The Auburn Football All-Quarter Century Team: Offense

We're 25 seasons into this century. Let's celebrate it by picking a team of the best Auburn football players to lace them up since 2000.

(Auburn Tigers)

AUBURN — If this century was a football game, we’re heading into the second quarter.

While Auburn football is in the midst of one of its toughest stretches in program history, you can’t deny that this century hasn’t been good to the Tigers. From 2000 to 2024, Auburn won its first national championship in the modern era, played for another and arguably should have played for one more.

In these last 25 seasons of Auburn football, fans have been treated to some of the best collections of talent the Plains has ever seen. More than 20 All-Americans have laced them up for the Tigers, along with a dozen first-round NFL Draft picks.

Look, we’re in the smack middle of the offseason. New developments are few and far between right now. More season preview content has to stretch out for the next couple of months, before the Tigers hit the field for a critical fall camp.

With that in mind, let’s do the ultimate game of Remember Some Guys and pick the All-Quarter Century Team for Auburn football. This exercise has been a popular one in recent months, with the NHL naming official ones for all of their respective teams and outlets such as The Athletic picking MLB squads.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll share our picks for the offense, followed by the defense on Wednesday morning. We squeezed in one more player than the usual 11 on both sides of the ball — so we have two running backs and three wide receivers on offense, plus a full 4-3 front plus a nickel back on defense — along with a specialist for both sides.

Some of these picks were extremely tough. Some were surprisingly easy. In the end, we decided to let a player’s individual accolades and statistics carry most of the weight, with team success playing a role in any necessary tiebreakers.

Feel free to share your own Quarter Century picks on offense in the comments below, or shoot your thoughts to me in an email at the1andonlyJF@gmail.com. (If you want to tie these into a mailbag question for Thursday, even better.)

We’ll start with the single easiest decision in the history of any all-time team picks.

(Auburn Tigers)

Quarterback

Cam Newton

Picking a team like this usually requires you to look at the longevity and consistency of a player’s career. It’s one thing to have a hot season, but what did you do across your entire body of work? Choosing a player based on one year doesn’t seem smart.

But Newton transcends all of that, because he might have had the single-best season of any single player in college football history.

You know the story. Newton transfers to Auburn after his dismissal at Florida and a season in junior college. He doesn’t lose a single game. He makes career-defining plays look routine. The Tigers win the national championship. He wins the Heisman Trophy. He becomes the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft.

When it comes to quarterbacking, Newton is the hands-down best to ever do it on the Plains. Just one more year as a Tiger would have only ran up the score on everyone else. Newton averaged more than 10 yards per pass attempt. His 50 total touchdowns rank seventh all-time at Auburn — for an entire career. Only two quarterbacks have Auburn have rushed for more yards than him. Again, he only played one season.

All due respect to the rest of the quarterbacks who suited up and led the Tigers to wins over multiple years in this quarter century. Jason Campbell would be a fine choice in almost any other period in Auburn history. But this isn’t even remotely close.