AUBURN — Jaylin Williams had never scored more than eight points in an Auburn basketball game.

But with less than 20 seconds remaining in the 2020-21 season opener against St. Joseph's, the sophomore forward, who would go on to become the winningest player in program history, had what, at the time, was a career-best 12 points on 50% shooting.

The Tigers were down two after SJU split a pair of free throws, but the Hawks made the mistake of signaling for a timeout after Ryan Daly's second foul shot found the bottom of the net. The break allowed Auburn coach Bruce Pearl to confer briefly with his staff, including Mike Burgomaster.

Burgomaster advised Pearl, who was on his way to the huddle, to run an action that would feature Williams faking a ball screen before slipping toward the basket.

"What’s the backup if it doesn’t work?" Pearl posed.

"Coach," Burgomaster assured, "it’s going to work."

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Pearl obliged, St. Joseph's was duped and Williams punched home the game-tying dunk after receiving a pass from Devan Cambridge. The Tigers got a stop on the ensuing possession and went on to win in overtime, outscoring their opponent by five in the extra period.

"That one sticks out to me," Burgomaster told the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday, reflecting on his favorite play calls over his eight-season Auburn career that's seen him rise from graduate assistant to assistant coach/offensive coordinator. Pearl admits the latter is an unorthodox title, but that's the best way to convey Burgomaster's impact, especially in football country.

A 29-year-old Massachusettsan who enrolled at the University of Miami in 2012 with the goal of one day working on Wall Street, Burgomaster has instead become Pearl's co-architect in creating an offense that closed the 2023-24 regular season rated by KenPom as the No. 13 unit in the country.

"The bottom line is I trust him," Pearl said. "... I would say Mike Burgomaster is one of the most valuable, underrated assistants in all of college basketball.”

Nights at the coffee table

Ryan Langford wasn't yet sure how to feel about one of his new superiors.

Joining the Auburn staff in 2016, Langford didn't become a manager because of a basketball-driven infatuation for Pearl or an unquenched desire to watch the team up close. He already had hoops experience — he was an assistant at Lee-Scott Academy when the Warriors won the 2016 AISA Class AAA state title — and his incentive for being a manager was centered on making coaching his career.

"He was always on my case," Langford, now the boys varsity coach at Abbeville Christian High School, said of Burgomaster. "Got to get this done, that done, that done."

Langford spent two seasons as a student manager before he got promoted to graduate assistant, the same position Burgomaster held when he first made his way to the Plains. The two also became roommates, and Langford quickly realized why his new bunkmate ditched his finance degree.

"When I say we spent 24 hours together, we did," Langford said. "... He always made it a point, especially when we lived together, that we were going to beat everybody to the gym and we were going to walk the last person out at night.

"That speaks a lot to Mike’s come up. He wasn’t born this genius. He’s put in a lot of work. He definitely got me a lot more focused just on life. He had a lot to do with everything that I've been able to achieve."

Langford was most impressed with Burgomaster's knack for knowing a little something on every team. Tennessee is up next on the docket? Burgomaster would breeze through the Vols' schedule and identify which teams deploy concepts similar to the Tigers. He'd flag the film on those games and watch them to understand what worked, and what didn't.

Burgomaster didn't have to look it up. He had those teams' playing styles saved in his memory.

"We’d spend nights at the coffee table, talking special situations," Langford said. "I’m like, ‘All right, Mike. We’re down three, 1.6 seconds on the clock. We’ve got the ball on the side. They’ve been in man the whole game, but sometimes he goes zone out of the timeout. Give me two. Give me your zone play and your man play. What do you got?’

"We would do that for hours. ... It never stops with him. He always wants to figure out how to be better. I think the sky is the limit for that guy. I know it is.”

Stamped by a legend

The plan was to follow in his dad's footsteps.

Burgomaster's father, Tom, has a background in accounting. It's a career Burgomaster grew up around and was familiar with, and he went down to Coral Gables to study it so that he could one day land a job in the field.

That was until one of his freshman-year floormates walked by his dorm room and asked if he wanted to take a trip to the Miami basketball facility. The floormate had inquired about becoming a manager, and the staff let him know to swing by. Burgomaster, thinking it sounded cool, agreed to tag along.

The friend ended up not joining. Burgomaster, however, was hooked.

"It’s crazy now that I’m on this side of it, because I just basically walked in and introduced myself," Burgomaster said. "... I fell in love with being a manager that year. My junior year I got to travel a little bit. I skipped an exam to go to the NIT Final Four with Miami. That’s when I knew this is what I want to do. At the end of the day, being around the program was more important than anything else that I had going on.”

Burgomaster spent four years with the Hurricanes, enjoying co-head manager duties as a senior. From the film room to the laundry room, he helped coach Jim Larrañaga's team go 98-44 and reach the Sweet 16 twice.

"Mike was always ready, willing and able to take on more responsibility," Larrañaga said. "... You couldn’t ask him to do anything too big or too small that he wasn’t going to put 100% effort into doing it to the best of his ability.

"Some guys think that coaching is glamorous, but the ones that I’ve had work for me — whether they be an assistant coach, a director of basketball operations, video guy, an analytics guy — the ones who really make it are the ones who had the same attitude that Mike had."

'Joker before Joker'

Burgomaster's legacy at Miami reaches beyond the on-court success to which he assisted the Hurricanes.

He also created the manager ladder, a power ranking of the one-on-one abilities of the managerial staff. The games were usually played to about 11 points. Make it, take it.

"Players would come in early once they figured out what was going on," former Miami manager Travis Dunnette said. "It was a lot of fun.”

The 6-foot-6 Burgomaster had no shame in putting his stature to use, bullying those smaller than him in the post. But he also had some ability on the perimeter, and his slow, deliberate moves were, as many put it, akin to a two-time NBA MVP.

“He was definitely a lot like Nikola Jokić," said John Daniel, a former Miami manager who's now an associate athletics director at LSU. "That’d be my player comparison for him. Unbelievable passer, can shoot it from deep. Even if it didn’t look like he was moving fast, he was smooth and fluid and knew how to get to his spots. ... He might be a step behind you physically, but he’s three steps ahead of you mentally.

"That was pretty obvious, for me, from the first time that I ever stepped on a court with him. I’m sure it’s continued when he’s been at Auburn, too.”

It has.

"He was Joker before Joker," former Tigers manager Michael Wilmot said.

A voice in the ear

The phone call lasted about an hour, with the two parties bonding over their connection to Boston and discussing what life looks like in Auburn for someone fresh out of college.

Burgomaster notified Miami during his senior season that he planned on taking coaching seriously once he graduated. Larrañaga didn't have an open spot on his staff, but the Hurricanes were determined to find a home for an up-and-coming assistant who had done right by the program for nearly half a decade.

That's when Adam Fisher connected with Harris Adler. Fisher, currently the head coach at Temple and previously an assistant at Miami, reached out to Adler, who at the time was on Pearl's staff, and let him know he had a potential candidate to be a graduate assistant if the Tigers were in the market. They were, and Burgomaster made his way to Auburn for an in-person visit after passing screen calls from Adler and Pearl.

Burgomaster was offered the job. He accepted at the airport on his way back to Florida.

"As I recall, he had done his homework on me and us and he really wanted it," Pearl said. "I think the next thing was it didn’t take me long to recognize he had a really good mind and a really good feel. He just had no experience. The biggest thing with me and Mike is, I quickly stopped treating him like a graduate assistant and started treating him like a coach."

Pearl calls his own plays, but Burgomaster has heavy input before and during games while Pearl is dealing with other head coaching responsibilities. The duo also combined this offseason to revamp the offense, bringing in more of a five-out strategy that gives big men Johni Broome and Dylan Cardwell an opportunity to play away from the rim and open up the floor.

Burgomaster's suggestions are accepted about 90% of the time, Pearl estimates. That figure has grown rapidly since Burgomaster first joined as a 22-year-old nearly eight years ago.

"When Mike then graduated and it was time for him to go off and do what all grads do, and that’s stay a year or two and go on to bigger and better things, we worked really hard to create bigger and better things for him here at Auburn," Pearl said. "Because I recognized that he was too valuable to me and too valuable to us."

Richard Silva is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at rsilva@gannett.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @rich_silva18.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Inside Mike Burgomaster's ascension to Auburn's offensive architect