War Eagle Extra

The day after: Analyzing the 2012 Auburn recruiting class

For the first time since Gene Chizik took over the reins of the Auburn football program, the Tigers had a lot more riding on national signing day than usual. Rarely has such a solid class depended on so many late decisions from prospects. Partly because Auburn is stocked with youngsters at every position from the last two top-five recruiting classes, and partly because the Tigers decided to go for the highest-level prospects this season rather than trying to fill out a massive, monster class like other teams in the SEC, Auburn’s day came down to a string of national signing day decisions from top prospects.

But lost in the constant stream of prospect decisions — by my count, Auburn went 3 for 9 — was the fact that the Tigers had already landed a string of four-star recruits that had the class in decent shape before national signing day, and none of those prospects flipped. In the end, Auburn finished with 19 prospects, a smallish recruiting class considering they can sign 25, but all 19 were three-star recruits or above. Anyway, here are Auburn’s ranks right now, with three targets — OL Alex Kozan, OL Jordan Diamond and WR Stefon Diggs — still mulling over their decisions. The first number is Auburn’s national rank, followed by their SEC rank.

  • Rivals: 11, 4
  • Scout: 14, 6
  • ESPN: 17, 6
  • 247Sports: 17, 7

For the most part, I spent my day at the Auburn Athletics Complex tracking Auburn’s signees as the letters of intent rolled into Auburn’s fax machine and posting their profiles to the blog. Need to take a look at any specific player? Simply scroll back through the blog for a look at his signee profile, which includes all of his rankings, a highlight video and any other relevant information I could find.

And here’s all the stuff the Ledger-Enquirer wrote on Auburn’s 2012 class, including a story by colleague Jeff Hendrickson on Central-Phenix City quarterback Jonathan Wallace, a last-minute addition to the Tigers’ class.

What follows, then, is a list of Auburn’s complete signing class from yesterday, minus Prosch, with links to the incoming signee profile from other parts of the blog. Click on the player’s name, you see his profile. Auburn counted the fullback among its incoming players, but for the Ledger-Enquirer’s purposes, we limited the class to incoming freshmen.

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