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Auburn junior Chad Baker-Mazara asked everyone but players leave the locker room during halftime.
He and the 16th-ranked Auburn men’s basketball team were trailing Ole Miss by nine points at the break. However, it felt as though the Tigers could’ve easily been trailing by more as the Rebels shot the ball at a 51% efficiency in the opening half, forced Auburn to commit eight turnovers while only committing two themselves and had hit six 3-pointers.
In all honesty, Auburn was lucky to find itself in a single-digit deficit after Ole Miss led by as many as 13 points in the first half. It was a made 3-pointer from Auburn’s Denver Jones with just 11 seconds to play in the first half that pulled the Tigers within nine heading into the break.
Nonetheless, Baker-Mazara had seen enough. And his teammates credited him and his halftime message for sparking Auburn’s second-half comeback, paving the way for the Tigers to secure their first Quad 1 win of the season in a 91-77 road victory over the Rebels.
“Y’all tell me,” Auburn senior center Johni Broome responded when asked about the effectiveness of Baker-Mazara’s halftime message.
Broome, who hadn’t scored at all in the first half, put up four quick points on a pair of buckets to help Auburn open the second half on a 6-0 run.
The Tiger’s six unanswered points were the start of Auburn’s 15-6 run in the opening 4:38 of the second half, which gave Auburn its first lead of the game.
“We hung in there. You know, they came out, they hit a lot of tough shots,” Broome said after the game. “Basketball is a tale of two halves, you know. It’s a game of runs.”
And it was a halftime speech from Baker-Mazara that’s credited for giving Auburn the spark it needed to go on its run in the second half.
“You know what, this is their team,” Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl said following Saturday night’s win from Oxford, Miss. “And so one of the things that Chad did… I got out of the locker room pretty quickly. All I said was, ‘Hey, if we want to win this game, we can’t give up 44.’ But he’s got my demeanor. And then Chad and Johni and the other guys… they said what needed to be said.”
Broome said the speech at halftime didn’t involve “pointing out anybody.”
Instead it was the complete opposite.
“We were just encouraging everybody on getting what we needed to win this ball game,” Broome said. “Everybody came out with a different spark. We just needed everybody on the same page — I’ve got your back, you’ve got my back. Let’s go out here and win the game.”
Auburn went on to dominate the second half, outscoring Ole Miss 56-33 while the Tigers shot the ball at an unbelievable 73% clip, while holding the Rebels to just 38% shooting.
Following Auburn’s win over Ole Miss and Williams’ postgame interview with the SEC Network broadcast, SEC Network college basketball analyst Ron Slay went on a passionate rant about the leadership of Auburn’s players at halftime.
“It warms my little heart to know that there’s still players out there like that,” Slay said after the game. “The locker room is owned by the players. There’s not any ifs, ands or buts about it… That right there is special. That ought to be echoed throughout the entire SEC.”
Slay went on to stand up from his chair in the studio and applauded Baker-Mazara and the Tigers.
“Auburn, Baker-Mazara, this is for you,” Slay said as he continued to clap.
