Despite not being ranked No. 1 in this week's AP poll, there's very little debate among NCAA men's college coaches as to which team has been the most dominant through the first six weeks of the season.
The Auburn Tigers rank No. 1 in the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), at KenPom, in Bart Torvik's rankings and in ESPN's College Basketball Power Index. They're also No. 1 in ESPN's Strength of Record and in Wins Above Bubble. As Kevin Sweeney of Sports Illustrated pointed out on X last weekend, Auburn's current KenPom net efficiency rating is the highest any team has been at this point in the season since at least the 2011-12 campaign -- by an enormous margin.
We reached out to a number of college basketball coaches to get their thoughts on the most impressive early-season teams and players they've seen -- and the dominance of star big man Johni Broome and Auburn was a common response. Here's more of what these coaches see from Auburn, as well as some of the other teams and players who stand out so far.
The complete dominance of Auburn and Broome
"They're great offensively," one coach who faced Auburn said. "It's really simple stuff. You can't let Broome get in the short roll, you need to have a plan for the flex action because everything ends up in some kind of flex action. And then they just say, we're going to get it up on the rim and we're going to send bodies in there and you just get a little bit physically overwhelmed, no matter how much you prepare for it. They've got big dudes going in there, bodies are flying, and it turns into a physical game. They can win in a lot of different ways."
"They're really, really hard to play," another coach added. "The amount of things they have in their toolbox, from the way they deny to the fullest extent to the way they don't allow you to get in an easy rhythm up the floor. They just stretch your special teams in a way very few teams can. In your prep for them, you almost get distracted by the totality of what they are. You have to spend so much time on minutiae that for other teams, you don't have to. They're so good at top-locking and denying. They use their physicality to disrupt any kind of flow that you've got going."