Best Auburn football players: Modern-era Mount Rushmore – From Bo to Cam

The best Auburn football players, including Heisman-winning quarterback Cam Newton, make up the Tigers’ Modern-era Mount Rushmore.

You can’t tell the story of SEC football without several chapters about Auburn football. Here is their modern-era Mount Rushmore, going back to 1980.

The Auburn Tigers have played college football since 1892. Over the years, they have developed several incredible rivalries, including the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry with the Georgia Bulldogs and the always exciting Iron Bowl vs. the Alabama Crimson Tide. With 772 wins to date and five claimed national titles, Auburn football has been a huge part of why the SEC is so fantastic.

Though Alabama has had more success and Georgia has been more consistent in its football history, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a college football program with more unforgettable moments and runs than Auburn football. I mean, Auburn had the Prayer at Jordan-Hare and Kick Six in consecutive games vs. their two rivals at the end of the 2013 regular season.

All the while, Auburn has given us 31 consensus All-Americans, 12 SEC Championship and three Heisman Trophy winners in their illustrious history. Though Auburn had great success under Ralph “Shug” Jordan in the 1950s, the program really found its footing in the 1980s under the legendary Pat Dye. Since the 1980s, Auburn has cemented its status as a college football blue-blood.

With that decade in mind, what we’re going to do today is give you the modern-era Mount Rushmore for Auburn football. We’ll go back as far as the 1980 NCAA season to give you the four best players to ever star in front of War Eagle Nation. There are also a few former stars who just missed the cut. Here is Auburn’s football modern-era Mount Rushmore and honorable mentions.

Honorable Mentions: Auburn football modern-era Mount Rushmore

Ed King starred on the offensive line during Dye’s heyday as Auburn’s head coach. King played at the same position Dye did in college at Georgia, as he became a two-time All-American at guard. King won two SEC Championships at Auburn in 1988 and 1989, earning unanimous All-American honors as a junior in 1990. He was be a second-round pick by the Cleveland Browns in 1991.

Many say the 2004 team was the best in college football history to never play for a national title. Auburn went undefeated and is the reason for the College Football Playoff. While they had many great players, you could say the best was cornerback Carlos Rogers, a consensus All-American and the Jim Thorpe Award winner. He went No. 9 overall to the Washington Redskins in 2005.

It wasn’t a one-man show during Auburn’s perfect national title-winning season in 2010. The Tigers had an absolute monster in the trenches in defensive tackle Nick Fairley. He was a consensus All-American and took home Auburn’s second-ever Lombardi Award. Fairley was named SEC Defensive Player of the Year in 2010 and was a first-round pick by the Detroit Lions.

Center Reese Dismukes deserves recognition for his latter two years at Auburn. He was a two-time All-SEC performer, helping Auburn win the SEC in 2013 and play for a national title. Dismukes backed up his stellar junior season with an All-American campaign in 2014, where he won the Rimington Trophy. He went undrafted in 2015 and played for a few NFL teams in the next few years.