AUBURN'S BIGGEST WIN in the last 25 years or so...
--Van Plexico

A. It helps if it's over Alabama.

B. An SEC championship/trip to the SEC Championship game must be at stake.

C. It helps to have national implications.

D. It helps if we are ending a losing streak to that team by winning the game.

E. It helps me, personally, if I was there at the game.

F. It helps if the game was close, and came down to the last minute, or the last play.

G. It helps if the team we beat was highly-ranked.

H. It's very important if it kept bama from winning in Auburn.

With those elements in mind, the following games seem to qualify, in my view (bearing in mind that I didn't attend my first Auburn game till 1977)

1982 bama   A, D, F

1983 (season) Michigan Sugar Bowl: I didn't consider this one because we were wronged by voters in the final polls, making this game mean less than it should have. If we'd been awarded the Mythical National Championship after winning this one, it would probably be near the top.

The 1997 bama game.
It was over Alabama; it came down to two FGs at the end, one made, one missed; it kept us unbeaten by bama in J-H; it won the SEC West for us; it put us in the Championship Game; and I was there. I cannot recall being happier after a win than I was after that one, which is, in the final analysis, the critical element here.

Okay-- now I've come back and revisited this again a few years later (it's now 2003, and I originally wrote this in about 1998 or '99).  And I have a really hard time justifying the '97 Alabama game as being bigger than the '89 one.  As much as we got for winning in '97, we would have lost even more if we'd failed to pull off the huge win in Jordan Hare, first time ever, in 1989.  The chart above does seem to back this up-- it's the only one that registered in six categories.

By those same criteria, I rate the following as the most disappointing losses:

VP