Ole Miss will be in deep vs. sharpshooting Auburn
Auburn and Ole Miss enter their showdown with identical 16-7 straightup records, but for Ole Miss it feels as if it has overachieved to this point while Auburn has not lived up to its preseason hype.
The Tigers rely a lot on 3-point shooting, getting 41.5 percent of its points from shots beyond the arc. That is ninth among Division I teams and Auburn makes 41.9 percent of its 3-point attempts at home, which ranks 15th.
This will pose a problem for an Ole Miss defense that is 301st in the country in opponent’s 3-point shooting percentage. The Rebels counter with a pair of guards in Breein Tyree and Terence Davis who combine to average 34.7 points per game and both shoot north of 38 percent from distance, but do not have the size to exploit Auburn’s biggest weakness. For the season, the Tigers are 121st in rebound rate with a lot of that deficiency due to Austin Wiley missing extended time. Though Ole Miss is 59th in this category, Wiley is acclimating his way back into the Auburn fold and should see more playing time than the three minutes he had in the team’s loss to LSU. Even if Wiley’s contributions are limited, Chuma Okeke has stepped up, averaging 9.8 rebounds per game in Auburn’s last four contests. Since Christmas, Auburn has won outright and covered all but one of its six games, with that lone loss coming at the hands of Kentucky. Auburn has won each of those games by at least 14 points and the average margin of victory was 25.2 points. There is not much to suggest Ole Miss can pull off what Kentucky did to avoid a double-digit loss. THE PLAY: Auburn, -8.