Aubserver Mailbag 166: How much higher is Auburn's ceiling now?

This week: NFL Draft potential, 1,000-yard receivers, transfer reform, basketball targets, scheduling, Michael Harris II and snow cones

WR Cam Coleman (Austin Perryman/Auburn Tigers)

This is the time of year to be optimistic. So far, nobody has won — or, more importantly, lost — a single college football game in the 2024 campaign. If you want to shoot for the moon with your preseason expectations, go for it.

Let me take you behind the curtain a little bit: I don’t ever want to lie to you: the reader, the listener, the subscriber. I don’t want to inflate your hopes and dreams for your favorite team, because disappointment is going to be inevitable at some point in the season. (That even goes for teams that are juggernauts.) These are sports played by people in their teenage years and their early 20s. There’s a major element of uncertainty baked right into the product, good or bad.

But I also want you to be excited about the upcoming seasons for both Auburn football and Auburn men’s basketball. I want you to look forward to the fall and beyond. If you’re not, you probably aren’t going to want to read or listen to anything about these teams — unless you just like having a misery outlet. (Sometimes, I think some of y’all are just built that way.) Optimism is simply better for business.

I say all of this because this has been a pretty busy week for an Auburn football team desperate to break a rough streak of three straight losing seasons. The Tigers had clear needs in the transfer portal and addressed them by signing three new defensive linemen and a former No. 1 wide receiver from a strong Power 5 program.

By all means, be happy with the pickups. Hugh Freeze and his coaching staff didn’t have the Year 1 they wanted on the field, but they’re doing a much better job in the talent acquisition department than their predecessors. On paper, Auburn is bringing in players and building a roster that is closer to what it’s expected to do as a perennial force in the SEC, like it was for large stretches of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

Yet I’ll always encourage fans to ride the hype train responsibly. I’ve seen and heard fans who have taken the news of the week and pushed themselves towards predictions of double-digit wins for Auburn football this fall.

Pump the brakes some. This is still a rebuild, and it’s not going to happen quickly. Auburn is a more talented team than it was this time last year. But while talent acquisition is a prerequisite for being a top team, it’s by no means a guarantee. Just look at Texas A&M over the last few years. Or Florida. Or Miami. Shoot, Auburn is a clear example of a Blue-Chip Ratio team that has fallen well short of contention.

In this week’s mailbag, let’s take a step back and evaluate what the Tigers have done this offseason and how that affects their trajectory for the 2024 season. We’ll also take a look at Bruce Pearl and the basketball program — with multiple questions about scheduling and the portal — and have some fun with hypotheticals at the end.

Also, some of you indulged my goofiness online and put down your favorite snow cone flavors with your questions this week. I’m not sure why I’ve been thinking about them this week, other than the fact we’re getting closer to the summer. But we’ve got some serious takes about shaved ice with sugar syrup on it.

Let’s go.

How high has the win floor and ceiling been raised with the four portal adds this week? Also: Lime snow cone.

Aubiece

I think Auburn’s roster got better this week with the additions of Philip Blidi, Isaiah Raikes, Keyron Crawford and KeAndre Lambert-Smith. Friend of the newsletter Max Olson, who I used to work with at The Athletic, had three of those four players in the top 20 of best available transfers so far in the spring portal window.

Auburn’s defensive line wasn’t in a good spot in terms of the pure numbers game, and Blidi and Raikes have played considerable minutes at the Power 5 level. Crawford gives the Tigers another pass-rusher who is coming off a strong season at the Group of 5 level, and it still feels like he’s got room to grow as a newcomer to football.

It feels like Auburn should be better suited to rotate up front, which it hasn’t done enough of over the last few years. Lambert-Smith, meanwhile, steps into the Auburn receiver room as the most established Power 5 option. With how rough things have been through the air, you take that kind of production and run with it.

But I want to be careful in talking about the potential impact of these players. The Tigers didn’t land a can’t-miss superstar this week — and it’s not like there’s very many of those in the second portal window — but rather pieces who can help bridge the gap between what has been a tough now and what they hope will be a better future. Even Lambert-Smith, with all of his numbers that he brings from Penn State, has been inconsistent in terms of his production over the years.

I think Auburn is better prepared for the fall by adding these four players. Lambert-Smith fills an immediate need, eases some pressure off of that freshman class at wide receiver and has proven he can be a game-changer against quality competition. Blidi and Raikes make Auburn’s defensive tackles deeper and more experienced, and that could help push somebody or multiple somebodies to break out. Crawford is the definition of a backfilling bridge player on a roster with a lot of old and a lot of young. But they’re rotation guys, not stars. The good thing is that this is a dirty work position.

Do I see any of these transfers as players who make Auburn a win or two better right now? Not right now. It makes sense that the Tigers are surrounding Payton Thorne and the younger quarterbacks with more wide receiver talent, and it’s the strategy that makes the most sense with the program’s timeline. There’s a real chance it makes him a better quarterback and, in turn, makes Auburn a better team. But there are still a lot of unknowns and a whole lot of work to do as a passing attack.

On defense, Auburn should be able to handle any injuries and develop the blue-chip youngsters more effectively with the new additions. I’m still curious to see how that run defense shakes out with the returning production at inside linebacker but plenty of newer faces at defensive tackle. This could help the Tigers be a better defense, yet I’m not banking on them to become a dominant one. We’ll learn a lot in the early fall.

To sum it all up, the Tigers addressed needs this week that made them a more stable roster — but they didn’t dramatically increase their overall talent level, in my opinion. The floor might be higher than it was coming into the spring. The ceiling, though, is mostly going to be affected by the blue-chip high schoolers you recruit, develop and turn loose on the field. We’ve got some time before we see the fruits of that labor. For now, these older transfers are building blocks rather than signs of a finished product.

And a lime snow cone feels like it would be too tart for me. Throw some cream on there and make it more like a key lime pie, though? Now we’re talking.

Of the current players on the football team roster, who has the highest NFL draft ceiling and why?

John