we have in front of us.”

Auburn has not only embraced its schedule, it’s dominated it. With the win on Saturday, the Tigers improved to 20-1 on the season and 8-0 in conference play.

Moreover, Auburn has seemingly only grown more and more comfortable with each away game. The Tigers’ sole loss this season was in their first road game when they faced off against Duke.

Auburn continued to show some weakness on the road through their first three away games in conference play, winning the contests by a narrow average margin of 3.3 points per game.

However, after winning its past two road games by double digits, Auburn is looking more comfortable than ever in enemy territory. In the Tigers’ win on Saturday, all five of their starters scored double figures.

As usual, Johni Broome led the way, tallying 20 points and 12 rebounds while shooting 7-14 from the floor. As Cardwell mentioned, Baker-Mazara and Jones were also excellent in the outing, combining for 34 points on 8-13 shooting from 3-point range.

Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl couldn’t have been happier with his team’s performance.

“It was a great win,” Pearl said. “Our best road win of the year. That’s a terrific team, talented team, well-coached team. We didn’t play our best. We struggled early with some of our spacing and we turned the ball over early, and that was something we did not want to do. But the guys, you know, obviously didn’t panic. … We never panicked.”

Auburn will return home to host Oklahoma on Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET. The game will air live on the SEC Network.