Two things are certain about Bruce Pearl as he passes the midway mark of his second season as Auburn's basketball coach.
Pearl has not produced the same success with the Tigers as he did during his six seasons with Tennessee. Yet the 55-year-old human Pixie Stick has given Auburn plenty of reasons for excitement, including Saturday afternoon's upset of Southeastern Conference kingpin Kentucky and Tuesday night's win over rival Alabama.
There was also the triumph over Tennessee earlier this month for Pearl, whose Tigers are 9-8 overall and 3-3 in league play entering Saturday's game at Florida.
"You do check a box off, but we try to talk about playing harder and better," Pearl said in a news conference late Tuesday night. "We've just got to continue to move forward. We have as good an environment as there is in college basketball, and it elevates our play."
Auburn's big wins - the Tigers had not defeated Kentucky since 2000 and were swept last winter by the Crimson Tide - came in the suddenly hostile Auburn Arena, which has a capacity of 9,121. It is the second conference venue Pearl's teams have routinely filled, with Thompson-Boling Arena having been a feared facility when his Volunteers were producing a 145-61 record that included six consecutive NCAA tournament appearances.
Pearl's 2007-08 Volunteers went 31-5 and reached the Sweet 16 before getting dumped by Louisville, and his 2009-10 team went 28-9 and got to the Elite Eight before losing by a point to Michigan State. His time at Tennessee eventually was sullied by his lying to NCAA investigators, which resulted in his dismissal and a three-year show cause penalty, keeping Pearl out of coaching from August 2011 to August 2014.
Auburn gave Pearl a second chance in the SEC, and the Tigers went 15-20 in his debut season, with three of those wins occurring in the SEC tournament. That gave him more league tourney wins than predecessors Jeff Lebo and Tony Barbee combined.
"Off the floor, it's been way better than I could have ever dreamed," Pearl said Monday on the SEC teleconference. "We've sold out season tickets two years in a row. We've created a great home-court advantage, even though our team is not quite ready to take full advantage of it. We've been able to schedule tougher and get us in more relevant nonconference games, so off the court has been great.
"On the court, I have not done a great job handling the roster turnover. We lost four senior guards last year, including KT Harrell, who was the league's leading scorer, and to have a new backcourt this year and the injuries in the backcourt - we've just had tremendous turnover there."
Auburn has four NCAA Sweet 16 appearances in its history, including an Elite Eight trip in 1986. The Tigers lost to eventual national champion Syracuse, 79-78, in the 2003 Sweet 16, but that was the last time they appeared in March Madness, marking the longest current drought of any SEC team.
When it came to constructing his second league program, Pearl didn't exactly start from the greater Lee County area.
Junior guard Kareem Canty, who scored 26 points against Kentucky and 25 against Alabama, is from New York and transferred to Auburn from Marshall. Tyler Harris, a 6-foot-10 forward averaging 15.2 points per game, is also from New York and arrived as a graduate student from Providence.
Senior forward Cinmeon Bowers, who tallied 20 points and 17 rebounds Tuesday night, is from Wisconsin and started his career at Chipola College in Marianna, Fla.
"One of the main reasons I wanted to come here was to have upsets against teams like this," Harris said in a news conference after the Kentucky game. "I always wanted to go to a place where we could win big and turn the program around. I look at this as a steppingstone for where we're trying to get and what is to come."
What comes next for Auburn is venturing back on the road, the same road that resulted in a 15-point loss to Missouri and an 18-point loss to Vanderbilt that preceded the stunning of John Calipari's Wildcats.
Nobody is declaring that Pearl has turned Auburn around. What is evident is that he's giving the Tigers hope for respectability - Auburn has ESPN's No. 12 recruiting class - that hasn't existed for more than a decade.
"I have four scholarship guards available to me," Pearl said, referencing the season-ending losses of Tahj Shamsid-Dean and T.J. Dunans. "We've been decimated by injuries, and that's definitely been a factor. There is not a lot of margin for error. We can definitely play with a lot of great effort and energy, and that's the only way to have any chance to win any games in the SEC.
"It's been a big experience to see our guys realize that when fully engaged on both ends of the floor, we have a chance."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.