gus-postgame-IB-2013.JPG

Gus Malzahn is all smiles after beating Alabama in his first Iron Bowl as a head coach Nov. 30, 2013 in Auburn, Alabama. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

Shug Jordan spent a quarter century at Auburn and won a national championship, and he couldn't do it.

Tommy Tuberville was there for a decade and put together an undefeated season, and he couldn't pull it off.

Pat Dye spent a dozen years on the Plains and won four SEC titles, but he achieved this other feat just once. Even though he coached his last game with the Tigers in 1992, Dye remains the first, last and only Auburn coach to do it.

What is this elusive milestone that Gus Malzahn has a chance to reach in his sophomore season? He can become just the second head coach in Auburn history to put together back-to-back 10-win seasons.

Dye did it by going 10-2 in both 1988 and 1989, and that's it. No one had done it before, and no one else has done it since.

It's a most unusual asterisk for one of the top 15 college football programs of all time, and it's an awful lot of history weighing against the Tigers making a run at a second straight SEC title and one of the four berths in the first College Football Playoff.

How hard is it to win 10 games? Not as hard as you might think. With the exception of Doug Barfield, every Auburn coach since Jordan has done it at least once.

How hard is it to win 10 games in consecutive seasons? Harder than you might imagine, and not just at Auburn.

Alabama set the standard for 10-win seasons under Bear Bryant. He had 13 of them in his 25 years as head coach at his alma mater, and that was long before 12-game regular seasons. Bryant put together runs of five straight 10-win seasons from 1971-75 and four in a row from 1977-80. He also went back-to-back in 1961-62.

Since then, Alabama has had seven head coaches - not counting Mike Price, who doesn't count in this discussion because he never coached a game with the Crimson Tide - and only two of them have had consecutive 10-win seasons.

Gene Stallings did it in 1991 and 1992, and Nick Saban won't stop doing it.

Saban has strung together six straight 10-win seasons to match Steve Spurrier's SEC record from his days at Florida, and the Alabama coach has an excellent opportunity to break that record this season. To add even more glitter, those win totals have been 12, 14, 10, 12, 13 and 11.

Spurrier's on another streak with three straight 10-win seasons at South Carolina, which is all the more impressive for two reasons: The Gamecocks won 11 games in each of the last three years, and before Spurrier arrived, they'd won 10 games in a season only once.

Saban and Spurrier aren't the only current SEC coaches who've had nice runs of consecutive 10-win seasons in the league. Georgia's Mark Richt has done it four straight times, back-to-back and back-to-back again. Les Miles did it three years in a row when he started at LSU, and he's now working on a stretch of four straight 10-win seasons.

Other SEC coaches have demonstrated that kind of consistent success, but with asterisks. Bret Bielema's had three straight 10-win seasons before, but at Wisconsin. Gary Pinkel did it twice in a row at Missouri, but in the Big 12. Kevin Sumlin has done it, too, but in his last year at Houston followed by his first year at Texas A&M. So has Hugh Freeze, but in his last year at Lambuth and his only year at Arkansas State.

That means eight of the SEC's 14 head coaches have put together consecutive 10-win seasons at least once as college coaches.

For the men who've done it exclusively in the SEC, Saban, Spurrier, Richt and Miles have something else in common. They each play Auburn this season.

So if Malzahn is going to follow his 12-2 debut with at least 10 more wins this season, if he's going to become the second Auburn coach to achieve double-digit wins in back-to-back years, he'll have to earn it.