Bruce Pearl

Bruce Alan Pearl (born March 18, 1960) is an American college basketball coach who is currently the head coach of the Auburn Tigers men's basketball team.

He previously served in the same position for Tennessee, Milwaukee, and Southern Indiana.

Davis had served as head coach at Boston College from 1977 to 1982 and Pearl had served as his team student-manager.

Pearl is a 1982 graduate of Boston College, where he served as the manager of the men's basketball team.

Pearl is Jewish.

His Hebrew name is Mordechai, after Queen Esther’s uncle Mordechai from the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Pearl served as an assistant coach at both Stanford from 1982 to 1986 and at Iowa from 1986 to 1992 under Coach Tom Davis.

During the 1988–89 basketball season, Pearl, then an assistant coach at Iowa, was at the center of a recruiting scandal involving Illinois.

Both Illinois and Iowa were recruiting Deon Thomas, a top high school player from Chicago.

Pearl lost this recruiting battle when Thomas committed to Illinois.

Thereafter, Pearl called the high school student and recorded a phone conversation with Thomas, which may have been illegal depending on where Pearl originated the call.

(Illinois requires prior consent of all participants to monitor or record a phone conversation according to Ill. Rev. Stat. Ch. 38, Sec. 14–2; Iowa, where Pearl was coaching at the time, only requires one party's consent to record a phone conversation.) During the conversation, Pearl asked Thomas if he had been offered an SUV and cash by Illinois assistant coach Jimmy Collins, and Thomas seemed to indicate that he had.

Pearl then turned over copies of the tapes to the NCAA, accompanied by a memo describing the events.

During the subsequent NCAA investigation, Thomas denied the allegations and said the story was false, that he was agreeing with Pearl only to try to get rid of him.

Thomas later passed a polygraph test in which he denied Pearl's accusation of Illinois's offering cash and a car.

The NCAA did not find Illinois guilty of any wrongdoing relating to Thomas's recruitment, finding that the purported evidence provided was not "credible, persuasive and of a kind on which reasonably prudent persons rely in the conduct of serious affairs".

Because the investigation uncovered other violations, however, including Illinois's third major violation in six years, the NCAA cited Illinois with a "lack of institutional control" charge and implemented several recruiting restrictions and a one-year postseason ban.

When Pearl and Collins were both head coaches for four years in the Horizon League, the two men never engaged in the traditional postgame handshake, reportedly due to lingering feelings over the incident.

In 1992, Pearl got his first head-coaching job, at Southern Indiana.

He inherited a Screaming Eagles team that had won just 10 games in the previous season.

Pearl posted a 22–7 record in his first season, and led the Eagles to nine straight NCAA D-II tournaments in addition to winning four Great Lakes Valley Conference titles.

In 1994, USI finished with a 28–4 record en route to a loss in the D-II championship game; in 1995, the Eagles won 29 games and claimed the D–II championship behind national Player of the Year Stan Gouard.

A team from the GLVC played for the National Championship every year after his first season at USI.

Pearl was named the NABC Division II coach of the year after his national championship.

He left USI with a 231–46 record over nine years.

Pearl led Southern Indiana to a Division II national championship in 1995, during which he was named Division II Coach of the Year by the National Association of Basketball Coaches.

In Division I, his teams have won four conference championships and three conference tournament championships, and qualified for ten NCAA tournament appearances and one Final Four.

Pearl is the second-fastest NCAA coach to reach 300 victories, needing only 382 games to reach this mark (Roy Williams needed 370 games at Kansas to reach this milestone).

When Thomas was asked about forgiving Pearl in a 2005 interview, he was quoted as saying, "It's hard to forgive a snake."

Thomas went on to become the University of Illinois's all-time leading scorer.

Pearl was named Coach of the Year by Sporting News in 2006 and was awarded the Adolph Rupp Cup in 2008.

He also served as the head coach for the Maccabi USA men's basketball team that won the gold medal at the 2009 Maccabiah Games.

A native of Boston, Pearl attended Sharon High School in Sharon, Massachusetts.

He is one of the few Division I basketball coaches who never played high school basketball, even at the junior varsity level (being the only head coach in the 2022 NCAA tournament with that distinction); a shoulder injury while playing football in his first year of high school prevented him from further pursuing sports as a player.

Pearl also wore the jacket during the 2009 SEC Men's Tournament Final.

Pearl was the first president of the Jewish Coaches Association, and in 2019 became the fifth Jewish head basketball coach to lead a team to the Final Four.

The Algemeiner named Pearl one of 100 people positively influencing Jewish life in 2022.

Pearl has also been the head coach at Tennessee, Milwaukee and, prior to that, at Southern Indiana, where he won a Division II national championship.

He also served as an assistant coach at Stanford and at Iowa under then-head coach Tom Davis.

Against division rival Kentucky and in-state rival Vanderbilt, Pearl chose to wear a brightly colored orange jacket in honor of the late UT coach Ray Mears.