Lloyd Nix, the quarterback on Auburn’s 1957 national championship team and later a distinguished dentist in north Alabama, has died. He was 87.

Nix’s death was announced by the Auburn athletics department via social media. No cause of death was immediately announced.

Born Dec. 7, 1936, Nix was a multi-sport star at Carbon Hill High School in Walker County, where he was a two-time all-state pick in football and an all-district selection in basketball. He also pitched and played first base in baseball in high school and later at Auburn, where he helped the Tigers win the 1958 SEC championship.

However, it was on the gridiron where the diminutive (5-foot-10, 165-pound) Nix excelled most, playing both ways at Auburn and twice being chosen to the All-SEC team under head coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan. He led the conference in total offense as a senior in 1958, but it was as a junior that Nix and the Tigers had their greatest glory.

Auburn went 10-0 that season, routing Alabama 40-0 in the Iron Bowl and finishing the year No. 1 in the Associated Press poll. It was Auburn’s only national championship in football until the Cam Newton-led 2010 squad repeated the feat.

“We had gradually moved up in the polls,” Nix told AL.com’s Mark McCarter in 2011. “The only time I ever remember Coach Jordan mentioning we had a chance to win the national championship 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.’”

And how did Nix find out Auburn was indeed national champions?

“Somebody told somebody else and they told me,” Nix told McCarter. “I’m not even sure they rolled Toomer’s Corner.”

Auburn was nearly perfect again in 1958, with the lone blemish a 7-7 tie vs. Georgia Tech in October. The Tigers finished 9-0-1 and were ranked fourth in the final polls (SEC rival LSU was crowned national champion with a 10-0 record).

Nix won the Cliff Hare Award as Auburn’s outstanding senior athlete in the Class of 1959, and after graduation attended the University of Alabama School of Dentistry. He later served in the United States Air Force in Texas before moving back to Alabama and starting a dental practice in Decatur in 1964.

Dr. Nix treated patients in north Alabama for 35 years until retiring in 1999. He and his wife, Sandra (a 1960 Auburn graduate), had two daughters and six grandchildren.

Nix was a former present of the Auburn Football Letterman’s Club, the Auburn Alumni Association and the Morgan County Auburn Club. He was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1994.

Outside of athletics, Nix served as chairman of the Auburn Research Advisory Board, was a member of the Auburn University Foundation and at various times as president of the Morgan County Dental Association, chairman of the Council on Ministries of Central United Methodist Church and as a board member for the Alabama Institute Foundation for the Deaf and Blind. In 2008, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Auburn University Alumni Association.