Unprecedented Top Three: Teams with Jewish head coaches lead the college basketball rankings

Auburn Basketball Coach Bruce Pearl sports tefillin on the court at Auburn during a visit from Athletes for Israel.

Update, March 16: After eight weeks at No. 1, Auburn slipped to third, with Duke achieving the top spot, making consecutive No. 1 teams with Jewish head coaches. And all three teams profiled here were named No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament, making history again.

History was made when the Associated Press and USA Today men’s college basketball polls were released today, as the top three teams in the country have Jewish head coaches.

And they are all in the South.

Auburn (23-2) continued its run as the No. 1 team for the sixth week in a row, followed by Florida (22-3) and Duke (23-3). Bruce Pearl is in his 11th season at Auburn, while Todd Golden and Jon Scheyer are in their third seasons at Florida and Duke, respectively.

Auburn has faced both Duke and Florida this season — and those are the team’s only two losses thus far. Both games were rare top-10 showdowns between Jewish coaches.

Pearl keeps making history at Auburn, where he is already the winningest basketball coach. In 2019, Auburn became the first team from the state to reach the Final Four.

He further made history during the Feb. 15 win against archrival Alabama in a 1-versus-2 matchup. It was the first such game in Southeastern Conference history, and only the sixth nationally where both teams were from the same state. Auburn won as the No. 1 team, the previous five wins were by the No. 2 team.

The win also made Pearl the first coach to win a 1-versus-2 game at two different schools, having done so at Tennessee, and both were on the road, another first.

A Boston native, Pearl grew up mystified as to why people from different groups could not get along. In sports, he said, color did not matter — “can you guard somebody? Can you rebound?”

A football injury in high school ended his playing career, but he went to Boston College — “to show them Jewish kids can be tough” — and became a manager for the basketball team. He soon became an assistant coach, then after graduation moved on to Stanford and Iowa. His first head coaching job was at Southern Indiana in 1992, transforming a 10-win team into a Division II national champion in four years.

After a few years at Milwaukee, he revived the Tennessee program. In 2014 he was hired at Auburn to rebuild their program.

Through the years, he has been outspoken in support of Israel, remembering how his grandfather was crying watching the news during the Six Day War in 1967, afraid that Israel might not be there the next day.

In 2009, Pearl made his first trip to Israel, as the coach of the U.S. men’s basketball team in the World Maccabiah Games. Golden was on the team, along with Pearl’s son, Steven. Scheyer was supposed to be on that team as well, but had to drop out due to requirements at Duke, where he was playing.

Pearl led the U.S. team to its first-ever Maccabiah gold medal, defeating Israel in overtime for the title. But while Pearl knew the significance of wearing the USA uniform, he felt a responsibility to make the experience a time of Jewish learning. Holding training camp in Knoxville, he took the team to Shabbat services, and said half of them had not been in a synagogue before.

In 2022, Pearl was able to fulfil a long-time dream of taking his college basketball team to Israel.

College teams can take one international trip every four years, and Auburn’s most recent trip was to Italy in 2017.

In 2008, he took his Tennessee team on a trip to the Czech Republic and Germany, and included visits to the Dachau and Theresienstadt concentration camps on the itinerary.

“These foreign trips have been one of the greatest teaching moments I have been a part of in 40 years of coaching college basketball,” Pearl said. “Israel has not been your typical destination for college basketball teams. Yet, Israel is one of the top 2 or 3 countries in the world in its quality of competition and support for professional basketball.”

Working with Athletes for Israel, he called the trip Birthright for College Basketball, after the Birthright Israel trips organized for Jewish college students, and said that after Auburn’s groundbreaking trip, Israel will become “one of the most sought after and impactful foreign trips in the future.”

The first-ever Israel trip by a Power Five team was broadcast back to the States on ESPN.

In 2023, Arizona and Kansas State made the journey to Israel, and expanded it into an Abraham Accords event as the first-ever American college basketball teams to play in the United Arab Emirates. The war made it impossible to schedule a university for 2024.

Between the recent Florida and Alabama games, Auburn hosted Oklahoma, with 120 Jewish high school students from around the country in attendance. Organized by Athletes for Israel, the students held a basketball tournament at Auburn, and Pearl put on tefillin in the arena. After the students had dinner with Pearl and the Auburn Hillel, Pearl recited the Mourner’s Kaddish, as his mother passed in November.

During the SEC Network broadcast, there was a lengthy segment about Auburn’s 2022 team trip to play in Israel, and about Pearl’s vocal advocacy for Israel. He wore an Israel and U.S. flag pin, and a yellow hostage pin during the game, and after the win, went over to where the Jewish high school students were and led them in chants of Am Yisrael Chai.

He is similarly loud when it comes to Israel, making himself available for the Jewish community — including personally frying latkes at a Chanukah party at his home each year for Auburn’s Jewish students — but also embracing the evangelical Christian community and its strong support for Israel.

He marvels at how amazing America is, that he can coach basketball and be embraced as an outspoken Jew in Alabama.

At the Final Four in 2019, Pearl said he is grateful for “the religious freedom I have to be a practicing Jew in the Christian community. I can tell you down South it is so comfortable there because we share the same God. And my Christian brothers embrace that. It’s a wonderful thing.”

Golden grew up playing basketball at the Jewish Community Center in Phoenix, then played college ball at Saint Mary’s College near San Francisco, where he went from a walk-on to team captain.

He made Aliyah after his senior year, which helped him land in the Israeli league, where he counted toward the rule that at least two of the five players on the court have to be Israeli. He played for two years with Maccabi Haifa.

After his time in Israel, he took a sales job in San Francisco, but soon felt the desire to get back into basketball and took a coaching job at Columbia University.

After two years at Columbia, Golden worked for Pearl at Auburn as director of basketball operations, then as assistant coach from 2014 to 2016. He then headed to the University of San Francisco, where as head coach he led the team to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1998.

Golden took over at Florida in March 2022, and this month’s win evened his record against Pearl at 2-2. It was the second time Florida had defeated a No. 1 team in the regular season in just over a month — and those are the only two such wins in Florida history.

In 2022, he won the Red Auerbach coach of the year award from the Jewish Coaches Association. Pearl was a founding member of the Jewish Coaches Association, and its first president.

In the 2023-24 season, Florida and Auburn met in the final of the SEC Tournament, with Auburn winning the title.

Scheyer was named successor to legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski in 2021, effective the following April. He grew up near Chicago and became known as the “Jewish Jordan” in high school, though his team was said to be the only state championship team in the country with an all-Jewish starting five. He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame before he started college.

From 2007 to 2010 he played on Duke teams that won two Atlantic Coast Conference championships and one national title.

After an eye injury derailed him in the NBA, he played one season for Maccabi Tel Aviv, then in 2013 joined the coaching staff at Duke. In 2018 he became co-associate head coach.

In the 2022-23 season, Duke went 27-9, the best-ever debut season for a Duke head coach. The team won the ACC tournament, and he became the only person to win that as both a player and a coach.

In 2015, Scheyer said he would rather be recognized as a great basketball player and person, rather than because he is Jewish, but “I was all for that” if someone then recognized his Jewishness on top of the other factors.

There is still more history to be made. Currently, the three teams are favored to be 1-seeds in the NCAA tournament. There have been two Jewish NCAA tournament champion head coaches — Nat Holman at City College of New York in 1950, and Larry Brown at Kansas in 1988.