Fall Camp 15: The Auburn players to watch this preseason

From the freaky freshmen to the new starters, here's our annual list of the Tigers who intrigue us the most as fall camp opens.

(Austin Perryman/Auburn Tigers)

To borrow a phrase from Auburn basketball and apply it to football, it’s ‘bout that time.

Auburn football opens fall camp Wednesday, and preseason practices officially begin Thursday morning. Like last year, the Tigers are hoping they’ll be able to beat the sweltering Alabama heat by going in the morning, at least until school starts back.

As is tradition here at The Auburn Observer, we’re wrapping up our preseason preview newsletters — which included nearly 25,000 combined words in the State of the Program summer series — and focusing on the return of practices with our Fall Camp 15.

These are the 15 players that we’ll be watching the closest during fall camp. Some are expected to start. Others are looking to make a jump up the depth chart. Several haven’t made their Auburn debuts yet. But they all bring a large amount of intrigue.

Picking this group of players was a little different than our previous editions of the Fall Camp 15. Let’s go back to some of the intro to last year’s piece:

For the next several weeks, Auburn will have a whole lot of position battles to decide, roles to establish and strategies to nail down. This roster is almost split 50/50 between returning pieces and newcomers, and it feels like almost everything is up for grabs with just one month left until the start of the new season.

That really isn’t the case in 2024. Yes, Auburn is still in something of a rebuild mode as it heads into Year 2 under Hugh Freeze and looks to end the streak of losing seasons. But, while so much felt wide-open last fall, there’s much more continuity and clarity with the roster this time around.

We’ll soon find out if that familiarity can push Auburn to the improvement it needs.

The Fall Camp 15 is listed in the traditional football positional order — starting with the offensive backs and working through the rest of the skill players, then to the linemen and the defensive backs. While there isn’t a quarterback on this year’s list, thanks largely to Payton Thorne returning as a starter, there is a specialist at the end.

RB Jeremiah Cobb

At SEC Media Days, Freeze said he might put Auburn’s two most experienced running backs — Jarquez Hunter and Damari Alston — in yellow non-contact jerseys in fall camp. The Tigers know exactly what they have in the league’s returning leader in rushing yards and his bruising primary backup.

You can look at that strategy a number of different ways. But what you might not be thinking about first and foremost is how that could pave the way for more preseason touches for Jeremiah Cobb.