As Auburn opened the 1984-85 basketball season, there was ample reason for optimism.
The Tigers had finished tied for second in the Southeastern Conference the previous season and had made the first NCAA Tournament appearance in school history. Charles Barkley was gone and had been a lottery pick in the NBA, but junior Chuck Person and freshman Chris Morris were back. They would eventually join Barkley as first-round draft choices.
Sophomore guards Gerald White and Frank Ford, freshman center Jeff Moore and junior forward Vern Strickland had been recruiting prizes. Freshman guard Johnny Lynn was an adept ball-handler and outside shooter. Senior post man Carey Holland was steady off the bench.
By the time the last shot had been taken in the spring of 1985, these Tigers would have reached heights no Auburn team had reached, advancing to the Sweet 16. But the journey was difficult and at times even bizarre.
Coach Sonny Smith, in his eighth season at Auburn, announced midway through the season that he planned to resign.
"The frustration level was kind of high," Smith says. "It just kept building. I thought we should have been doing better than we were."
Assistant coach Mack McCarthy, now the head coach at East Carolina, says it didn't seem many cared about Auburn basketball.
"It's hard to go out there every day sweating your butt off and doing everything you can do and caring more than anybody," McCarthy says. "You want people to be in that frame of mind with you. At that point, we hadn't rallied the masses. It took a while to build a winning culture."
The Tigers finished tied for seventh in the very tough SEC, but in perhaps the most remarkable turnaround in their history, won the SEC Tournament and beat Purdue and Kansas in the NCAA Tournament before finally losing a heartbreaker to North Carolina.
It was during the NCAA regional at Notre Dame that Smith began to rethink his resignation. In the end, he returned and took the 1986 Tigers to the Elite Eight.
Saturday, every member of that team returned to Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum, along with Smith and assistant coach Lawrence Johnson, for a reunion. They cheered the modern-day Tigers in a 58-57 victory over Alabama.
They reminisced about a season that had gone from being a disappointment to being one for the history books and the museum.
"To me, the season had been a disappointment," Smith says, "but if you look at the overall talent in the league, I don't know that it was. We were basically and undersized team and didn't have a deep bench. Winning on the road was very difficult."
But the Tigers won when it mattered most, and they changed the direction of Auburn basketball.
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