When Sammie Coates visited an Auburn basketball practice last month, the former Tigers leading wide receiver was impressed with how far Bruce Pearl's squad had come.

When Pearl arrived on the Plains just shy of four years ago when Coates was starting spring practice for what would be his last season before leaving for the NFL, Auburn's basketball program was in shambles and the roster was lacking across the board.

"There were four or five guys on the football team," Coates said, "who could've played for the basketball team."

It was a hypothetical argument at the time and one that even Pearl didn't outright dismiss. It never happened but it underlined how desperate the Tigers were for talent.

A rebuilding process began with Pearl pillaging the bargain basement, bringing in higher-risk junior college and graduate transfers. It brought Auburn short-term talent and potential wins but forced younger, long-term foundational players to learn his system behind a different kind of one-and-done: veterans who either didn't have the time or willingness to do so themselves.

The trade-off has proven worth it as Auburn basketball has gone from a rag-tag bunch to the riches of winning its first SEC regular-season title since 1999. No. 16 Auburn (25-6, 13-5 SEC) enters the SEC Tournament as top seed because it leads the conference and is in the top 15 nationally in scoring (84 ppg.) while also having largely fixed its biggest weaknesses from last season: Defense and free throws.

Its defensive efficiency, which ranked 13th in the SEC in each of Pearl's first three seasons, has improved to eighth in the SEC and 35th nationally. Auburn's 78.9 percent free throw shooting is best in the SEC and sixth nationally, a meteoric rise from its 67.2 percent mark last season, and is just shy of the program record of 79.2 percent in 1965-66.

These improvements are the result of a four-year process of personnel addition by subtractions, and additions, the most dramatic of which came in the last 12 months, along with the building of a culture that has slowly aligned with the style of Pearl's teams at Tennessee of a decade ago.

"I think they bought into Bruce Pearl's style of play," said former Kentucky star Antoine Walker, now an SEC Network analyst. "They play fast, they get up and down the floor, they play hard. ... (Bryce Brown and Jared Harper), that backcourt is dynamic, probably the best backcourt in the SEC this year. I think those guys took their game to the next level for Auburn."

The Sept. 26 arrest and subsequent firing of assistant coach Chuck Person for his role in the FBI's investigation into corruption in college basketball dealt a devastating blow to the program, particularly the ineligibility of Austin Wiley and Danjel Purifoy, but it also led to a divisive force - Person was tasked largely with coaching defense and had influence over players he recruited, as alleged in the federal complaint against him - being removed from the coaching staff.

Wiley's presence has been sorely missed especially since the season-ending injury to Anfernee McLemore on Feb. 17. Purifoy would have given Auburn another offensive weapon but he was a defensive liability last season and hasn't spent much time around the program in months since it became clear he wasn't going to play this season.

Combined with the additions of Chuma Okeke, Davion Mitchell, Malik Dunbar and Desean Murray, who sat out last season after transferring, Auburn's toughness and mettle improved and melded with the core of Brown, Harper, Mustapha Heron, McLemore and Horace Spencer, who all endured the disappointment of last season and saw how a fractured room operated when senior T.J. Dunans and graduate transfer Ronnie Johnson freelanced. They vowed not to repeat those mistakes even without Wiley and Purifoy in the lineup.

"The buy-in took place when they began to trust each other and respect each other," Pearl said. "The buy-in took place when they looked at their teammates and went, 'He's going to class, he's in early, he's getting shots like I am, he's getting his rest, he deserves the minutes like I deserve the minutes.' It became respecting one another and trusting one another, and that's when that took place as opposed to maybe, let's just say in year's past, upperclassmen would say, 'It's my turn, I'm a senior, it's my turn, and the other things don't matter as much.' No, that's not why you're going to get the rotation or the minutes or the role, you're going to get it because you earned it and not because you are a senior. So that may have been a misunderstanding, or maybe not everybody was not as completely engaged, and then you feel like, 'I've earned this. I've earned this bad shot. I've earned this force. I've earned those minutes.'

"When everybody is working hard and you trust one another, respect one another, when you are happy for another man's success as much as you are for your own, that's when you have chemistry and that's when you have the buy-in. Do you maintain that throughout the season? Certainly losing challenges that. Winning cures everything."

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Pearl's arrival brought renewed enthusiasm to the program, but even Auburn administrators acknowledged the brutal road he faced. His contract incentivized even a .500 SEC record during his first two seasons, when he loaded the roster with transfers in Cinmeon Bowers, Antoine Mason, K.C. Ross-Miller, Trayvon Reed, Kareem Canty, Tyler Harris and Dunans.

"I have to say I would do it the way I did it and this is the reason why, we couldn't attract the quality of a high school player until the later years," Pearl said. "Austin got it started. Mustapha was next. Part of it was really it took me to get established in recruiting a little bit and then once you start being able to build some credibility in recruiting Austin, Mustapha, Chuma, Davion, Jared, those guys recognize each other out there on the circuit and go, 'These are good players, these are good kids and I want to play with these kind of players.' I couldn't do it - first of all, don't forget my first year I was in a show-cause I couldn't recruit, I couldn't lay that foundation. The following year was already between year 1 and 2 was my first year out and that was Mustapha and Austin."

Bowers, Mason, Ross-Miller, K.T. Harrell and Malcolm Canada produced some memorable wins in 2014-15, especially over Xavier and at Georgia, but fizzled down the stretch before a remarkable three-game run in the SEC Tournament.

Canty, Harris and Bowers delivered back-to-back wins over Kentucky and Alabama in 2015-16 but collapsed once Canty, the temperamental point guard, left the program in the middle of February.

The coaches believed a postseason berth would happen last season and expectations rose dramatically once Wiley arrived in mid-December. But an injury to Purifoy rendered him completely ineffective on defense and Dunans could fill columns in a box score but also made many poor decisions and was a dominating personality over the nucleus of freshmen. Johnson, a grad transfer from Houston who began his career at Purdue, was an experienced hand running the point, but the Tigers looked like two different offenses when he was in compared to Harper for more reasons than age.

Combined with the usual growing pains of a young and undersized team, which regularly started games erratically due to running plays incorrectly, and the on-the-fly adjustment of having to change the offense to go more through Wiley once he arrived, the results varied wildly. There were wins over Texas Tech, TCU and a season sweep of Alabama but also one of the worst blown leads in program history at Ole Miss, being swept by Georgia and losing in the first round of the SEC Tournament to a last-place Missouri team with a lame-duck coach.

"I think we learned so much last year by coming up short as a young team, we just did," Pearl said. "The pain of feeling we didn't achieve the level of our ability - we should've gone further. We should've been a postseason tournament team. We should've been in the NIT and why didn't we? We broke down the things that we did poorly and decided that we're going to change it. We just decided and that locker room decided they were going to change it."

***

An August trip to Italy helped change the dynamic on the court.

Before the team left for the four-exhibition European trip, Pearl let everyone on the team know their roles. He emphasized the need to limit questionable shot selection, which he referred to as "Huh?" shots, through film review of last year's struggles. The tone was serious and it helped the Tigers improve their mindset on the court.

"When we went to Italy that was when I've seen the biggest change in the way we played," Brown said, "even played a bit faster than we did last year because guys knew what their role was and they knew exactly what they were going to do. You might have me just sprint in the lane, spreading the wing instead of calling for the ball or something like that; really understanding our role and knowing what we do and trying to do our roles the best we can."

Transition defense and free throw shooting were also areas Pearl honed in on to improve in the offseason. Pearl began using a drill he saw an Atlanta high school use in which players rotate shooting foul shots over a span of 15 minutes. If a player makes 10 in a row, they're in the "10 club," and after a rotation can try to do it again to improve to 20, 30 and so on until they miss. Purifoy made 70 straight free throws in one of Auburn's drills and though he hasn't played the exercise benefitted the rest of the team as well.

"That's helped, I think, with our free-throw percentage," Pearl said, "and it's made a big difference in the outcomes of the games."

Riding high off its Italy trip, it didn't take long for chaos to take fold back home in Auburn. Just over a month after the trip, Person was arrested and the status of Wiley and Purifoy was thrown into flux.

Then came a humiliating exhibition home loss to Barry, a Division II school, when the defensive malaise of last season was once again on display. Pearl and his staff went back to hammering the points they preached all offseason.

"The biggest problem was the defense and rebounding," Heron said at the time, "same thing as last year."

The Barry loss wasn't the last wake-up call for the Tigers, though, as Pearl's lack of cooperation with Auburn's internal investigation into the program became public and his future was reportedly in peril.

Yet somehow the players kept focused on the court.

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Pearl will employ any motivational tactic he can and one prognostication of a 4-14 SEC record and a ninth-place finish in the preseason SEC media poll provided ample bulletin board material.

Yet even amid a 12-1 mark in non-conference play, the coaching staff wasn't sure how Auburn would fare against bigger, more physical teams in SEC play.

Where hot starts in non-conference games turned into blowouts, Auburn opened SEC play with several comebacks of 10-plus points, showing a resiliency and cohesion it sorely lacked last season.

Even without Wiley and Purifoy, Auburn increased its rebounds and assists while cutting down on turnovers from last season's numbers.

"Are they listening to me, are they hearing my voice a little bit more? Maybe," Pearl said. "Are they trusting the system more and each other? I think one of the biggest things is this year everybody is putting in the time. Nobody's cutting corners, therefore every man out there is entitled. Whereas in years past I had some guys that paid the price but a few others that weren't, so, therefore, it kind of carried over to the floor."

Auburn is playing almost exactly how Pearl's teams at Tennessee did in the mid and late 2000s.

Nine players are averaging over 14 minutes per game, though McLemore's injury has skewed those numbers for the bigs over the last four games. Four players are averaging more than 10 points and four have more than five rebounds per game. Brown has 100 made 3-pointers.

With the exception of depth, which is undoubtedly Auburn's weakness as it enters the postseason, the similarities to Pearl's 2007-08 Tennessee team are uncanny.

"The style is still the same," Pearl said. "Been doing this a long time and what we do is what we did. There are a lot of similarities. J.P. Prince at the three, a left-handed three man like Mustapha Heron. Mustapha's a better shooter, but they're both productive off the bounce. Tyler Smith was an undersized four-man, so is Desean. Chuma Okeke is a stretch four/five just like Wayne Chism. There are a lot of similarities between those teams. My Tennessee teams were a little deeper and had a little bit more size, but the heart of a champion is consistent."

That Tennessee team made it to the Sweet 16 and that would be a historic achievement for Auburn, which will make just its ninth NCAA Tournament appearance in program history this year and first since 2003 when the Tigers lost to eventual national champion Syracuse in the Sweet 16.

Auburn's strengths and vulnerabilities are obvious and SEC teams already began to exploit them, going to the paint on offense and pressuring Harper and Brown defensively.

"This is a team that I think is very talented and tough," ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said. "Bryce Brown and Mustapha Heron are very good players. They're undersized. Losing Anfernee is a big deal; McLemore is a good player, was a good shot-blocker, a guy who played really hard. Losing him is a big deal.

"They're still good. They can still beat just about anybody out there, but not having a capable player in your lineup like that reduces your chances of a longer run in the tournament than otherwise. If they had him, you could say they're an Elite Eight team without straining yourself. They're more vulnerable without him in there."

One of the smallest teams in the country, Auburn has to hope the NCAA selection committee pairs them against a mid-major conference champion that plays up-tempo and lacks a dominating center.

"Their kryptonite is going to be a team with size that can pound them inside," Walker said. "I think it's going to be more important for Auburn to always establish their style of play and that's to try to press, play fast."

Regardless of what happens this weekend at the SEC Tournament in St. Louis, Auburn will get a chance to add chapters to what has already been an incredible season.

Once this storybook journey ends, the looming decision as to Pearl's future awaits.

ames Crepea is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @JamesCrepea.