It is early enough in the college basketball season that nothing really feels consequential yet. Most of the programs that will matter in March are still tuning up teams that won't, to the point where the scoreboard has kind of a pleasant abstraction to it. For every early match-up between North Carolina and Kansas—it really happened, on Friday night; Kansas won, it was a fun game—there are two that mostly serve to remind you what a vast and varied country this is. Kentucky and Bucknell? Arizona and Old Dominion? Auburn, but also Vermont? Provided you don't look at the scores in those games, which were decided by a combined margin of 137 points in favor of the programs you'd expect, it's kind of nice to think about. But it's conceptual, in the ways that basketball games played before Thanksgiving tend to be.
So much of the season hasn't happened yet that the broader stakes are not yet set, but it seems safe to say that Auburn's convincing 74-69 road win over Houston on Saturday night will matter. Houston, which came into the game ranked fourth in the country, is very good; Auburn, which was ranked 11th, won by getting second-half buckets with striking efficiency against one of the best defensive teams in the country. What was abstract and unrepresentative about Auburn's season-opening thrashing of Vermont—and they won that game 94-43, so that's basically everything—looked sharper and more significant on Saturday. The performance vaulted the Tigers to the top spot on the KenPom rankings, just ahead of Houston; the inherently unstable admixture of transfer portal ronin and multi-star recruits, which could always become anything, looked like a (very good) basketball team.
Also, and more importantly for our purposes here, one of those transfers and one of those freshmen were not with the team because they got into a fight that led the team plane to turn around less than an hour into its flight to Houston on Friday. The Field Of 68's Jeff Goodman initially reported that the incident was "horseplay," adding later that it "nearly turned into a donnybrook." Subsequent reporting named the players involved—Ja'Heim Hudson, a senior transfer from Southern Methodist, and freshman Jahki Howard—and made mention of some torn clothing. Local news pored over air traffic control recordings, which featured pilots first requesting an emergency landing in Montgomery, Ala. because "we've got a bunch of basketball players fighting," before amending that request to simply flying back to Auburn once the fight was "contained." The flight was in the air for fewer than 45 minutes.
Neither Hudson nor Howard, both of whom played significant minutes off the bench in Auburn's blowout over Vermont, ultimately made the trip to Houston. A dramatic win over an elite program is a great way to get reporters to stop asking about what variety and intensity of horseplay led to a pilot actually following through on "I will turn this thing around if you don't knock it off." Coach Bruce Pearl didn't say much about it after the game beyond that it is an "unfortunate situation" that the team is "dealing with head on."
In a celebratory moment from the locker room that he streamed on Instagram Live, Auburn big man Dylan Cardwell was a bit more expansive. Amid some familiar postgame whooping, Cardwell asked, rhetorically, "when you lock a bunch of dogs up on a plane, what do you expect to happen?" before proclaiming his "unwavering faith and ultimate belief and trust in the lord." It's still early, but not too early to declare that college basketball stuff—some extremely college basketball stuff—is already happening.
