The Auburn Tigers just closed the gap on the University of Alabama in the national title debate, and they didn’t have to take a single snap to do it. Claiming four new national titles in one swoop, in the year 2025, has to rank as Auburn’s greatest victory since the Kick Six.
Thing is, based on the precedent already set down by that school across the state, Auburn is completely justified in claiming most, if not necessarily all four of the new titles. What’s good for the Tide is good for the Tigers, after all.
“For too long, Auburn has chosen a humble approach to our program’s storied history — choosing to recognize only Associated Press national championships,” Auburn athletic director John Cohen told On3 in announcing the new title windfall. Two banners, for the 1957 and 2010 seasons, hang in Jordan-Hare Stadium, and prior to this week the Tigers also acknowledged the 1913, 1983 and 1993 seasons as meeting national championship qualifications.
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Effective immediately, Auburn will now claim the 1910, 1914, 1958 and 2004 seasons as national championship ones, because, as Cohen notes, the Tigers’ recognitions “now align with the well-established standard used by the NCAA’s official record book and our peers across the nation.”
Auburn can justify the new rings on two fronts: first, because pre-21st-century college football was a chaotic nest of competing rankings and ad hoc justifications, and second, because Alabama already went there.
Reason #1: Nobody knows anything
The Tigers are taking advantage of 20th century college football’s inherent absurdity. Then as now, the soul of college football lies in argument, the furious and fiery debate over unanswerable questions of strength and worth. But for all the good that the College Football Playoff and its predecessor postseason series have brought the game, they’ve robbed us of the debate of which team really would’ve come out on top in a winner-take-all matchup.
When you determine your postseason rankings via polls rather than games, there’s ample room for debate … and ample territory to claim championships on your own a century after the fact. Multiple contemporaneous and after-the-fact polls have attempted to make sense of college football’s anything-goes era, some with far more statistical rigor and validity than others. Still, finding a poll that breaks your way is like finding a $100 bill on the ground; you might not be entitled to it, but you’re going to keep it anyway.
Auburn does have history in its corner. The Auburn of the 1910s was a fearsome unit, led by a diminutive Irishman named Mike Donahue and featuring players with spectacular names like Fatty Warren, Baby Taylor and Moon Ducote. In the three national championship seasons Auburn now claims, the Tigers won 22 games, lost one and tied one. Auburn and Alabama weren’t playing at that time due to hard feelings on both sides, which was good news for a Tide team that went a mediocre 15-11 over the same stretch.
The 1958 Auburn team played under a total blackout — no television, no bowl appearances — but still managed to go 9-0-1. That was only good enough for fourth in the final rankings, behind LSU (10-0), Iowa (7-1-1), and Army (8-0-1). The 2004 team went 13-0 but was not included in the two-team BCS, losing out on a berth by mere percentage points to USC and Oklahoma. Auburn and Oklahoma were tied going into the regular season’s final week, but because Auburn didn’t beat Alabama badly enough in the Iron Bowl, winning by “only” eight points, Oklahoma moved ahead only to get shellacked by USC in the Orange Bowl.
(Incidentally, I cover all this in my new — and apparently already dated — book “Iron In The Blood: How the Alabama vs. Auburn Rivalry Shaped the Soul of the South,” on sale next Tuesday. Feel free to correct the appropriate passages by hand.)
Reason #2: Alabama did it first
If you’re mad at Auburn for claiming four new titles, you might want to reserve a good measure of your scorn for their rival. Back in the 1980s, an Alabama sports information director went diving in the record books and in one swoop, awarded Alabama five pre-Bear Bryant-era titles. These range from defensible and acceptable to absurd, like the 1941 season where Alabama went 9-2 and finished 20th (!) in the AP poll … but ranked No. 1, tied with Minnesota, in a single, much smaller poll. Nothing Auburn did Tuesday is anywhere near as egregious as that, and yet the 1941 team remains canonized on Alabama’s Walk of Champions in front of Bryant-Denny Stadium.
Now, granted, there’s the question of an incredibly slippery slope here. If Auburn is going to claim a national title for 2004, why can’t Utah — which also went undefeated at 12-0 that year — also claim one? Why couldn’t 2017 Central Florida or 2023 Florida State, which, like 2004 Auburn, were both left out of the postseason dance despite going undefeated?
For that matter, why can’t Alabama claim the 1966 title and jump up to 19? That season, Alabama went 11-0 with six shutouts, but finished behind two teams — Notre Dame and Michigan State — that went 9-0-1 and played to a tie in late November. The suspicion, then and now, was that pollsters of the day were punishing the Crimson Tide for the state of Alabama’s woeful record on civil rights in the turbulent 1960s. (Politics and sports have always intertwined.)
Yes, Auburn’s ring-grab could well set off a new wave of schools retroactively seeking to claim national titles won by their great-grandfathers. We could see new banners hanging in stadiums all across the country as enterprising researchers whip up dissertation-length justifications for why their school deserves titles from the days before cars or TV.
But so what? We now have in place a means of determining, once and for all, a season’s indisputable national champion. And as college football sins go, a bit of reapportioned valor ranks pretty low on the list. We’ve got to hold onto something to argue about, after all.
