It's not exactly breaking news with the early departures of stars Cam Newton and Nick Fairley that Auburn's championship band is splitting up in spectacular fashion after one surprising, frenzied push to the top. Leave it to unrivaled stat head Phil Steele, though, to put in perspective just how much of the championship team is leaving the Plains: With just seven starters coming back in 2011, the Tigers have fewer returning starters than any other team in the country. That's not fewest in the SEC or fewest of the major conferences. In terms of front-line experience, the '11 Tigers will be 120th out of 120.Of course, the biggest stars, Newton and Fairley, were both first-year starters in 2010 themselves. But you don't pull All-American, top-10 draft picks off your bench every year, and most of the supporting cast had been around the block: Seven offensive starters against Oregon in the BCS Championship Game were seniors playing their final game, along with seven more starters on defense. That number includes four-fifths of the offensive line and five members of the defensive front seven (not including Fairley), leaving exactly one returning starter on each line: Right tackle Brandon Mosley on offense and defensive end Nosa Eguae on defense.
Altogether, the Tigers will defend their championship in the fall minus their leading passer, leading rusher, two of their top four receivers, four starting offensive linemen, their top two pass rushers and four of their top five tacklers – an unprecedented exodus for a championship team in the BCS era. In broader sports terms, that makes the Tigers the amateur equivalent of the 1997 Florida Marlins.
College football doesn't lend itself to that kind of attrition en masse, but the track record of teams that have suffered a major, one-time exodus after a championship or near-championship season over the last decade aren't exactly encouraging:
• Florida State (2001): The Seminoles, losers to Oklahoma in their bid to repeat as BCS champions in 2000, sent off Heisman-winning quarterback Chris Weinke, as well as their leading rusher (Travis Minor), leading receiver (Marvin Minnis), three starting offensive lineman and eight starters on defense, five of whom were drafted in the first three rounds. Old habits dies hard enough that the '01 'Noles opened at No. 6 in the AP poll, but subsequently dropped four games en route to the Gator Bowl, ending a nine-year run atop the ACC and a 13-year run with at least 10 wins and a top-five finish at season's end. A decade later, FSU is still yet to renew the streak.
• USC (2006): The exodus from the explosive outfit that fell just short of its second straight BCS championship in 2005 would have been enough to cripple almost any other team for the foreseeable future: A staggering 11 Trojans went in the '06 draft, including Heisman headliners Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush, the first of six offensive starters off the board in the first three rounds alone. In USC's case, though, all nine returning starters were All-Pac-10 picks in '05, and took the Trojans back within an eleventh-hour flop at UCLA of another championship trip the following fall. By the end of the year, the '06 lineup featured eight future draft picks who weren't listed as starters at the beginning of the season, not including backup quarterback Mark Sanchez.
• Penn State (2006): The Nittany Lions may be the best analogy for Auburn's run in 2010, featuring a star quarterback who came out of nowhere in his only season as a starter (Michael Robinson), an overwhelmingly senior-laden offensive line and a dominating defensive lineman (Tamba Hali) at the head of a soon-to-be dismantled defense that lost the entire starting secondary and all but one member of the front four. The Lions went from back-to-back losing records in 2003-04 to Big Ten champions in 2005, finishing third in the final polls, and returned immediately to the fringes with just nine returning starters in '06.
• Florida (2007): Not many championship teams can count on improving offensively after replacing a four-year starter with a true sophomore in a lineup that lost half its starters, but even Tim Tebow's Heisman-winning effort for the SEC's No. 1 offense in '07 couldn't overcome the growing pains of a defense replacing nine starters, seven of them draft picks. Even stocked with future draft picks itself, the spanking-new Gator D couldn't prevent four losses in a transition year between the plucky '06 champs and the juggernauts of 2008-09.
• Hawaii (2008): The Warriors' 12-0 Sugar Bowl run in 2007 yielded one of the most prolific offenses of the decade, virtually all of which hopped the first flight out of the islands when it was over – including June Jones, who followed his record-breaking quarterback, Colt Brennan, and top receivers to the mainland to take over as head coach at SMU. The defense also lost most of its starters, plunging UH from the greatest season in school history to a losing record in '08, with almost three full touchdowns per game on the board.
• Texas (2010): The numbers aren't as overwhelming, but the impact of the departures from the '09 BCS runner-up – quarterback Colt McCoy, his best receiver (Jordan Shipley), three starting offensive linemen, the Big 12's best pass rusher (Sergio Kindle), the leading tackler (Roddrick Muckelroy) and the best playmaker on defense (Earl Thomas) – added up to a disaster on every front last year, by far the worst of Mack Brown's tenure in Austin. Considering the expectations, the resulting collapse may exceed the implosions at Tennessee, Michigan and Notre Dame as the most spectacular in recent memory.
So precedent is a mixed bag. No defending BCS champion has ever opened the following season outside of the top 10 in the preseason polls; the closest a championship-caliber team has come to that kind of fall, in fact, was Auburn in 2005, which dropped all the way to 16th in the preseason AP poll after losing the core of its uncrowned, 13-0 team in 2004. (The Tigers finished 14th in '05 with a 9-3 record.) As far as actual results, only two defending BCS champs, Florida in 2007 and LSU a year later, have dropped more than three games the year after winning the title, and only the '08 Tigers fell out of the polls altogether.
The early line on 2011 has Auburn falling anywhere from 14th to nearly out of the polls altogether in the wake of their great departure, typically coming in somewhere in the mid-teens. Vegas is even less optimistic, especially with Alabama and LSU loading up for their own title runs in an intensely competitive division. A pair of back-to-back, top-10 recruiting classes eases the pain somewhat, but if the Tigers are going to count on that kind of youth movement filling the most massive gaps ever experienced by a defending BCS champ, just holding fast in the top 20 – or the top half of the SEC West – will be a more than respectable encore.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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