AUBURN, Ala.—The No. 20 Auburn men’s basketball team plays an exhibition game against Oklahoma State Wednesday in the Ballin’ in Boutwell event at historic Boutwell Auditorium in downtown Birmingham.
Tipoff is slated for 7 p.m. CT and will be streamed live on YouTube with the Auburn radio feed available on the Auburn Tigers app with Andy Burcham and Randall Dickey calling the action. The game is sold out.
Presented by Nike and Hibbett, Ballin’ in Boutwell is in its second year of hosting exhibition games in Boutwell Auditorium, which was built in 1924 as Municipal Auditorium.
The game will be the unofficial debut for first-year head coach Steven Pearl and will provide the Tigers their first action against another team since opening up practice last month.
“Oklahoma State returned two guys from last year, similar to us, and they have a whole brand-new roster, a lot of new faces you’ve got to look at,” Pearl said. “For our team, it will be important to see how guys are going to handle playing in front of 3,000, 3,500 people, and their families are going to be at this game. It’s always interesting to see if people change in those environments. We try to tell our guys you can’t treat it any differently than you treat a practice these last couple months.”
The defending Southeastern Conference champions, Auburn lost five starters from last year’s Final Four run including conference and national player of the year Johni Broome, but return sophomore guard Tahaad Pettiford, who was a freshman All-SEC member a year ago. A native of Jersey City, New Jersey, and preseason first team All-SEC selection, Pettiford averaged 11.6 points and 3.0 assists during his freshman year. Despite starting in just one game a year ago, Pettiford was third in the team in scoring and first in assists.
Auburn’s roster features 12 new faces in 2025-26 including Big 12 leading scorer Keyshawn Hall (18.8 ppg) from UCF and Birmingham native KeShawn Murphy, a 6-10 forward who spent the previous three seasons at Mississippi State. One of the SEC’s top sixth men last season, Murphy averaged 11.7 points and 7.4 rebounds as a junior.
The exhibition will be the first of two for the Tigers. who will play Memphis on Thursday, Oct. 30 in State Farm Arena in Atlanta in the last tuneup before the regular season slate begins on with Tipoff on the Plains, Nov. 30 in Neville Arena against Bethune-Cookman.
“Part of it Wednesday is looking at different lineups, who plays well together, who doesn’t play well together,” Pearl said. “We need to get a better feel for that and a better understanding of which guys start well as opposed to finish well. There are a lot of things in your first game that you lock into in-game that will help us moving forward.”
Oklahoma State returns one starter from last season’s team that was 17-18 under second-year head coach Steve Lutz. Like Auburn, the Cowboys have 12 new faces this season, led by guard Isaiah Coleman, who averaged 15.6 points a contest in 29 starts at Seton Hall in 2024-25.
The two programs have split four previous meetings with the last coming in the 2016 Big 12/SEC Challenge when Oklahoma State won in Auburn. The Tigers defeated the Cowboys, 81-74, in the second round of the 1999 NCAA Tournament in Indianapolis, propelling Auburn to the Sweet 16.