The 2010 Auburn Tigers were a great team that needed all the planets to align to become the legendary memory on the Plains that they've become. Cam Newton needed to be enticed away from Dan Mullen's Mississippi State Bulldogs and have the greatest season in College Football history, Nick Fairley needed to stay the course after playing a secondary role the season before, Michael Dyer had to rise to the occasion in the BCS National Championship Game against the Oregon Ducks, and countless other breaks had to transpire for history to unfold like it did.
Undoubtedly, that team was an underdog. They were the underdog in that year's Iron Bowl, they were an underdog against the South Carolina Gamecocks in the SEC Championship Game, and they began as the underdog against the Oregon Ducks before the betting public bought in and swayed it away from the Ducks.
History seems to be forgetting that, though. Saturday Down South's Connor O'Gara claims that the SEC hasn't been an underdog since Tommy Tuberville's undefeated 2004 Tigers, overlooking the 2010 team that wasn't supposed to achieve everything they did.
O'Gara overlooked that team while discussing the greater narrative surrounding the SEC's fall from grace as the perennial overlord.
"After having 2 decades of data that showed not all conferences were created equal, the SEC’s 3-year pattern suggests that it really is a Power 4, and not a Power 2 in the NIL/transfer portal era. For a conference that wants to puff its chest out at the rest of the world, that’s not the development it hoped to see. For a college football world that grew tired of the regional dominance, you could argue the SEC’s era of dominance ending benefits the greater good," O'Gara wrote.
"You could also argue that for the first time since an undefeated 2004 Auburn squad wasn’t included in the BCS National Championship, the SEC can sell an underdog, 'nobody believes in us' narrative. Granted, plenty of AP Top 25 voters will still probably believe in the SEC enough to have the conference all over the preseason polls, and if you close your eyes, you can picture no shortage of SEC representation in the first Playoff Poll of 2026."
ESPN called 2010 Auburn Tigers 'unlikely' champions
ESPN's Bill Connelly sees 2010 Auburn as an "unlikely" champion, meaning that the underdog narrative hasn't been completely forgotten.
"After more than a half-century without a real title*, Auburn finally achieved another one with one of the most lightning-in-a-bottle seasons in college football history. The Tigers had gone just 13-12 in their two previous seasons, and they would go 11-14 over the next two, but in between they played 14 games with Cam Newton at quarterback and won all of them, seven by just one score. It was one of the more clutch runs we'll ever see; teams on these types of runs usually falter well before the national title game, but Newton's Tigers did not," Connelly wrote.
"(* Yes, Auburn claims four titles from between 1957 and 2010, but that doesn't mean I have to acknowledge them as legitimate.)"
These Tigers may be grouped in with the pre-NIL-yet-still-NIL-driven Florida Gators, LSU Tigers, Alabama Crimson Tide, and Georgia Bulldogs teams of the SEC's golden era, which is definitively over after three straight seasons of missing the CFP, but 2010 Auburn was not like the others.
That team stands alone. They overcame several Goliaths, and did more with less.