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MBB:  Jeremiah Wilkinson Leads UGA Over Auburn in Overtime

 Jeremiah Wilkinson scored a season-high 31 points, including seven in overtime, to lead No. 23 Georgia (13-1) to a 104-100 victory over Auburn (9-5) in their SEC opener at Stegeman Coliseum on Saturday.   

FAST FACTS

• Wilkinson led the Bulldogs offensively for the seventh time this season. He scored 18 points in the first half alone, which was more than his total output for seven games this season.
• Marcus “Smurf” Millender also posted a season-high offensive output with 24 points
• Five players scored in double digits for the first time since Dec. 22, 2025: Wilkinson (31), Millender (24), Blue Cain (15), Somto Cyril (15), and Jordan Ross (12).
• The contest featured 10 ties and 11 lead changes, with the Bulldogs going ahead for good on Wilkinson’s 3-pointer with 1:50 remaining in OT.
• Auburn tied the game at the end of regulation in improbable fashion after trailing 92-88 with 5.2 seconds remaining. Keyshawn Hall was fouled with 0.7 seconds left. He made two free throws before missing the third on purpose. Kevin Overton grabbed the rebound and knocked down a short jumper as time expired.
• In the final 3:20 of regulation and overtime, the Bulldogs shot 13-for-16 from the line.
• The Bulldogs are now 13-1, matching the second-best start in program history and representing UGA’s best beginning to a season since opening the 1930-31 campaign at 23-1.
• Georgia topped the 100-point plateau for the seventh time this season. Prior to this season, the Bulldogs’ most games reaching the century mark was five in 1990-91.
• The last time Georgia scored over 100+ points in an SEC game was a loss against Alabama on Feb. 8, 2020. 
• The Bulldogs have now won 12 straight home games dating back to last season, equaling the sixth-longest stretch of success at Stegeman Coliseum in program history.
• Georgia improved to 64-31 against Auburn in Athens, though Auburn still leads the series overall, 104-98.
• Georgia is 1-1 in overtime this season. Saturday was the Bulldogs’ first overtime win since defeating South Carolina, 81-78, on Jan. 28, 2023.

“1-0 no matter how you draw it up against a really good Auburn team. I thought both teams play really well. Great environment. Thankful to our fans. A game that that I know I’ll remember forever just the way it ended. Incredible tale of two separate responses. We get up four late and didn’t make the great decisions that we needed to make just to finish it. Didn’t love our body language. Guys are smiling. Love it. I want our guys to have fun. In fact, that’s what we wrote on the whiteboard right before the game. Let’s just play hard as heck and have fun. You guys have earned it. It’s why we’re here. You can’t smile until it’s over, and it wasn’t over. They made some huge plays. Very, very difficult to defend. Then the way that we responded to that negativity, to that. Oh my gosh. Wow. What an enormous shot going into overtime our guys were phenomenal. They got off to a tough start in overtime too. We just continued to play. I thought Somto [Cyril] was brilliant defensively down the stretch. Jeremiah [Wilkinson] hit some huge shots. Just collectively, moving forward, with 18 of these, you may have another eight or 10 of those where it’s one possession, two possessions down the stretch, and the decisions you make could cost you or get you a W. This one, we’re very fortunate to have won, of course. Man, back to work because we’ve got 17 to go, and we don’t have a day off.”

On the identity of the team…

“It [the game] kind of confirmed it [the team’s identity]. Honestly, our team is really competitive. We’re very resilient. Jeremiah Wilkinson is extremely confident. Somto Cyril is an elite defensive player. We got other pieces, other guys that continue to get better, like Smurf Millender. We’ve got a really strong bench. We’ve got great depth and play multiple guys, so a confirmation of all that. We played really well against Cincinnati in the second half. Clemson is really good, it could have gone either way. This one went our way, but it was a similar game against another high-level team. We’ve got a bunch of those moving forward. We have got to continue to be as resilient and all the adjectives, positively, that I just used, but we’ve got to clean up some stuff. There’s a lot of things that we can continue to do better. I’m sure Coach Pearl is telling his team the same thing. It’s early. It’s one game. I know this, the 23 offensive rebounds aren’t going to translate to a lot of wins. We’ve got to fix that. We can’t just bank on scoring 104 in a bunch of these SEC games.”

Auburn Head Coach Steven Pearl

On the team’s overall defensive performance…

“Horrible. Our one-on-one defense is terrible. We continuously work on it, and we let guys drive right around us. At some point, we have to have an identity. I’m always going to look within first, and I’m always going to figure out what I can do better to help us on the defensive side. At some point, our guys have to have a level of pride that they’re not going to let their guy just continuously line them up and drive right around them. There’s nothing that we can do from a schematic standpoint unless we just completely sell out and just give up wide open threes. You have to have a little bit of pride in not letting those guards go for 31 and 24. It’s not the threes I’m as concerned about. A couple of them were scout specific that we got up out of our stance. I’m more concerned about just the one-on-one drives where they just get into the paint and there’s no rim protection because we know we don’t have that. They are able to score twos because we either reach or we open up the gate too much. My biggest challenge for our guys is we have to have more of an identity defensively in our one-on-one defense. I can sit here, scheme and talk about different coverages. At the end of the day, we did a lot of switching. We ran a lot of zone. All they did was just get the ball into a guard’s hand and then just attack us one-on-one. We just weren’t able to keep them in front. My team has to do a better job of finding their identity defensively and taking some accountability in their one-on-one defense. I can’t go out there and guard for them.”

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