By Nate Allen
Special to the News-Times
FAYETTEVILLE - Coach Mike Anderson’s Arkansas Razorbacks won’t have to force Auburn to run with them.
Auburn’s Tigers of former Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl want to run with the Razorbacks as much as Arkansas wants to run with Auburn.
Last season, the Tigers outran the Razorbacks, snapping an eight-game losing streak to Arkansas with a 90-86 victory at Walton Arena.
Another track meet disguised as a basketball game could reoccur when the Razorbacks (21-7, 10-5) and the Tigers (17-11, 6-9) meet at 7:30 tonight on the SEC Network at Auburn Arena in Auburn, Ala.
In his third year at Auburn, Pearl has established the uptempo play a lot of players style that exemplified his Tennessee teams.
Anderson is six seasons into reigniting the uptempo play he was a part of playing two years for Nolan Richardson at Tulsa before becoming an assistant coach for all 17 of Richardson's Arkansas years before making his own mark as a head coach at Alabama-Birmingham and Missouri.
“Arkansas basketball has got a brand the way they defend and the way they play and the way Mike coaches them,” Pearl said. “The personnel may change, but Arkansas basketball really doesn’t.”
Pearl’s style doesn’t change much, either, but his personnel sure did.
This season he much relies only on sophomore guard Bryce Brown from the Auburn team beating Arkansas last season at Walton.
Brown only averages seven points but Anderson recalls him scoring 27 on Arkansas at Walton.
“The Brown kid last year hit nine threes here,” Anderson said. “I’m sure he still remembers that.”
Auburn senior starting guard T.J. Dunans didn’t play at Walton against Arkansas last season.
Auburn’s other present top players include graduate student transfer guard Ronnie Johnson, formerly at Purdue and Houston, and starting freshmen forwards Mustapha Heron and Danjel Purifoy, freshman point guard Jared Harper and freshman center Austin Wiley, who didn’t graduate high school until December.
The novelty of coaching so many newcomers makes Pearl sound like Forest Gump.
“It’s like a box of chocolates, you are never sure what you are going to get,” Pearl said. “Each one of the freshmen has great strengths and dimensions, and each of them have weaknesses that need to be worked upon. We try to take advantage of their strength and sometimes their weaknesses get exposed.
"I think all of our freshmen are better offensively than defensively. So as a result, we score the ball pretty well, but we do struggle to defend. That’s the biggest difference between high school and college. High school players can score at a high level, but defensively, the speed and physicality of the game is much different.”
Anderson, who is breaking in three junior college transfers this season, an activated redshirt and three freshmen, says everybody is basketball aged from 28 major college games.
“These guys are no longer freshmen now,” Anderson said of Pearl’s rookies. “So I really feel they’re playing at a pretty good level right now. They can shoot the basketball and they can score. And when you’ve got a team that can score, they can really energize your defense. They are very, very talented.”
Heron, a McDonald’s High School All-American, and Purifoy lead Auburn’s scorers, averaging 15 and 11.5 points.
“The big 6-10 kid Austin Wiley who mans the middle, he’s just come out of high school,” Anderson said. “But he has really kind of given them a presence inside.”
The Tigers just snapped a three-game losing streak by thumping LSU 98-75 Tuesday night, and other than an 82-61 loss at Texas A&M, the Tigers have scored 82, 98, 84, 95, and 98 points their last six games.
“We’ve got to guard the perimeter and chase people off the 3-point line,” Anderson said. “We are going to have to be really dialed in defensively and got to keep them off the boards. I think they shoot it and go get it. They want to play uptempo.”
Rolling with four consecutive victories, the Razorbacks beat Texas A&M and Ole Miss, mixing defenses and playing uptempo at home the last two games, but relied more on a matchup zone to win their last two road games at LSU and South Carolina.
“From our standpoint, we will continue to do what we do,” Anderson said. “Be a team that plays multiple defenses, tries to make adjustments as the game goes on and keeps them off the boards. They get to the free throw line an awful lot and they shoot a lot of 3-point shots.”