Auburn football: 5 most overrated players in program history

The Auburn Tigers have had plenty of superstars, but some may have been overhyped. Here are the five most overrated players in Auburn football history.

For a program as great as what the Auburn Tigers have put together over the years, you will be hard-pressed to find a collection of what we’d like to call overrated players. Auburn football has had plenty of overachievers in school history, many of whom went on to have even better careers at the professional level than they ever did in college.

For as many blue-chip prospects as Auburn has sent to the NFL, very rarely do their best prospects bust. Even if they do end up busting, they usually end up with a great season or two before they end up washing out of the league. While Auburn has rarely been dominant year over year, rarely are the Tigers ever bad. It is why they have achieved blue-blood status as a program.

So what we’re going to try to do today is look at former Auburn stars who maybe weren’t as good as initially advertised. For some programs, finding NFL busts are incredibly easy. As for Auburn, this is really not the case, though they have had their fair share of professional misses. This is about finding guys whose hype was clearly overstated, but we just didn’t want to admit it as such.

Here are the five most overrated players in the history of Auburn football.

When Auburn went on its miraculous run to the 2013 BCS Championship Game, one of the Tigers’ biggest stars on offense was Heisman Trophy finalist running back Tre Mason. He was coming off a 1,000-yard rushing season for a terrible 3-9 Auburn team in 2012. Though a good back, Mason absolutely benefited from the hurry-up-and-run offense of incoming head coach Gus Malzahn.

Even though Malzahn was Auburn’s offensive coordinator when the Tigers won the 2010 National Championship with Cam Newton, the SEC seemed to forget completely what had worked down on The Plains only three years prior. Malzahn’s offense allowed former Georgia Bulldogs defensive back Nick Marshall to become a well-respected quarterback and for Mason to become an SEC star.

We do need to give Mason credit for being Auburn bell-cow that season, as Marshall wasn’t much of a passer. He did throw a beautiful deep ball, but his greatest throw was a tipped pass off two future Georgia transfer defensive backs Tray Matthews and Josh Harvey-Clemons into the hands of wide receiver Ricardo Louis for most glorious 73-yard pay dirt.

Besides being the beneficiary of Malzahn’s gimmicky high school offense, the reason Mason shows up on this list at No. 5 was how short-lived an unspectacular his NFL career. The former third-round pick by the then-St. Louis Rams only lasted three years in the league. Off-the-field issues and personal problems ended his NFL career before his 24th birthday.