MINNEAPOLIS — Sometime during the Final Four on Saturday, the television cameras will focus on Auburn Coach Bruce Pearl. They are likely to find him in his usual animated state: limping up and down the sideline, screaming, arms flailing, his face the color of a bowl of borscht, his once-pressed suit reduced to a rumpled outfit paying homage to the land of a thousand (perspiration) lakes.

“He might as well be out there on the floor with us with a jersey on, honestly, the way he’ll be sweating,” Auburn forward Malik Dunbar said with a laugh. “He wants to win so badly.”

Pearl’s problem, at least at several previous stops in a nearly four-decade coaching career, is that he wants to win so badly he does not always play by the rules. Yes, he has led Auburn (30-9) to its first Final Four, and to a date with Virginia (33-3) in Saturday’s first national semifinal. But before that, Pearl committed a recruiting violation at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was fired for a similar one at Tennessee, got blackballed by the N.C.A.A. and then saw two assistants leave his staff at Auburn under the cloud of F.B.I. investigations.