There are a whopping ten SEC teams in the AP preseason poll for the 2025 college football season. But according to former Alabama quarterback and current ESPN analyst Greg McElroy, there should be at least one more – the Auburn Tigers.
Yes, those Auburn Tigers.
It may come as a shock to hear an endorsement of Auburn from a former Alabama player given the heated nature of the Iron Bowl rivalry. But Greg McElroy is no Desmond Howard when it comes to their treatment of a former rival when it comes to their job as an analyst.
But it’s also a shock given Auburn has hit a rough patch in recent years. The Tigers have had four consecutive losing seasons and are yet to have one since firing Gus Malzahn after the 2020 campaign saw them finish 6-5. They finished 14th in the SEC last year and even lost at home to California.
Nevertheless, on his ESPN podcast, Always College Football with Greg McElroy, the national championship winner with the Crimson Tide shared why he thinks the Auburn Tigers are being “slept on” and disrespected entering the 2025 season with the transcript coming from On3.
“The other team I feel is really being slept on is Auburn. If you look at where they were last year, how many games were just flat out given away – just given away,” McElroy began, citing five-interception games against Cal and Arkansas last season, as well as one-score losses vs. Oklahoma and at Missouri. “It’s just, there’s no way (Auburn) can be as snakebit as they were last year. The football gods won’t allow, it’s not likely. I guess it can happen, Nebraska fans are like ‘We’ve been that way for awhile now, we’ve lost a lot of one-score games.’ I get it, so I understand it can happen for sure.”
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“But you look at where Auburn had challenges last year, they had challenges at quarterback, they were inconsistent at wide receiver, they were inconsistent on the offensive line, and then defensively at all three levels they were pretty solid. The offensive line has been solidified. That group is back mostly intact with a couple of high-profile transfers. You look at the receiver position, they bring in a game-breaker in Eric Singleton from Georgia Tech. So that group has immediately gone from a middle-tier group in the SEC to one of the top groups in the SEC at the wide receiver spot,” McElroy continued. “And at quarterback, with the challenges they had with turnovers last year, I know Jackson Arnold had his fair share of challenges with turnovers at Oklahoma, but it sounds like those things are kind of a thing of the past. So hopefully they’re going to get better quarterback play, they’re going to have better weapons, the offensive line is going to be better. The one position that is not as good as last year is running back, but they have some depth at that position as well.
“So I look at Auburn and for them to be 5, 8, 11, 12 spots – so basically 37th in college football – to me is way too far (down),” McElroy concluded. “I think Auburn has a chance to be a Top 25 team. I don’t think they’re a (College Football) Playoff team, but they have a chance to be a Top 25 team for sure. Especially with the pieces that’ve improved from last year to this year.”
It’s going to be interesting to see what folks around the college football universe think of McElroy’s comments given the tribalism that exists in the sport, especially amongst Big Ten and SEC fans. Big Ten fans are already up in arms about the huge numbers of SEC teams in the preseason poll, setting up another season long narrative battle like we saw last year. And to think that an SEC team that hasn’t won 10 games since 2017 is now getting hyped up may be a bridge too far.
But to be fair to the ESPN analyst, he also listed USC, Baylor, and Utah as disrespected teams in the poll, so this is not really a show of SEC bias. And if there’s anyone that should feel slept on, pour one out for the Missouri Tigers. They couldn’t even get ranked in this year’s preseason poll after going 21-5 the last two years, or even make Greg McElroy’s disrespected list.
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