College basketball rankings: Auburn removes any doubt on who the No. 1 team is after handling Alabama

CBS Sports graphic

The overwhelming majority of coaches who enter the profession will never be involved in a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. But Bruce Pearl has now been in two such games at two different schools and won both of them despite being an underdog and on the road each time.

Amazing stuff.

Final score: No. 1 Auburn 94, No. 2 Alabama 85.

Pearl’s top-ranked Tigers went to Coleman Coliseum on Saturday, jumped to a 9-0 lead and never trailed while improving to 23-2 overall, 11-1 in the SEC. The victory came eight days short of the 17-year anniversary of Pearl taking second-ranked Tennessee to top-ranked Memphis and winning 66-62, making him the first coach in history to win multiple No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchups on the road.

“I think the thing I’m proudest of is that all eyes of college basketball were on the state of Alabama and the SEC,” Pearl said afterward. “What this conference has done in men’s basketball is historic. And you never know if a game can live up to the hype … but it was a really clean game. A really clean game, which I was really pleased by. And I know that [Alabama coach] Nate [Oats] talked to his team about that. Because that’s how the No. 1 teams in the country should act, that’s how they should compete, that’s how they should play. And I was really pleased with that.”

Needless to say, Auburn remains No. 1 in Sunday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings for the 40th consecutive day, And, at this point, it’s reasonable to assume the Tigers will be there for a while considering the gap between their body of work and everybody else’s.

It’s large and growing.

Auburn’s nine-point win at Alabama pushed the Tigers to 14-2 in Quadrant 1 with zero additional defeats. That means Auburn has fewer losses than any other ranked team and at least six more Q1 wins than everybody else. So, even though the Tigers haven’t quite separated from the pack in the predictive metrics, they have definitely pulled away from all challengers in any conversation about bodies of work.

Elsewhere in the sport, Wisconsin probably had the second biggest win on Saturday — specifically a 94-84 victory at Purdue. That result pushed the Badgers to 13-5 inside the first two quadrants with seven victories inside Q1 and zero losses outside of Q1. It’s a body of work that compelled me to move Wisconsin from No. 16 up to No. 9 in the Top 25 And 1, one spot ahead of No. 10 Purdue, which caused St. John’s, Marquette, Memphis and Michigan to be pushed down one spot each, no fault of their own.