Auburn Basketball … Gloom, Despair, No Luck at All

Gloom, despair and agony on me,

Deep, dark depression, excessive misery,

If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all,

Gloom, despair and agony on me.

– Buck Owens and Roy Clark, “Hee Haw” (1969-1992)

Buck Owens and Roy Clark, wearing overalls and bemoaning their misfortune, sang those words every week on “Hee Haw,” television’s variety show built around country music, set in fictional Kornfield County. It was only on the network for three seasons, but later generations know the show due to the next 21 years of syndication.

Few since Buck and Roy can relate to that song more than Auburn head basketball coach Bruce Pearl. The way things have caved in on Pearl and his staff since the season started, the Tiger pep band should abandon the “War Eagle” fight song when the team comes onto the court and replace it with the Owens/Clark theme song.

Pearl might want to consider a uniform change, as well. Swap the orange for those denim overalls. That change wouldn’t cost much since there are so few players available to wear the new duds.

Lee County has been looking a lot like Kornfield County and that landscape may not change much until the 2015-2016 season comes to a merciful end.

At the start of the season, things looked pretty promising for Auburn basketball. In the backcourt, Tahj Shamsid-Deen returned for his third year at point guard, joined by junior college All-American T.J. Dunans and Kareem Canty, the high-scoring transfer from Marshall.

In the frontcourt, Cinmeon Bowers was back for his senior year after averaging almost a double-double a season earlier, along with highly rated newcomer forwards Daniel Purifoy and Horace Spencer, along with Tyler Harris, a 6-10 center transfer from Providence. Depth could come from 7-2 Trayvon Reed.

Fast forward to mid-February. Auburn sits near the bottom of the SEC, having suffered through a string of double-digit losses. Shamsid-Deen played almost none due to a recurring shoulder injury, while Dunans was lost to injury in a Hawaii tournament in late December and has never returned. Canty, the league’s fourth leading scorer and starting point guard (due to the loss of Shamsid-Deen and Dunans) was suspended for “conduct detrimental to the team,” then left Auburn to enter the NBA Draft.

Purifoy has never been declared academically eligible, a victim of NCAA procrastination, and back-up freshman point guard New Williams, an all-star from California, has played sparingly in only 14 games due to a knee injury. Reed, the team’s tallest player, was not enrolled during the fall semester, but did enroll for the spring and should be academically eligible for the 2016-2017 season.

Players that Pearl was counting on at the beginning of the year have missed over 90 games combined due to injury, academics or suspension.

How thin has the Tiger backcourt been? Bowers – last season’s starting center – was the starting point guard in blowout road losses to Georgia and Tennessee. Pearl has been forced to use upper-class role players and non-scholarship substitutes in key roles.

It’s hard to see a silver lining in all of this, but there may be one or two.

First, players are getting valuable game experience that they would not have gotten otherwise. Freshman Bryce Brown has proven to be an outside threat, along with streaky sophomore T.J. Lang, who can score in bunches when hot. Spencer is a defensive stalwart with offensive potential for upcoming seasons.

Second, help is on the way. The incoming class that Pearl’s staff signed is among the nation’s Top 20, rated fourth in the SEC according to 247 Sports. Five-star Mustapha Heron, the nation’s fourth-ranked small forward, from Waterbury, Conn., joined the team in November, along with four-star point guard Jared Harper from Mableton, Ga., and 6-8 power forward Anfernee McLemore from Sylvester, Ga.

And, for basketball fans in the state of Alabama, this could be the beginning of good things to come.

Alabama head coach Avery Johnson also signed a Top 20 class in November, led by five-star Terrance Ferguson, a 6-7 shooting guard, rated No. 2 at the position nationally. He was joined by 6-6 shooting guard Ar’mond Davis, the top rated player from Idaho, and 6-8 forward Braxton Key from Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. The Tide will return a solid nucleus to go along with this signing class.

In-state fans still long for the days of Sonny and Wimp, when Alabama teams coached by Wimp Sanderson and Auburn teams of Sonny Smith were legitimate championship contenders, often playing in the NCAA Tournament, and having exciting, hard fought match-ups on the court. A return to those days may not be too far away.

That is, of course, if the curse of Kornfield County doesn’t show up again. Let’s hope we’ve heard the last of Buck and Roy for a while.