Many were surprised by last week’s announcement as Bruce Pearl retired after more than a decade as head coach at Auburn. Pearl had spent decades in collegiate coaching and made waves everywhere he went, and was a significant icon in this sport. The Tigers wasted zero time naming his son Steven as the next head coach and giving him a contract extension, securing Auburn’s future under the 38-year-old.
BREAKING: Bruce Pearl is expected to retire as the head coach at Auburn, sources tell me and @PeteThamel. His son, Steven, is expected to be the head coach for the upcoming season. pic.twitter.com/gmCAUUQgCD
— Jeff Borzello (@jeffborzello) September 22, 2025
Born in Iowa when his father was an assistant with the Hawkeyes, Pearl played under his father at Tennessee in the late 2000s and later worked as a medical sales rep after graduation. When Bruce was hired at Auburn in 2014, Steven joined his first staff as an assistant strength and conditioning coach. The younger Pearl worked his way up the coaching staff, becoming a full-time assistant in 2017 and associate head coach in 2023 before this most recent promotion to the top job.
Every moment of Pearl’s coaching experience has come in Auburn under his father, but now he’s been given the keys to the kingdom. He had been a key piece of the staff coaching the defense the last few seasons, but his responsibilities are significantly greater from the head coach’s chair. With only that limited experience here with the Tigers, it’s fair to wonder if Auburn made the right decision.
The first consideration is the importance of keeping the roster and staff together after Bruce’s retirement, though that development isn’t quite as important in this era of college basketball. With the development of NIL and the transfer portal, these rosters are turning over at an increasing rate. Hiring in-house looks great in principle, but very few of these players were going to stick around for four years regardless of keeping the same coaching staff and principles.
Auburn is coming off a season where they were unquestionably one of the best teams in the nation, winning the regular-season title in an SEC loaded with talent. It’s not easy to win games and titles in the SEC, and it's certainly not an easy task for rookie head coaches. Over the last decade, Avery Johnson and Jerry Stackhouse are the only people hired as SEC head coaches who didn’t have previous head coaching experience at the collegiate level, and neither of those hires worked at all for the Crimson Tide or Commodores, respectively.
Beyond the difficulties of maintaining this program’s momentum, Pearl is looking to break from his father’s shadow. He’s the latest in a line of mixed results when a son succeeds his father. Sometimes it’s worked out well, like Tony Bennett breaking through at Washington State or both Bryce and Scott Drew with Valparaiso, but often it’s not the case. Joey Meyer underwhelmed at DePaul, Sean Sutton had a forgettable run with Oklahoma State, and we can’t forget Pat Knight doing very little of value after succeeding his father down at Texas Tech.
After 14 teams from the SEC made the NCAA Tournament, these programs were not sitting on their hands. Texas brought Sean Miller and his years of success to Austin while every other program used the transfer portal to get into better shape. You cannot argue that the Tigers are an improved program now that Bruce has retired and his son has taken over the top job; it’s just a matter of waiting to see how the son fares leading his own program. With that lack of information, it’s fair to wonder if the long-term contract was the right move.