Bruce Pearl has a talented but young squad on his hands for the 2020-21 basketball season as Auburn lost its six top scorers from a team that went 25-6 and finished second in the SEC regular season.
Over at CBS Sports, they have published their predicted SEC rankings for the season and have the Tigers in the middle of the pack at seventh.
Auburn brings in one of its most hyped recruiting classes with 5-star guard Sharife Cooper leading the way. Four-star forward J.T. Thor is also looked at as a starter from the get go.
From CBS:
All five starters from last season’s team that began the season with 15 straight wins, and finished tied for second in the SEC, are gone — most notably Isaac Okoro, the one-and-done wing who is now expected to be selected in the lottery of the 2020 NBA Draft. So it’s reasonable to assume Auburn will slide in the league standings after finishing in the top four of the SEC in three straight seasons. But Bruce Pearl still has a chance to land in the top half of the league, and compete for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, thanks to a top-10 recruiting class headlined by five-star point guard Sharife Cooper, who pledged to Auburn over Kentucky in September 2019. The ball will be in his hands from Day One. And his most talented teammate might end up being JT Thor, a four-star forward who committed to Auburn in April to give the Tigers a frontcourt piece who should help offset the loss of Austin Wiley.
Here is how the SEC rankings broke down:
1. Tennessee
2. Kentucky
3. LSU
4. Florida
5. Alabama
6. Arkansas
7. Auburn
8. South Carolina
9. Ole Miss
10. Missouri
11. Texas A&M
12. Mississippi State
13. Georgia
14. Vanderbilt