AUBURN — Bruce Pearl may be stepping away from the sidelines, but he’s not stepping away from the sport, as TNT announced Thursday, Oct. 16, that the freshly retired Auburn basketball coach will be joining crew of in-studio analysts for the upcoming 2025-26 season.
Pearl will joining former college basketball standouts Jalen Rose and Jamal Mashburn as TNT’s trio of analysts, along with in-studio host Adam Lefkoe, for coverage of the Big East and Big 12 conferences. Chris Webber will also be returning to TNT this season, helping with the network’s coverage of the Players Era Festival.
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TNT’s crew of Pearl, Mashburn, Rose and Lefkoe will also join CBS Sports’ joint coverage of the NCAA Men’s Division I Men’s Basketball Championship.
“I’ve long admired and deeply respected the way TNT Sports delivers the best studio shows in the industry, along with the way they treat everyone as family, and I could not be more excited to join the amazing team they’ve assembled to cover college basketball,” Pearl said in a release. “The product has never been in better shape on the court and I’m going to bring the same passion I displayed as a coach to broadcasting. I can’t wait for the start of the season.”
Pearl’s move to broadcast comes less than a month after his retirement, which was announced Sept. 22. He spent 11 seasons at Auburn, leaving with a 246-125 record.
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His final record after three-plus decades as a college basketball head coach was 708-269. Pearl’s 708 victories were the 10th-most among active Division I head coaches at the time of his retirement, trailing the likes of Arkansas’ John Calipari, Kansas’ Bill Self, Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and several others.
Adam Cole is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at acole@gannett.com or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @colereporter. To support Adam’s work, please subscribe to the Montgomery Advertiser.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Former Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl joining TNT in-studio crew
