PAPER TIGERS

Bryant Smith snipped off a strand of the net and looped it over his ear to wear for the rest of the evening.

Then Chris Porter stepped up and gave the rim a rattle--not that the power-dunking Auburn forward with more than a passing resemblance to Kobe Bryant usually requires a ladder, but this was a special occasion.

Only February, and orange and blue streamers flew.

“We Are the Champions” blared over the public-address system, and Auburn fans spilled onto the court, some of them carrying cameras.

The Tigers--25-1 and ranked second in the nation, their highest since 1959 after having been unranked in the preseason poll, had a rip-roaring, net-snipping celebration last week just for clinching a tie for the Southeastern Conference regular-season championship. They have since won the title outright, for the first time since 1960.

Don’t even think about what it will be like if Auburn makes it to the Final Four.

“Aw, man, I couldn’t imagine,” said Porter, the Tigers’ star, a junior college transfer who never considered going anywhere but Auburn after growing up 90 miles away.

“This town would go crazy, I think,” said Scott Pohlman, the 160-pound shooting guard you’d mistake for the scrubbini the crowd calls for at the end of the game, until you see him play. (“Opie Taylor becomes a basketball player,” Coach Cliff Ellis said.)

The Tigers are rollin’, as their SEC champion T-shirts proclaim, and you might consider buying stock in the paper companies if they keep winning.

The trees at Toomer’s Corner--long reserved mostly for football celebrations or beating Alabama in anything--blossom with white streamers of toilet tissue after every victory. There have been 25 of them now, by an astounding average margin of 23 points.

“What’s different is, this year we’ve got a toilet paper shortage because they’ve rolled it so much,” said Athletic Director David Housel, a renowned story teller once dubbed by a sportswriter as “the Round Mound of Expound”--a tip of the hat to Charles Barkley, the school’s most famous basketball alum.

Maybe you yawned when Auburn beat Southeastern Louisiana by 54 the first game of the season, or Bethune-Cookman by 53. Then the Tigers lost at Kentucky with a flu-weakened team in the only showdown of the regular season and slipped out of people’s minds.

Until about the time they tore through four SEC opponents by a total of 124 points this month, blowing out South Carolina by 28, Louisiana State by 26, Mississippi by 29 and hated ‘Bama by 41.

Shoot, when the Tigers led Vanderbilt by only eight at halftime last week and won by a mere 18, some people even wondered what was wrong.

“It’s funny, some of the reporters, if we’re not winning by 40 or 30, they’re questioning whether we’re playing well,” said Pohlman, a player from suburban Atlanta who almost went to Pepperdine before Auburn swooped in after Georgia and Georgia Tech overlooked him. “It’s hard to beat every team by 30 points.”

It has been a strange year at Auburn, where the football team went 3-8 and Coach Terry Bowden quit at midseason, rather than be fired at season’s end. (The school recently agreed to pay $500,000 to back out of a game against Florida State and a presumably vengeful Bobby Bowden.)

Basketball has been the salve, and a more unlikely one you could hardly imagine.

“It’s almost like the town’s kind of switched,” Pohlman said. “It was such a bad time. I think this gives our fans something to hold their chin up high about.”

Despite Barkley’s time at Auburn from 1981-84, only four Auburn basketball teams have ever been ranked in the final polls--the 1957-58, ‘58-59, ‘59-60 teams, and the 1983-84 team led by Barkley and Chuck Person that took Auburn to its first NCAA tournament.

The Tigers then made it five consecutive seasons, reaching the Elite Eight in 1986 before losing to eventual champion Kentucky, but that’s it.

More incredibly, there have been only six 20-victory seasons, including this one.

No wonder Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Cremins, who knows Ellis from Ellis’ days at Clemson, sent a note earlier this season asking, “Auburn, No. 15 in the nation. What the hell’s going on?”

Courtside at Auburn’s Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum, where only 1,206 turned out for a December game against Florida A&M; last season, rowdy students in orange T-shirts stir up sold-out crowds of 10,500 this season.

They’re known as “the Cliff Dwellers,” a nickname thought up by Housel’s wife, Susan, in a tribute to Ellis. They’re not quite the Cameron Crazies or Stanford’s Sixth Man Club yet, but they’re getting there.

“We played at Duke, and they’re still No. 1,” Vanderbilt forward Vince Ford said. “However, the Cliff Dwellers are an up-and-coming bunch of students.”

Even Bo Jackson, who admitted to Ellis he went to only three basketball games in his four years at Auburn, was in the stands for the Vanderbilt game.

“A Heisman Trophy winner for Auburn, and he came into the locker room and said he’d heard about us, seen us on TV, and wanted to come out and see us for himself,” Porter said.

Housel has his own measure of success.

“The biggest sign that Auburn basketball had arrived was when the owners of the major souvenir shirt shops here at Auburn left the game early,” he said after Skip Johnston, owner of J & M Bookstore, stood up with about eight minutes left.

“I said, ‘Where you goin’, boy? We’ve been waitin’ 39 years for this,’ He said, ‘Believe it or not, I’m going to go open up.’ ”

There’s even a sign at Four Seasons Cleaners in town that proclaims Auburn the “Basketball Capital of the South.”

Duke ought to have a complaint with that, but if so, tell Mike Krzyzewski to quit angling to be No. 1 in the East in the NCAA tournament so the Blue Devils can open in Charlotte.

There is more than a bit of hyperbole about it all, especially when Auburn has beaten precisely one ranked team. The Tigers notched an 83-66 victory over Arkansas when the Razorbacks were ranked 18th on Jan. 6. They lost to then-No. 7 Kentucky later that month, 72-62, on a night when Doc Robinson, the Tigers’ flashy point guard, played despite flu symptoms and two other sick players didn’t play at all.

Auburn is very good, but it’s hard to put the Tigers on a level with Duke, or even a team with such defensive intensity as Connecticut, when the SEC is not up to its usual standards.

So Auburn beat South Carolina by 28. Syracuse beat the woebegone Gamecocks by 47. Florida and Tennessee qualify as good, if erratic teams.

But so far the Tigers, who face one of their more difficult games tonight at Arkansas’ Bud Walton Arena, where they are 0-6, have not hit a lull, as Connecticut and Cincinnati did.

“People say, ‘When’s it going to run out?’ ” Ellis said. “Twenty-six games now. Say five, 10, 15, that’s one thing. This is 26. You can’t take that away.”

Ellis has pulled off this sort of feat before, winning in a power conference with a decidedly not-so powerful program. In 1990, he won the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title at Clemson with Elden Campbell and Dale Davis--beating Duke to clinch--and he still has a coffee table in his den made from pieces of the floor on which the Tigers beat the Blue Devils.

Ellis announced his resignation during the 1993-94 season, though, finishing with an 18-16 record and saying, “It was time to move on. There were some philosophical differences.”

Auburn heard the talk about NCAA trouble.

“We looked into that, and we checked it out with the NCAA and were told there were absolutely no concerns and so we moved forward,” Housel said.

Five seasons later, he has a contender for a No. 1 regional seeding in the NCAA tournament, particularly if Auburn wins the SEC tournament.

One of the biggest reasons for Auburn’s success is the way four returning starters accepted Porter, a 6-foot-7 power forward from Abbeville, Ala., who signed with Auburn in high school but went to Chipola Junior College in Florida for two years after failing to qualify academically as a freshman.

“They have taken Porter in and allowed him to come in and get the publicity, and it has not bothered them,” Ellis said.

Porter is good enough to jump to the NBA, but he’s so crazy about Auburn, he says he’ll be back.

“I wanted to come here since I was a little kid,” Porter said. “You figure it out real early, Auburn or Alabama. It was pretty much Auburn for me.”

The team didn’t buckle when Porter was suspended for three games for a still-unspecified rule violation earlier this season, either. Mack McGadney, a freshman, took Porter’s spot in the lineup, even though the grandmother who raised him had died that morning.

“I told him, ‘If you need to go home, you go,’ ” Ellis said. “But he said, ‘Coach, this is what she would want me to do. I’ll play this game.’ He stepped up and played a beautiful game.”

Porter returned after three games, but Ellis didn’t put him back in the starting lineup for two more.

“It was my own fault,” Porter said. “I pretty much let my teammates down. The team, it’s not all about me. We play together well as a team, and without me they did a great job of playing, which I had no doubt in my mind they’d go out and do.”

The Tigers are in superb condition, aren’t afraid to use their bench, and know how to wear people down.

Rebounding is another strong point.

They are among the top teams in the nation in rebounding margin, beating opponents on the boards by almost 10 a game. Smith, the defensive stopper, has more offensive rebounds, 83, than defensive, 80.

Porter leads the team with 8.7 rebounds a game, and scores plenty of his 16 points a game on dunks off offensive rebounds. The one everyone remembers was against LSU, when he corralled a long rebound with one hand in mid-air and threw it down with a windmill that seemed to start around his knees.

“The best dunk I’ve ever seen--by far!” Pohlman said. “It was like one of those dunks you see where someone missed it, but you’d be like, ‘Oh my God, what a dunk that would have been if he made it.’ But he made it.”

Even the victory margin might be reason to question how far Auburn will go in the NCAA tournament. After all, the Tigers aren’t getting much practice trying to score in the last 10 seconds.

“I would hope we could continue to go all the way like this,” Ellis said. “I guess I don’t want to look into the future and say we need a close game or a loss.

“That’s what makes this team amazing to me. Every time you think something’s going to happen . . . This has been 26 games now. This team just has not had any mercy on anybody.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘Burning Up

A look at Auburn’s basketball records:

BY DECADE

*--*

Year Record Pct. 1905-10 29-17 .630 1911-20 38-56 .404 1920-30 69-84 .451 1931-40 88-72 .550 1941-50 76-99 .434 1951-60 145-76 .656 1961-70 154-90 .631 1971-80 120-146 .451 1981-90 163-138 .542 1991-99 143-116 .552

*--*

*

IN THE 1990s

*--*

Season Record SEC PI. 1990-91 13-16 5-13 7 1991-92 12-15 5-11 5 1992-93 15-12 8-8 3 1993-94 11-17 3-13 6 1994-95 16-13 7-9 4 1995-96 19-13 6-10 4 1996-97 16-15 6-10 3 1997-98 16-14 7-9 3 1998-99 25-1 13-1

*--*

* Last NCAA tournament appearance: 1988

* Last 20-win season: 1985-86 (22-11)

* Total 20-win seasons in 93-season history: 6