Bruce Pearl was never big on doing things by the book, so why should his retirement be any different?
The 65-year-old Auburn head coach announced Monday — the first day of official practice for Division-I men’s basketball programs across the country — that he was retiring from coaching, and that his son, Steven, would take over as the frontman for Tiger hoops. The decision came just 42 days before the start of the 2025-26 season.
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“I’ve been a part of college basketball for almost 50 years, and the truth is, it’s time,” Pearl said in a video. “I told myself when I got to the point where I could not give it my all, or I wasn’t necessarily 100 percent, or I couldn’t be the relentless competitor that [Auburn fans] expected of me, that it was going to be time.”
Pearl walks away at a time when he seemed positioned to be one of the primary faces of college basketball’s new era. In the last four years, the sport has seen six national championship-winning Hall of Fame head coaches announce their retirement from the sport. The number of active head coaches with at least one national championship on their resume? Seven.
The slew of recent retirements has left college basketball — a sport where the head coaches are typically the defining stars — without a defined set of names to lead the game into the first stage of its next era.
Pearl had seemed to be at the forefront of coaches poised to take advantage of this period of sweeping change.
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He was coming off of likely the best (or at least the most successful) coaching season of his career. In 2024-25, Pearl led Auburn to the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament and a trip to the Final Four in San Antonio. The Associated Press named him as the National Co-Coach of the Year, an award he shared with one of the sport’s few remaining active legends, Rick Pitino. For many, it seemed like a question of when, not if, Pearl finally got over the hump and won his first national championship.
Pearl leaves the game having transformed Auburn from an also-ran SEC program with no Final Four appearances and just one trip to the Elite Eight to one that is now expected to be among the sport’s elite on an annual basis. He leaves the school as the program’s all-time leader in wins (232), and with a sparkling 694-270 all-time record as a head coach.
As of now, there is no clear indication of why at this point in his life and this point in the college basketball calendar Pearl chose to step away.
Maybe it was for political reasons, although Pearl has said he does not plan to run for the United States Senate despite the urgings of many top Republican officials in Alabama. Maybe it was to ensure that his son had a chance to be the head coach at Auburn, although Pearl has previously railed against nepotism in sports. Maybe it was because of the exhaustion of the transfer porter and NIL, although Pearl has used both as well as anyone in recent years, and being in the SEC has Auburn well-positioned to compete with 95% of the sport financially in the years to come.
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It seems likely that the real reason for Pearl’s surprise exodus, whatever it may be, is as complicated and convoluted as the man himself.
For decades now, fans have been taken with Pearl’s heart-on-his-sleeve persona, his sense of humor, his willingness to do silly things like paint his chest for a women’s basketball game, and his openness with his emotions. The explanation for why Pearl still struggled to make the leap from fun bit player to leading man in college basketball is complicated and requires some backstory.
First, there was a highly-publicized and controversial incident during Pearl’s time as an assistant coach at Iowa in the late ‘80s (Google “Deon Thomas incident” for the full story) that torpedoed any chance he had of becoming a Division-I head coach early in his career. Instead, he spent a highly successful decade at Division-II Southern Indiana, where he won four Great Lakes Valley Conference regular-season titles and led the Screamin’ Eagles to the 1995 Division II national championship.
Pearl finally got his shot in the big leagues when he was hired by Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2001. After four seasons that featured two trips to the NCAA Tournament and a Cinderella run to the Sweet 16 in 2005, Pearl was offered the head coaching job at Tennessee.
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In Knoxville, Pearl’s national profile skyrocketed almost immediately. His postgame interviews were regularly highlighted on ESPN’s SportsCenter, and his move to show up to a Tennessee women’s game with a Power V painted on his bare chest further endeared him to the sporting public.
In 2007-08, he led the Vols to the SEC regular-season title and the program’s first ever No. 1 ranking in an AP Top 25 poll. They would finish that season in the Sweet 16, a feat they would repeat a year later. In 2010, Pearl guided the Volunteers to the program’s first ever regional final appearance.
Everything at that moment in time pointed towards Pearl’s name eventually being mentioned in the same breath as Coach K, Bill Self, Rick Pitino and John Calipari.
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And then things came to a screeching halt.
Following the 2009-10 season, multiple reports surfaced alleging that Pearl had invited a handful of top junior recruits to his Knoxville home during the fall of 2008. Pearl vehemently denied these reports. When a picture surfaced of junior recruit Aaron Craft attending a barbecue at Pearl’s home, that denial became impossible to believe. Even so, Pearl initially told NCAA investigators that Craft had never been to his home, this despite being presented with the photographic evidence to the contrary. He subsequently requested a second interview with the NCAA in August, 2010 where he admitted wrongdoing.
Pearl held a tearful press conference that September where he admitted publicly for the first time that he had committed NCAA violations and then lied to the NCAA about those violations. Tennessee responded by docking $1.5 million from Pearl’s salary and taking him and his assistant coaches off the road in recruiting in staggered amounts.
UT didn’t make those punishments effective immediately, however, which would turn out to be a crucial error in judgment.
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Four days after the press conference, Pearl and assistant coach Tony James committed a secondary violation when they “bumped “ into recruit Jordan Adams. Adams initially told the NCAA that he and Pearl had a three-minute conversation where Pearl told him about what was going on with the NCAA, downplayed it, and then pointed to his Elite Eight ring and told Adams that he “can get one of these.” Pearl ultimately described the conversation differently, but his major error came in once again not self-reporting the violation immediately.
Then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive suspended Pearl for the first eight conference games of the 2010-11 season. Following the report of another minor violation in early March 2011, Tennessee fired Pearl on March 22. He had coached the entirety of the 2010-11 season without a contract.
On Aug. 25, 2011, the NCAA hit Pearl with a three-year show-cause penalty. Former Tennessee assistants Tony Jones, Steve Forbes, and Jason Shay all received one-year show-cause penalties. In its punishment, the NCAA made it a point to note that it was Pearl’s dishonesty which turned what would have been a minor violation into a major one.
After spending a couple of years maintaining his national profile by taking a job as an ESPN analyst, Pearl was thrown a lifeline by another SEC program in desperate need of a jolt of life.
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Four months before the end of his three-year show-cause penalty, Auburn signed Pearl to a six-year deal worth $14.7 million. In doing so, Pearl became the first coach in college basketball history to be hired by another school while saddled with an active show-cause penalty. When the show-cause penalty officially ended at midnight on Aug. 24, 2014, Pearl celebrated by dancing and posing for pictures with about 50 fans outside Auburn Arena.
Despite the program being tied up in the FBI’s investigation into college basketball in late 2017, Auburn made the then-highly controversial decision to stand by their man (the NCAA would ultimately ban the program from postseason play in 2021). Pearl rewarded the loyalty by taking the Tigers to the program’s first NCAA Tournament in 15 years in 2018, and then guiding them to their first ever Final Four a year later.
Pearl’s rocky rise to the top of the sport came just about as close to happening as possible. It took a missed double-dribble call, a controversial last second foul call, and three made free-throws with 0.6 seconds left to keep Auburn from upsetting top-seeded Virginia and playing Texas Tech for the national championship two nights later.
Post-COVID Pearl retained his status as one of college basketball’s most recognizable second-tier coaches.
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After serving out their NCAA-mandated punishment in 2020-21 (including a two-game suspension for Pearl), Auburn returned to the NCAA Tournament as a single-digit seed in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and then had the greatest single season in program history a year ago.
Even with Pearl’s NCAA issues being a thing of the relatively distant past, he still found a way to generate off-the-court headlines in other ways during his time at Auburn.
Before last November’s presidential election, Pearl tweeted about his fear of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ “socialist, woke progressive beliefs.” A devout member of the Jewish faith, Pearl has also been outspoken throughout the season about the war in Gaza. He showed up to Auburn’s pre-Final Four press conference in San Antonio wearing a dog tag, and explained that he does so as a reminder of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
“If the hostages are released, the death and the dying will stop,” Pearl said.
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Pearl also consistently voiced his support for President Donald Trump, and offered up headline-grabbing thoughts on Russian President Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. Predictably, the comments were received differently by the public. The only certainty about them was that making them in concert with Auburn’s “dream season” only made Pearl even more recognizable than he already was.
And now, seemingly at the peak of his career from the perspectives of both on-court success and off-court visibility, Pearl is walking away. For … reasons.
In a career with an unrivaled amount of twists and turns, maybe this is the only way it could have ended.
