Auburn became the first football team to win The Associated Press Trophy in 1957. Emblematic of the college football national champion of the time (as crowned by the AP voters), the trophy now resides at the University of Alabama.

Perhaps that's some sort of cosmic balancing since the Crimson Tide's wretched play seemingly helped torpedo one of Auburn's rivals for the No. 1 ranking in 1957. But then 60 years ago, the national-championship trophy was not the be-all and end-all for coach Ralph "Shug" Jordan's greatest team of Tigers.

"We had gradually moved up in the polls," Auburn quarterback Lloyd Nix told the Huntsville Times in 2011. "The only time I ever remember coach Jordan mentioning we had a chance to win the national championship was when we started on the field before the Alabama game, and he just said, 'Guys, if y'all have a good game, you have a chance of being a national champion.'"

The current Auburn team is battling to win a national championship of its own as it prepares for Saturday's Iron Bowl. What will it take for the Tigers to get into the College Football Playoff that determines the title team? The answer to that can be heard daily being diagrammed down through every probability and possibility on radio and TV shows and podcasts.

The preoccupation with the national championship is only one of the many ways that college football has changed in the 60 years since Auburn was crowned the best team of the 1957 season by The Associated Press without playing a televised game.

Alabama, the top defensive team in the nation right now, has given up 112 points this season. Auburn's 1957 team gave up 28 (and one of the four touchdowns against the Tigers came on an interception return). Auburn averaged scoring 20.7 points per game on its way to the title. That would rank 117th in the nation this season, between Cincinnati and South Alabama.

The 1957 Tigers earned their title with superb defense, unflinching immunity to pressure and a get-out-the-vote campaign that outflanked Ohio State coach Woody Hayes.

As with many of Auburn's best teams, the 1957 squad had the look of a good, but not great, team in the preseason write-ups. Chief among the cited stumbling blocks: The absence of expected starting quarterback Jimmy Cook. He'd been put off the roster along with fullback Donnie May for breaking team rules.

It might have been a blessing in disguise. Jordan replaced Cook with Lloyd Nix, a reserve halfback, and although Nix completed only 33 passes in the 1957 season, his passing was secondary to his role as a play-caller and nifty option operator.

Fullback Billy Atkins was Auburn's leading scorer in 1957.

THE SOUTHERN BLUEPRINT

Auburn placed 15th in the AP preseason poll, which at the time ranked 20 teams. When the Tigers opened the season against Tennessee, though, Auburn was unranked. The first regular-season poll appeared on Sept. 23, and the Tigers didn't play their first game until Sept. 28. Six unranked teams that had won games on Sept. 21 jumped into the top 20, squeezing out Auburn.

Tennessee had been No. 5 in the preseason poll and was the defending SEC champion. But the Volunteers didn't have two-time SEC Player of the Year Johnny Majors anymore, and Auburn won 7-0 in Knoxville.

The opening victory served as a template for the season. In the first of six shutouts, the Auburn defense yielded 84 yards, and fullback Billy Atkins scored all the points the Tigers needed.

By the 1950s, the pervasive character of college football in the South had flowed into the region from Knoxville, where former Tennessee coach Robert Neyland won 83 percent of his games in 21 seasons with an emphasis on defense and field position. Neyland's last great team of Volunteers had won the 1951 AP national championship, the only SEC team to have one until Auburn followed a similar formula to its title.

The pillars of Neyland's success were his Seven Maxims. The second maxim says, "Play for and make the breaks, and when one comes your way -- score." The sixth says, "Press the kicking game. Here is where the breaks are made."

In the second quarter against Tennessee, Auburn end Jerry Wilson partially blocked a punt. The Tigers took over at their 43 and ground out the 57 yards to the end zone in 16 plays. Atkins plunged in from the 1, kicked the extra point and Auburn was back in the AP rankings -- zooming from unranked to No. 7 on the strength of beating Tennessee.

Jimmy "Red" Phillips of Alexander City was a consensus All-American end for Auburn in 1957.

"A GROUP OF GREAT ATHLETES"

A fullback running behind an offensive interior formed entirely of former high school fullbacks, Atkins scored all but three of Auburn's 14 rushing touchdowns in 1957. The Millport native also served as the Tigers' place-kicker, finished sixth in the nation in scoring and handled the punting in a way that would have made Neyland proud. And, of course, he played on defense.

In 1952, the NCAA had eliminated offensive and defensive platooning in college football with a rule that allowed a player to enter a game only once each quarter. When he got to the pros, Atkins played defense and led the AFL in interceptions with 10 in 1961. He also was the AFL's top punter twice.

But he wasn't first-team All-SEC in 1957.

Only a single set of 11 players was chosen as first-team All-SEC. Between The Associated Press and United Press teams, 13 players earned first-team All-SEC recognition. They represented nine schools, with Ole Miss getting three spots and Auburn and Tennessee two apiece.

Auburn's first-team All-SEC selections were its ends -- Wilson and Jimmy "Red" Phillips. They had complementing strengths. In the NFL, Wilson, a Birmingham native, played defensive end and Phillips, an Alexander City native, played split end. Phillips was Auburn's top target with 15 receptions for a 23.8-yard average and four touchdowns in 1957, and with the Los Angeles Rams, he made the Pro Bowl three times as a pass-catcher and led the NFL in receptions in 1961.

Phillips also earned unanimous All-American recognition -- Auburn's first consensus selection since Jimmy Hitchcock in 1932. Another member of Auburn's championship team, guard Zeke Smith, earned consensus recognition in 1958, when he won the Outland Trophy as the nation's best lineman.

In 1957, Smith was third-team All-SEC, along with his fellow guard, co-captain Tim Baker, and halfback Tommy Lorino. Atkins, center Jackie Burkett (on his way to 10 seasons as an NFL linebacker) and tackle Ben Preston earned second-team All-SEC honors.

"It wasn't just one or two football players," Wilson told the Birmingham News in 2011. "It was a group of great athletes."

A group that included 17 players who would be drafted by NFL teams in 1958 and 1959.

Auburn's second opponent, Chattanooga, did something that only two other offensives managed to do against the 1957 Tigers -- score. But Auburn still posted a 40-7 victory -- and dropped two spots in the AP rankings to No. 9.

In a 6-0 victory over Kentucky on Oct. 12 in the season's third game, Atkins knocked down a Wildcats' pitchout and fell on the football at the Kentucky 36-yard line. He then punched in a touchdown for the game's only points.

An unnecessary-roughness penalty on Kentucky star Lou Michaels for a hit on Lorino aided the Tigers' scoring drive. A tackle and place-kicker, Michaels would win the SEC's MVP Award for 1957, another example of individual honors eluding the unbeatable Tigers.

Tennessee blocking back Stockton Adkins won the Jacobs Award as the SEC's best blocker for the second straight year in 1957.

Jordan did win the AP Coach of the Year Award for the conference, but the league's coaches selected Mississippi State's Wade Walker for their honor.

Michaels is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. Jordan is, too, honored for his 25-season tenure at Auburn. But no member of his only conference-championship team is a Hall of Famer.

Phillips and Smith are the only players eligible for the honor under present rules, and they'd need to be recommended by the Veterans Committee to be considered.

"THE NATION'S BEST DEFENSE"

Auburn's defensive prowess was on full display again in the season's fourth game -- a 3-0 victory over Georgia Tech on Oct. 19.

Auburn stopped the Yellow Jackets on downs after they'd reached the Tigers' 4-yard line, and with Georgia Tech at the Auburn 5 in the fourth quarter, Phillips forced a fumble from quarterback Fred Braselton to end the scoring threat. That made Atkins' only successful field goal of the season -- a 31-yarder -- good enough for victory.

The AP story on the game called Auburn "a lumbering, punchless giant on offense, but the nation's best defense."

The Tigers ended up leading the nation in rushing defense in 1957, giving up an average of 67.4 yards per game. Opponents ran the football 390 times against the Tigers, gained only 674 yards (an average of 1.7 yards per carry) and didn't get into the end zone even once on the ground.

Auburn also led in total defense, yielding an average of 133.0 yards per game (the lowest in the nation since 1947), and scoring defense, giving up an average of 2.8 points per game (the lowest in the nation since 1946).

While Auburn's offense didn't earn the glowing praise of the defense, the Tigers' defense almost was like an offense, piling up 325 return yards on 20 interceptions. Auburn also recovered 22 of its opponents' 38 fumbles in 1957. That's an average of 4.2 takeaways per game.

The 1957 campaign was the seventh of Ralph "Shug" Jordan's 25 seasons as Auburn's football coach.

RISING IN THE RANKINGS

The victory over Georgia Tech moved the Tigers to No. 5 in the Oct. 21 AP poll as Auburn started to get its first breaks toward climbing to No. 1 even as it was slugging it out with the Rambling Wreck.

The teams to beat for the "mythical" national championship when the season began were Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Michigan State. The Oct. 7 and Oct. 14 polls had them as the top three, with the Sooners No. 1 in the former and the Spartans No. 1 in the latter.

But Michigan State lost to Purdue 20-13 on Oct. 19 to step out of the No. 1 picture temporarily. No. 4 Minnesota and No. 7 Oregon State also lost that day. Auburn jumped the three losers and idle Notre Dame in the rankings.

Something else happened in the Oct. 21 poll -- Ohio State reappeared in the rankings at No. 12. The Buckeyes held the No. 17 spot in the AP's preseason poll, but lost their opener 18-14 to TCU to fall out. After running off three wins, they were back.

On Oct. 26, Auburn beat Houston 48-7. The Cougars got one of the four touchdowns scored against the Tigers in 1957 on a 98-yard interception return.

Two days later, Auburn was up one spot to No. 4 in the AP poll, replacing No. 4 Duke, which had tied North Carolina State 14-14. The Oct. 28 poll also saw Texas A&M, coached by future Auburn nemesis Paul "Bear" Bryant, ascend to the No. 1 spot ahead of Oklahoma, which had slipped past Colorado by one point on Saturday.

After Auburn blanked SEC foe Florida 13-0 on Nov. 4, Texas A&M and Oklahoma were the only teams ranked ahead of the Tigers. A 21-21 tie with Michigan had cost Iowa the No. 3 spot.

Auburn's seventh game of the season featured a new experience for the Tigers: They trailed on the scoreboard. Mississippi State led 7-0 at halftime at Legion Field on a 57-yard pass that accounted for one of the Bulldogs' two first downs in the first half. In the second half, Atkins ran for two touchdowns and Burkett blocked a punt for a safety as Auburn rallied for a 15-7 victory.

The game didn't hurt Auburn in the AP poll, which showed Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Auburn at 1, 2 and 3, respectively, for the second week in a row.

The next Saturday, though, rocked the rankings.

A guard on Auburn's 1957 team, Zeke Smith won the Outland Trophy in 1958.

STANDINGS SHAKEUPS AND POLL SURPRISES

On Nov. 16, No. 1 Texas A&M, which had won 14 games in a row, lost to Rice 7-6 -- a defeat blamed on the distracting rumors and speculation that the Aggies coach was being called home to Alabama to replace J.B. "Ears" Whitworth, who was wrapping up a three-year tenure with the Crimson Tide that produced a 4-24-2 record. Even though Texas A&M had the 1957 Heisman Trophy winner, John David Crow, Bryant's Aggies didn't win another game.

No. 2 Oklahoma's winning streak came to an end, too -- and the Sooners had won 47 games in a row. Notre Dame ended the record run by beating Oklahoma 7-0 in what was touted as the game of the year.

Auburn did its part to ascend to No. 1. The Tigers beat Georgia 6-0 in another defensive triumph. In the third quarter, Auburn lost a fumble at its 10-yard line, held the Bulldogs on downs, promptly fumbled the football back to Georgia and held on downs again. The Bulldogs finished with three first downs and 68 yards of total offense.

But when the Nov. 18 poll came out, Auburn wasn't No. 1. Michigan State was. The Spartans, with one loss, had jumped from No. 4 over the undefeated Tigers, who rose only to No. 2. Coming off a 42-13 victory over Minnesota, Michigan State moved into the top spot even though Auburn got one more first-place vote than the Spartans.

In Game 9, Auburn beat Florida State 29-7 as the Seminoles finished with minus-29 rushing yards. Michigan State held serve, though, beating Kansas State 27-9 in the Spartans' regular-season finale.

But the AP poll held another surprise on Nov. 25. Auburn was No. 1, and Michigan State was No. 3, with Ohio State between them. The Spartans' 87 first-place votes of the week before had melted to 41. Auburn went into first despite getting three fewer first-place votes than it did when it was No. 2.

Ohio State jumped from 23 first-place votes to 65, siphoning off Michigan State's support in the Midwest. The Buckeyes had closed their regular season by giving Iowa its only loss of the year and beating Michigan 31-14, and they carried the prestige of earning the Big Ten's berth in the Rose Bowl.

There was one poll left -- the one that would determine the national champion. Auburn had one game left -- the Iron Bowl at Legion Field. Ohio State's regular season was through, but Hayes wasn't finished.

Auburn right halfback Bobby Hoppe carries the ball during a 1957 game.

GETTING OUT THE VOTE

The Buckeyes soon-to-be iconic coach campaigned in the press for his one-loss team to be put ahead of Auburn in the final rankings, even if the Tigers beat Alabama to finish the regular season undefeated (which was something of a foregone conclusion). He used an argument that wouldn't hold water today: Hayes' questioned the strength of the Tigers' schedule.

"But whom have they played?" Hayes asked.

Only four of Auburn's nine major-college opponents finished 1957 with winning records -- 8-3 Tennessee, 6-2-1 Florida, 6-2-1 Mississippi State and 5-4-1 Houston. Ohio State played five teams that finished with winning records, and the Buckeyes lost to one of them. Three of Auburn's opponents finished in the final top 20 compared with two of Ohio State's.

If, as Jordan had advised, Auburn had a chance to be national champion if it had "a good game" against Alabama, the Tigers did their part. Auburn routed the Tide 40-0 before a sellout crowd of 45,000 at Legion Field. Alabama lost two fumbles and five interceptions with Auburn turning in a pair of pick sixes -- a 79-yarder by Lorino and a 66-yarder by Burkett.

The Iron Bowl victory secured at least one championship for Auburn -- the Tigers' first SEC title. Auburn posted a 7-0 conference record. Ole Miss finished second at 5-0-1 after ending the season with a 7-7 tie against Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl.

The final AP poll was to come out two days after the Iron Bowl. While coach Jordan kept his players' focus on Alabama, Auburn's athletic department had taken steps beyond an Iron Bowl victory to make sure the Tigers stayed in the top spot.

When the AP college football poll began in 1936, a nationwide panel of sportswriters cast the votes. The AP soon abandoned that structure, opening the poll to any subscriber to its wire service. That meant every newspaper that carried AP stories and every radio station that read AP copy could vote in the college football poll.

Bill Beckwith, Auburn's sports information director, had been calling around, and he found out many small newspapers and radio stations in the South didn't realize they had a vote. He informed them of their eligibility and how, on the final ballot, the Tigers would appreciate their support.

And they got it. When the final poll was released on Dec. 2, Auburn's 85 first-place votes from the previous week had inflated to 210. So even though Ohio State picked up six first-place votes from poll to poll, the Buckeyes were swamped in their efforts to earn the AP's national-championship trophy. The final poll featured 135 more votes than the penultimate poll, and 125 of the new ballots had Auburn at No. 1.

Auburn finished 477 points ahead of Ohio State, the second-largest margin between first and second in the AP poll's history behind Oklahoma's 583-point clearance of Army in 1950. It will likely stay that way, too, because in 1960, the AP poll returned to using a nationwide panel of sportswriters and broadcasters -- apportioned by region -- to decide its rankings, a format that remains in use.

"We just went out and played," Lorino told the Birmingham News in 2011. "There wasn't a lot of hoopla about it. We just played every game and kept winning and winning."

So Auburn finished the season at 10-0 and awaited the delivery of The Associated Press national-championship trophy.

NO BOWL FOR NO. 1

But what about the Tigers' Sugar Bowl trip as SEC champions and the nation's best team, at least according to the AP?

SEC teams filled two of the 10 major-college bowl slots to cap the 1957 season. Ole Miss beat Texas 39-7 in the Sugar, and Tennessee edged Texas A&M 3-0 in the Gator.

Auburn couldn't go bowling because the Tigers were on NCAA probation, a relatively new status in college football.

The NCAA had added an enforcement division in 1952, and it determined that an Auburn assistant coach had paid twin brothers $500 apiece as an enticement to play for the Tigers. Auburn got the harshest punishment that had been handed out to that point -- a three-year bowl ban.

The Tigers' 9-0-1 team didn't get to go to a bowl after the 1958 season either. Auburn's next bowl didn't come until Jan. 1, 1964, when the Tigers played Nebraska in the Orange.

But the bowl ban was immaterial to Auburn's chances of finishing on top of the final AP poll because it came out nearly a month before the bowls were played.

An expanded College Football Playoff might end up rendering the bowls relatively meaningless again, but in 1957, the postseason games were sort of a football Twilight Zone.

There could be a certain prestige and pride attached to earning a bowl berth, although the most significant football program in the nation, Notre Dame, didn't participate in bowls. The postseason games were widely regarded as extracurricular -- exhibitions that were a reward for a superior season.

But the result of the bowl counted in a team's final record. However, for record-keeping purposes, beyond the W-L tally, the game didn't happen. The accumulation of team and individual statistics ended with the regular season, so the 104 rushing yards that Bob White gained for Ohio State against Oregon in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1958, aren't part of the Buckeyes fullback's official career record.

While Auburn had to stay home instead of going to New Orleans, Ohio State was in Pasadena as a national champion.

The Buckeyes finished on top of the final coaches poll of the 1957 season, based on balloting done after the final regular-season games. In later years, the coaches poll banned teams on probation from appearing. That was not the case in 1957. Auburn finished as the runner-up in the final coaches poll to Ohio State, even though the Tigers and Arizona State, the champion of the Border Conference, were the only undefeated, untied teams in the NCAA's University Division. (The Sun Devils placed 12th in the final AP and coaches polls.)

The AP's competitor, United Press, started the coaches poll in 1950, giving the media poll a 14-year head start on building credibility and a following.

A week after the season ended, Ted Smits, the AP's sports editor, brought the wire service's national-championship trophy to the Plains, where it was accepted on the team's behalf by coach Jordan and Dr. Ralph Draughon, the university president.

So how'd Auburn's national-championship trophy end up at Alabama?

Auburn coach Ralph "Shug" Jordan hugs the AP national-championship trophy.

THE TRAVELING TROPHY

On Dec. 1, Whitworth's three-year contract to coach the Crimson Tide football team reached its end. On Dec. 2, the final AP poll appeared, naming Auburn the national champion. On Dec. 3, Alabama introduced Bryant as its football coach and athletic director. The low tide of Alabama football was over.

In Bryant's first season at Alabama, the Tide went 5-4-1 after winning eight games over the previous four years.

In 1959, Alabama won the Iron Bowl 10-0 to end a five-game losing streak against Auburn.

In 1961, Alabama went 11-0 and won the AP national championship. When the Tide topped the final AP polls in 1964 and 1965, it got to keep the trophy, as tradition dictated.

Frank Dickinson, an economics professor at the University of Illinois, developed a system to select the champion of college football -- the pencil-and-paper forerunner of computer rankings. Unveiled in 1926, the Dickinson System became the first method of selecting the best team in college football to gain national credibility. After all, it was "scientific."

The Dickinson System became the basis for awarding the Rissman National Trophy, named after a Chicago businessman who sponsored the award. The hardware rotated from champion to champion, with each winning school keeping it until the next season's No. 1 team was named.

Dickinson's first national champion was Stanford, but he backdated the rankings for the 1924 and 1925 seasons, too. When Notre Dame finished atop the ratings for the third time in 1930, the Fighting Irish were allowed to retire the Rissman National Trophy.

Notre Dame's famed Four Horsemen donated the Knute Rockne Intercollegiate Memorial Trophy to take its place. Minnesota retired that trophy in 1940 when it won the Dickinson national championship for the third time.

That was the last year of the Dickinson System as it was overwhelmed by a wave of imitators and the shadow of the nationwide Associated Press poll.

Between the first Dickinson national champ and the AP's first poll in 1936, the Houlgate System, Dunkel Index, Boand System, Williamson System and Poling System gained national attention as college football ranking methods through newspaper syndication and annual football guides.

With ratings formulas in hand, the men behind the math also delved into college football history, retroactively naming the top teams from the game's earliest days. That's why fans can now look up the champion of college football's 1921 season, and see that it would have been California, Cornell, Iowa, Lafayette, Washington and Jefferson or Vanderbilt (take your pick), even though a national champion for college football existed only as a debating point at the time. No team got a trophy at the end of the season as the national champ.

(The Billingsley Report, a ranking system that first appeared in 1970, has coach "Iron Mike" Donahue's undefeated Auburn squad of 1913 as the national co-champion for that season with Amos Alonzo Stagg's Chicago Maroons, although such a claim at the time almost certainly would have been derided given the reputation of Southern football as inferior to the game played in the Northeast and Midwest.)

But there was a trophy for the Dickinson System, and there was a trophy for the AP poll when Minnesota's lettermen's club sponsored the Williams Trophy. With the Dickinson System dead, Minnesota shifted its responsibility to replace the national-championship trophy that it retired to the AP poll, naming the award after Henry Williams, the Golden Gophers' football coach from 1900 through 1921.

Notre Dame retired the Williams Trophy when it won its third AP title in the 1947 season and replaced it with the Rev. Hugh O'Donnell Trophy. Oklahoma retired that trophy in 1956, and the AP took control of its trophy.

So the first AP Trophy was won by Auburn. However, it was still a rotating award. When Alabama won it for the third time, the Tide got to keep the trophy first won by Auburn.

The Paul W. Bryant Museum on the university campus in Tuscaloosa has the trophy on display.

The AP Trophy is no longer a rotating award. The top team in the final poll gets hardware it can keep, and the day after the big game, the coach of the No. 1 team poses for photos with it. It's no longer called the AP Trophy. Since the 1983 season, the AP's national champion has earned the Paul "Bear" Bryant Trophy.

Auburn has a Paul "Bear" Bryant Trophy, earned by the 2010 Tigers, the school's first AP national-championship football team since the squad that couldn't be beaten 60 years ago.

Some members of Auburn's first AP title team were around to celebrate the second. Some were not. Coach Jordan died in 1980, and team MVP Atkins died in 1991. Of Auburn's other all-stars, the past couple of years have taken a toll. The ends, Phillips and Wilson, died in 2015. Lorino and Smith passed in 2016. And Jackie Burkett died on Sept. 1.

Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @AMarkG1.