Sequels almost always suck.
Ever seen Caddyshack 2? Speed on the Cruise ship?
Well, you can’t add (the game we won’t call the Iron Bowl of Basketball) 2 to the list after Saturday’s brawl in Neville Arena.
A day after Alabama coach Nate Oats said there was “not a whole lot riding on this game other than some pride,” Part II just went completely nuts.
Ten ties
Thirteen lead changes
One overtime
One ejection.
One crimson crane.
And one buzzer beater to end a game for the ages.
Alabama 93, Auburn 91.
Mark Sears, the All-American candidate largely absent for the first 44 minutes and 58 seconds, hit the runner in the lane for all the pride.
It capped an incredibly challenging final seven-game stretch for a Crimson Tide group that entered in quite a rut. A week ago it blew a game it should’ve won at Tennessee (on a buzzer beater, no less) before Florida outmuscled the Crimson Tide on Sears’ senior night.
This was a game rich in rivalry pettiness.
Auburn hung the 2025 SEC regular-season championship banner in the Neville Arena rafters before this one. The school also draped white towels commemorating that title on all the seats.
So it was fitting those hankies were the projectiles thrown by students into the wild Alabama celebration that followed Sears’ buzzer beater.
Three weeks after Auburn famously never trailed in the Mother of All (not IBOBs), Round 2 brought it all together. It wasn’t No. 1 vs. No. 2 and Oats was right, not much changed regarding postseason seeding, so it only added to the pride factor.
That clearly wasn’t lacking at any point on the final day of the regular season.
It was a classic slugfest between two of the newer entries into the national elite but this had all the tension and drama of the game they’ll play in Chapel Hill later Saturday.
The two took turns with iconic moments. Ignore the two sorry end-of-regulation attempts to win this before bonus time, this was a classic regardless of your affiliation.
You saw top National Player of the Year candidate Johni Broome drop 34 points. That included the game-tying 3-pointer in the closing minute to set up the dramatic ending.
Before that, Grant Nelson offered his dream-level first half with a surprising touch of rivalry tomfoolery. His dunk in the face of a fouling Dylan Cardwell allowed for another volley in the pettiness that dates back four years to the football field.
Three weeks after Auburn players hit the crimson crane at midcourt after beating Alabama, 94-85, Nelson struck the pose in hostile territory in a high emotion moment.
Bruce Pearl nearly popped an artery arguing for a technical foul -- repeatedly demonstrating Nelson’s troll move -- without success.
Game on.
The heat only rose from there and hit another peak early in the second half. Auburn’s emotional vein, Chad Baker-Mazara has been one of the greatest strengths of this No. 1 team. He’s also prone to losing his cool and that happened again with a cheap shot to the back of Chris Youngblood’s head in a rebounding scrum.
Flagrant 2 foul and a trip to the locker room.
No doubt, Baker-Mazara long arms would’ve been nice in that final sequence.
But this was about the guts shown by the players allowed to participate in the full 40 plus 5 minutes of basketball. It was a statement by Nelson, a star who is banged up and limped down the stretch of a bruising schedule. His 23 point-day was his first trip north of the 20-point barrier since dropping 25 on Kentucky nearly two months ago.
Nelson hadn’t made a 3-pointer in six games before draining three of them at Auburn. Yet it was his offensive rebound and putback with 1:17 left that stood out.
This was an Alabama team that was destroyed on the backboards Wednesday against Florida. It finished with a 50-35 rebounding deficit with its hustle and toughness reasonably questioned. The whole blue-collar mantra was rightfully mocked after that one and, at least for now, restored in this dose of rivalry retribution.
Alabama held a 41-33 rebounding edge as the supporting cast kept the 7.5-point underdogs in play before Sears arrived. Cliff Omoruyi had a few poster dunks in his 15-point, 8-rebound outing that saw him make all seven shots attempted.
Labaron Philon? Clutch.
Aiden Sherrell added eight tough points as Alabama said a little something about its dependence on the 3-point line.
It won this one making just 7 of 22 shots from behind the arc. That tied for the team’s fifth-fewest attempts from long-range -- a stat heavily influenced by Auburn’s suffocating perimeter defense.
But one complemented by the fact Alabama made 62% of its shots from inside the arc. Alabama doesn’t have to live or die on the 3-pointer if it can battle against one of the more bruising interior defenses and run out of there a winner.
For Auburn, it burns but they’re still on an inside track for the No. 1 overall seed. Not the way Broome wanted to walk out of Neville Arena for the final time but there’s still plenty on his table and, possibly, a few more banners to hang.
None of that should overshadow what happened Saturday in college basketball’s new center of gravity.
Two Mike Tysons punched for 45 unrelenting minutes.
This was the game everyone anticipated in mid-February when ESPN sent all its resources to Tuscaloosa. They sent the circus to the corpse of the ACC this week but the new arrivals showed the old dogs where the future is headed.
And that sometimes, the sequel dogs the original.
