AUBURN — The modern era of college football has become so transactional in nature that a lot of roster analysis can be boiled down to two questions: Who’s in? Who’s out?
For a Year 1 staff like the one Alex Golesh is heading up at Auburn, that feeling is even stronger. Golesh is importing as much of his 2025 USF offense — which finished No. 12 nationally in SP+ — as possible. When the Tigers open the season in two weeks, more than half of its first-choice offense could be made up of ex-Bulls.
And it’s easy for your eyes to get drawn to the same exercise on defense. Keldric Faulk and Keyron Crawford went to the NFL, and Auburn got Da’Shawn Womack and Nate Johnson from the transfer portal. Cody Sigler replaced Malik Blocton at defensive tackle, essentially. Andre Jordan Jr. and Gavin Jenkins are vying for snaps vacated by Kayin Lee and Jay Crawford at cornerback. The list goes on.
But what makes Auburn such a unique case for a high-level rebuild in 2026 is that it’s not a total reset. Sure, it can feel that way on offense, where Jeremiah Cobb and Omar Mabson II might be the only returners who play significant roles early.
Not on defense. DJ Durkin was in the running for the permanent head coaching job after serving as the interim to close last year, yet he decided to stay in his lucrative defensive coordinator role at Auburn under a different head coach. His decision played a huge role in bringing back players on a defense that was No. 16 in SP+.
“Coach Durkin is the reason why I stayed,” linebacker De’Marcus Riddick said Friday after practice. “That’s my dog. With the (shoulder injuries in 2025) and everything, I said that I’m not going to leave. It’s home for me, and there’s no point in leaving.”
The number of offensive players at Auburn who were here last year is in the single-digits, and most of them will likely be reserves. The defensive number is in the 20s, although not all of them are healthy right now.
It can be tempting to look at Auburn’s defense in that classic Who’s in? Who’s out? exercise. The level of on-paper star power that exited via the transfer portal, plus the NFL Draft, is not the level of on-paper star power that joined the roster this offseason.
But there is a large foundation that’s back from the side of the ball that actually did its job more often than not last year. Many of those players will play extensively in Week 1.
“It's a lot of guys that played under Coach Durkin last year and know his system and are able to teach the guys that we've got here now the way we do things,” second-year cornerback Blake Woodby said. “No matter what the record said for us last year, we still had an amazing defense, and we would like to continue to have those things.”
With Auburn looking to the new blood from USF to put life back into what has been a largely dormant offense for the better part of the last decade, the story on defense is mostly one that is tougher to measure in the preseason during this transactional age.
Auburn’s ceiling on defense — and, potentially, its ceiling as a team — will be based on just how much better these returning players will be in 2026. Some are already stars. Others are stepping into much bigger roles due to the departures from 2025.
But they all have something in common: They’ve been able to pick up where they left off last fall, and they’re ready to actually turn that into victories on the scoreboard.
“We all went to high schools where we're winning games,” Woodby said. “And we stepped into a situation last year where we didn't win as much as we wanted to. Nobody likes that feeling, and nobody likes to feel like we're not doing enough.”
After getting a chance to talk to each assistant coach and almost every defensive player expected to contribute at some point during this fall camp, here’s a position-by-position rundown of each returner on the defensive side of the ball for Auburn and where they stand as we get even closer to the start of a new season.