Auburn football: 5 most underrated players in Auburn Tigers history

Auburn football has produced a ton of stars, yet these guys are underrated.

In the SEC landscape, Auburn football always feels underrated, doesn’t it?

Despite being a blue-blood program in the eyes of many who live and breathe college football, the Tigers are in a class with very few contemporaries. Of all the perceived “little brother schools”, Auburn has done more than its fair share of winning. If their in-state rival was pretty much anybody but the Alabama Crimson Tide, we’d have a greater respect for the Auburn Tigers.

To date, Auburn has claimed two national championships and had three of its star players win the Heisman Trophy. Elite programs historically such as the Clemson Tigers and the Tennessee Volunteers have never even had a single Heisman winner, much less three like Auburn football has produced. Auburn is both overrated and underrated at the same time in a way unlike anybody else.

Though Auburn may have its down years, the Tigers rarely produce a bad football team. While it happens every so often when you least expect, Auburn can give us a truly great team that catches the college football world by surprise. Yet all the while, you have to be a pretty special player to even sniff the field of play at a school like Auburn, no matter who’s coaching the Tigers.

So what we’re going to do today is take a look back at some of the most underrated players in Auburn football history. Did this guy play during a down period for the program? What his excellence outshined by someone else on the same team? How did this guy slip through the cracks? He was pretty damn good at Auburn and we’re going to touch on that today, guys.

Here are the five most underrated Auburn football players of all time.

Takeo Spikes is the first of many former Auburn players on this list who became stars in the NFL. Spikes played for the Tigers from 1995 to 1997 under head coach Terry Bowden. While Auburn went to a bowl game every season, the Tigers never won more than 10 games during any of Spikes’ three seasons playing for them.

Back in 1997, Spikes led the team in tackles and was the star player on the Auburn defense that got to the SEC Championship game. Despite being named MVP for his performance in that high-stakes game, the Tigers lost to Peyton Manning’s Tennessee Volunteers by a single point, 30-29. Spikes would then go pro the following spring where he’d spend 15 strong seasons in the NFL.

He spent his first five seasons with the dysfunctional Cincinnati Bengals who drafted him No. 13 overall. Though a great player, Spikes never played on any strong teams. In fact, he holds an NFL record of playing in 219 games without ever making the postseason once. Despite all this, he was a tackling machine in the NFL, making two Pro Bowls and an All-Pro team with the Buffalo Bills.

Where Spikes is underrated in the eyes of Auburn football is that he didn’t play on a conference championship team under Bowden, nor did he take home any major honors during his time with the team. We remember Spikes more for all he accomplished in the NFL over 15 years, but we need to give him some more love for what he did while he was at Auburn in the mid-1990s.