Auburn football offensive lineman Gunner Britton compared the Tigers’ potential ceiling during the 2023 season to last season’s surprise College Football Playoff runner-up, TCU, which had leveraged the transfer portal during first-year head coach Sonny Dykes’ first recruiting cycle.
“So now with the portal, being able to kind of win now,” Britton said (h/t AL.com). “I believe it was TCU last year did a lot, where they added like 40-something guys from the portal, and everybody’s like, ‘What are they doing?’ And then they go play for a national championship and you’re like, ‘OK, well maybe there’s a method to the madness.'”
Britton comes to the Plains as a graduate transfer from Western Kentucky, who the Tigers beat during Week 12 of the 2022 season at Jordan-Hare Stadium; Cadillac Williams’ last game on the Plains as interim head coach.
Auburn football OL Gunner Britton on ‘freak shows’ in the SEC
Britton, coming from Conference USA, is experiencing a dramatic step up in competition — and the Conway, South Carolina native spoke about that to the media while referring to the talent in SEC locker rooms as “freak shows.”
“Obviously, you’ve got some freak shows here,” Britton said. “You see Alabama, you see Georgia, you see Tennessee, Arkansas — every one of them has freak shows, and that’s a big difference. But everybody, really, the difference is there’s 100 guys here that are really, really good athletes, whereas Western I was probably 40 to 50, is kind of how I would say. That’s the big difference.”
AU, as a bottom-tier SEC squad last season, dominated the Hilltoppers on November 19 despite WKU being a nine-win team at the Group of Five level. That in and of itself illustrates the difference in weight classes in the sport. Hopefully, Britton and the other G5 recruits are able to maintain their elite level of play in the most elite conference the sport has to offer.