Auburn coach Bruce Pearl met with the media on Thursday to preview the Tigers' matchup with Michigan. The Wolverines and Tigers will meet on Friday in the Sweet 16. Pearl was asked about defending Michigan's twin towers: Danny Wolf and Vlad Goldin. He also spoke on the bracket and his history with Dusty May.

Here's everything Pearl had to say about Michigan.

Question: Bruce, you've obviously coached a lot of basketball, seen a lot of teams. How many 7-footers together have you seen like this in this Michigan lineup? And how many times have you seen two big men run the offense the way that they do a lot of times at Michigan?

I haven't seen this since I watched McHale and Parish, right? These two guys are special. Goldin, in the Big Ten he was the best player on the floor almost every single night.

And Wolf, there's not another 7-footer in college basketball that resembles him. He's got Larry Bird type ball handling, passing, feel. He's just a gifted, gifted player. Obviously they work beautifully together.

They're going up against Dylan Cardwell and Johni Broome and Chaney Johnson, those three guys are going to be the focus of our defensive attack. Our ability to defend those two guys as well as No. 42 comes off the bench and shoots it a little bit for them, is going to be really the difference in the outcome.

Q: Coach, I wanted to ask you kind of a two-parter. One, couldn't help but notice the bracket. There's some teams you faced in the past at Tennessee that ended a few seasons. Kind of trivially, it's a little bit trivial, but take note of that. Then getting back to Izzo, asking about adjusting to the game, when you're talking about a 70-year-old coach who's done this long a time, do you see a lot of differences? In truth, what are the adjustments outside of NIL, transfer portal that we've seen over the last 10, 15 years?

In all fairness, and for full public disclosure, Mike covered me at Tennessee when I was a coach there. So he remembered us losing the last game of the season to go to the Final Four to Michigan State. He remembered me losing my last game as coach at Tennessee to Michigan in a first round game.

So when Mike may have saw that bracket, it may have been the first thing that came to his mind. It was not the first thing that came to my mind. Alabama State came to my mind. Creighton or Louisville came to my mind. This weekend we've got a four-team tournament against Michigan, Michigan State, and Ole Miss.

Michigan is as good as anybody in this field. They are. And I told our guys, I felt like Creighton could be in this group very easily. They made 4 out of the last 5 Sweet 16s, and I told our guys, if we can beat Creighton, when we get to Atlanta, there's not going to be anything there that's going to be beyond overwhelm us, or maybe even the Final Four.

If we're good enough to beat Creighton, if we're good enough to beat Michigan.

And of course, the survive and advance thing, I think that's really true for the first and second round for a 1 seed. It is about survive and advance for the top seeds. You get to this point, we feel like we're playing for a National Championship now, and we have four times we're going to have to do it. That's how I feel. I'm just telling you how I feel.

You don't feel like you're playing for the National Championship in the first and second round.

I love Coach Izzo because of his authenticity. I love him because he's so 100 percent real. And I love him because he speaks for the coaches. He represents us extremely well. But at the same time, nobody loves their student-athletes more than Tom Izzo.

So he gets the idea that we're finally able to compensate our student-athletes and we're finally getting caught up in a system that was just delayed in recognizing the value of our student-athletes.

At the same time, I think what happened in the questioning, somebody was asking him about where he was in the portal, like he was going to be worried about it. I'm not worried about it right now. Neither is he. It's not taking any time away from him.

The adjustments, we still have guys at Auburn that have been here four to five years. Dylan Cardwell, five years. Chris Moore, five years. Last year Jaylin Williams was five years. We still do it the old fashioned way. At the same time, we have added some tremendous pieces through the transfer portal.

Most of our transfer portal guys were guys from junior college, Division II, Mid-major. I'm so proud of a guy like Johni Broome, who comes from a very mid-major background, Denver Jones, Chad Baker-Mazara, Chaney Johnson, all those guys. They speak to the American dream, the story. It doesn't matter where you start. It's all about where you finish.

So changing in the profession, you've just got to adjust with the rule changes.

Q. I was wondering if you could speak about any history you have with Dusty May and the fact that he's rebuilt a roster kind of from scratch and brought them here?

How good of a hire was Dusty May for Michigan? How good of a hire was that?

A piece of history, back when I was a coach at University of Southern Indiana, USI in Evansville, Indiana, he played for Oakland City and played for Mike Sandifar. So we played them one time.

Then I just remembered him from being on Florida staffs, on Mike White's staff for a little bit, right? Am I correct about that? Okay.

Then my dad lived in South Florida, and my dad would sort of every now and then go to breakfast meetings with sort of basketball people down in South Florida that love basketball, anything for some bagels and cream cheese, anything. Dusty remembered my dad being at a couple of his breakfast meetings when he was trying to talk to basketball people about building the Florida Atlantic program.

Then the third thing would simply be when he hired KT Harrell. KT was a great player for us at Auburn my very first year. My first year at Auburn, the team had one or two players that belonged to the SEC. KT belonged not only to the SEC, but he was an SEC All-Star. We didn't have that much to go around him, and our guys knew it. Our guys had, as you would expect, a very tough year during regular season, but they never quit.

Yet our guys knew on that first year's team, KT's team, that we were going to get it going. They could tell by the way we were coaching, the way we were recruiting, the way we were treating them. I so wanted KT's team my first year to be a part of that foundation, to be a part of what was going to happen, and I didn't think it was possible for them because we just weren't talented enough.

That team came to Nashville and beat Mississippi State, beat Texas A&M, and beat LSU, three huge upsets, and then we played on the Saturday against Kentucky, a team that won the National Championship. We didn't belong in any of those games. That first year team, KT Harrell's team laid the groundwork for Auburn basketball in the future.

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