Chad Baker-Mazara is going to the Final Four in San Antonio, via the Dominican Republic, and a high school in New Jersey, and a prep school in rural Ohio, and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and a junior college in Niceville, Fla., and now Auburn University in eastern Alabama.
But the wiry 6-foot-6 wing, by his admission, doesn’t get to San Antonio if it wasn’t for a 12-month detour to the opposite side of the country — or more specifically, if it wasn’t for how his year at San Diego State ended.
“I was a little younger,” is how Baker-Mazara puts it, “having fun, enjoying my time, not being locked in to the things I had to be locked in about.”
Baker-Mazara was coming off a season where he was named Mountain West sixth man of the year and coming off a final game where he scored 17 points in the first half in an overtime loss against Creighton in the NCAA Tournament. He wanted to return. He planned to return.
But he had struggled academically throughout the season, skipping classes, missing tutoring sessions, failing tests, not completing assignments, running endless rows of stairs in Viejas Arena as punishment, and he needed to pass multiple courses in both SDSU summer sessions to maintain his eligibility for 2022-23. With a week left in the first summer session, he was so far behind that it was mathematically impossible to catch up.
Coach Brian Dutcher summoned Baker-Mazara to his office and pulled the plug.
“It was an eye-opening conversation,” Baker-Mazara says. “You never think something like that will happen until it happens. It was very hard. I’m kind of glad that I went through it. It was a growing-up moment I had to go through in my life. Some people have to go through it in different ways. I had to go through it that way.
“My parents were both mad. That was weeks of earfuls: ‘Man, what are you doing?’ It was weeks. I had to get my ear chewed off a couple times. Even my grandfather was mad at me. … I learned my lesson.”
It really didn’t hit home until nine months later, when the Aztecs went to the Final Four — and then the championship game — in Houston without him. Baker-Mazara watched Lamont Butler’s iconic buzzer-beater on his phone … on a bus … in Hutchinson, Kan., … at the national junior college tournament.
“I promise you that last year when San Diego State made their run, he was rooting for them,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl says, “but he also recognized that he could have been at the Final Four. He missed that opportunity. He puts that on himself.”
Auburn guard Chad Baker-Mazara (10) walks on the court against Michigan State during the first half in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
You could say he got hit over the head with a panhandle.
Without Division I academic eligibility, he was faced with two choices: spend a year rehabilitating his grades at the juco level, or turn pro in Latin America. His father, Derrek Baker, a former college and pro player, made the decision for him.
“I snatched him out and put him in junior college, which is the best thing that happened to him,” Baker told On3.com. “He wasn’t really listening. He wanted to do it his own way. Kids are like that sometimes. Sometimes you fall on your face, and I just wanted to be there to pick him back up.”
The destination: the Northwest Florida State Raiders in Niceville, a tiny town (population 16,490) in Okaloosa County in the west end of the Florida panhandle.
It was a humbling experience, to say the least.
“You get a lot of, how do I say this,” Baker-Mazara says, searching for the word, “amenities, that’s it. You get a lot of amenities at Division I that you don’t have at a JC. At the same time, it made me grateful for the situation I’m in right now and made me see that I can’t commit the same mistakes I did before.
“I’ve grown up.”
You won’t get an argument from his numbers, averaging 10.0 and 12.2 points in his two seasons at Auburn while shooting nearly 40% from 3 and leading the team in steals. Or his accolades, named all-SEC third team and Julius Erving Award finalist for college basketball’s top small forward. You will get an argument from his antics, though, which remain impulsive and incendiary.
Auburn was a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament last year and sent to Spokane, Wash., where SDSU was a 5 seed in the same quadrant of the bracket. Baker-Mazara met up with his former Aztecs teammates for pizza the night before their first-round games, reminiscing about the good times on the Mesa, envisioning a reunion in the second round.
Derrek Baker flew 3,000 miles from the Dominican Republic to see it, surprising his son in the hotel.
He got to see him play all of 181 seconds, when Baker-Mazara violently elbowed Yale guard August Mahoney in the chest and was ejected following a video review. The short-handed Tigers would lose 78-76, and Yale played the Aztecs instead.
“Lmao yall lame,” Baker-Mazara tweeted during the game while banished to the locker room, accompanied by three laughing emojis.
This season, he was ejected in the second half of a 93-91 loss against rival Alabama for elbowing Chris Youngblood in the back of the head on a skirmish for a rebound.
Pearl, Auburn’s veteran coach, is used to it by now, treading the line between his internal flame heating the house but not burning it down.
“Yeah, sometimes I might go over the edge,” Baker-Mazara says. “But he knows I’m not really trying to do that. He knows who I am. I’m a fiery person. He talks to me every day, staying in my head, like: ‘Be yourself but at the same time try to be composed so you won’t hurt us.’ I appreciate him a lot for that, because not many coaches try to let you be yourself out here.”
Baker-Mazara is still at Auburn this season — and could be again next season with additional Division I eligibility from his year in junior college — largely because of his unique relationship with Pearl.
In the days after the ejection against Yale, Baker-Mazara became a social media target of a frustrated fan base blaming him for the loss. Pearl had his back.
“I’m just going to tell the Auburn family, while I know you’re disappointed, if somebody was messing with your son, you’d stand up for your son a little bit, wouldn’t you?” Pearl said in an unsolicited diatribe to local media. “Stop messing with my son. Stop it. He apologized. He made a mistake. And I’m calling you out. I’m not having it. … Stop it.”
Pearl also knows this: Baker-Mazara, as unhinged as he appears at times, is something of a basketball savant, able to see passing angles others can’t, able to make big shots in big moments, able to anticipate plays before they happen.
He fills the box score like few other players: 12.2 points, 3.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 1.1 steals, .6 blocks, floaters in the lane, step-back 3s, breakaway dunks, 88.6% free throw shooting.
“Chad’s got stuff you can’t teach,” Pearl says. “He’s got ‘it.’ There’s an ‘it’ factor in sports. The great ones have it. He’s got it. You can’t explain it, but when you see it, you know it.”
Or put another way: His teams just win.
His prep school in Ohio was ranked No. 8 nationally. SDSU made the NCAA Tournament. Northwest Florida State reached the JC national championship game. Auburn spent most of this season ranked No. 1 and is now in the Final Four two years after he wistfully watched it on his phone on a bus in the middle of Kansas.
“It was best for both of us,” Dutcher says of Baker-Mazara’s departure from SDSU. “We loved Chad as a player, but he had some growing left to be done.
“Bruce (Pearl) called me. I told him: ‘I had no problems with Chad on the court at all. He can show up, roll out of bed and play the game. He has great instincts, knows how to play, he’s fun to be around, he’s a really great person. He just needs to get his life in better order, be more organized, be more on time and do all the little things. And I know you’ll help him do that.’ ”
Originally Published: April 3, 2025 at 6:53 PM PDT
