Auburn football is ranked as a second-tier football program

Every five years, The Athletic's Stewart Mandel puts out his "Kings and Barons" article. It's his fun way of ranking college football programs into tiers. The kings are the cream of the crop programs across the country then each classification drops with each tier. The typical tiers are Kings, Barons, Knights, and Peasants.

This year he felt that he needed to add one higher class, Emperor, to put Alabama in a different tier from everyone else.

He listed Auburn as a Baron with 11 other schools that are just outside of the top tier of the programs throughout the country.

He has Auburn listed with Florida, Florida State, Iowa, Miami, Michigan State, Nebraska, Oregon, Penn State, Tennesee, Texas A&M, and Wisconsin.

Auburn should feel good about this placement as it takes a much larger look at where the school is in relation to the rest of college football. Despite the trips and falls that the team experienced last season, Auburn is still seen as one of the top programs in college football.

The top tier teams, or the Kings, in Mandel's article are Clemson, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, and USC.

Here was an interesting note from Mandel about the top two tiers of teams.

While unintentional, 15 of the 22 Emperors, Kings and Barons are from the Big Ten or SEC or Notre Dame. I believe that accurately reflects the increasing consolidation of power among those two conferences, which together accounted for 10 of the 12 most-watched games during both the 2019 and 2021 regular seasons.