Auburn and Houston basketball agree to two-year neutral site series

Auburn’s 2024 and 2025 basketball schedules have become a tad more difficult.

The Tigers reportedly agreed to play a two-year neutral site series with the Houston Cougars of the Big 12 on Wednesday. The series begins this season at Toyota Center in Houston, and will conclude next season at Legacy Arena in Birmingham.

The Kelvin Sampson-led Cougars have become a staple of the college basketball world, having made at least the Sweet 16 in every NCAA Tournament since 2019. With Bruce Pearl having created the same type of “basketball renaissance” on the Plains, the quick series makes plenty of sense for both programs.

This year’s matchup will be the first between the pair of National Champion hopefuls since the second round of the 2023 NCAA Tournament, where No. 1 seed Houston overcame an early deficit to defeat the Tigers.

This announcement adds another difficult game to what has become a gauntlet of a conference slate for the Tigers. Starting with the Maui Invitational in November in which Bruce Pearl’s squad will play some combination of Memphis, Michigan State, UConn, Colorado, Dayton, Iowa State, and North Carolina, the Tigers also travel to Durham to take on Duke in early December before a matchup against Purdue a few days before winter break.

Pearl and the Auburn staff could be more inclined to put the Tigers through “the ringer” early on in the season after seeing the success of Alabama in the NCAA Tournament after the Tide played an extremely tenuous non-conference schedule last season. If anything, Auburn will certainly be more battle tested than it was a season ago when Johni Broome and company lost to Yale in the Round of 64.

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