When you’re talking top college football programs, don’t ignore Auburn’s challenging schedule

Somewhat lost in all the gloom and doom of the past week was something refreshingly fun. The Sporting News ranked the Top 10 college football programs of the last 10 years.

The names looked especially familiar in these parts. Four of these schools are from the SEC, including our Big Three — Alabama (No. 1), Georgia (No. 9) and Auburn (No. 10).

LSU was the other SEC school at No. 5. The others were Clemson (No. 2), Ohio State (No. 3), Oklahoma (No. 4), Florida State (No. 6), Oregon (No. 7) and Wisconsin (No. 8).

Before anyone starts arguing about the rankings, understand that the criteria used were objective. They awarded 10 points for a national championship, five points for either playing in a national championship game or making the College Football Playoff, three points for appearing in a New Year’s Six Bowl or one of the old BCS bowl games, and two points for producing a Heisman winner.

Now, we can quibble with the criteria itself. The Heisman is an individual award. Yeah, team performance matters to a degree. But five of the last 10 Heisman winners didn’t play in the national championship game. The other issue with the criteria is a team could lose, say, the Sugar Bowl by 30 points but that would have the same value as that bestowed on the winning team.

Still, it’s kind of hard to make an argument that any team was underrated or overrated.

To me, there were two notable takeaways from this:

One, there’s virtually no separation between Georgia and Auburn. Yeah, the Bulldogs won eight of the 11 meetings between the two during that span. But Auburn won two SEC championships during that span — which should have been used in the calculation rather than Heisman counts. And Auburn won a national championship, while Georgia — as Auburn fans like to take note — has not won a national title since Herschel Walker was a teenager. Never mind that he still looks like one. It has been 40 years nonetheless.

Here’s the other takeaway: Nobody among those 10 programs on the list has had a more consistently challenging schedule than Auburn.

The Tigers are the only team in college football that has to play three of those programs on that list every single year. Throw in that they played Clemson five times and that’s 35 games against four of the best programs in college football. The Tigers are 11-25 against Alabama, LSU, Georgia and Clemson during that span and 76-20 against everyone else.

Therein lies the perpetual challenge facing Auburn coach Gus Malzahn. He has built a program that’s on the brink of greatness. But the Tigers first have to get through the most brutal regular season schedule in college football. It’s easy to say Malzahn’s teams have underachieved. But what other coach could the Tigers hire to push them over the hump?

That’s not likely to change as long as Nick Saban and Kirby Smart are out-recruiting everyone else in the conference.

It makes for some fun football seasons in these parts. That is, if they play.