It’s a simple question, with a very difficult answer — who is the greatest Auburn football player of the modern era?

We all have our opinions, and we can argue them for hours on end. But now, we’ve given you — the AL.com reader — the opportunity to decide.

We’ve seeded our Top 16 choices of the best Auburn players since 1970 into a March Madness-style bracket and given you the chance to vote round-by-round. Once all the votes are tallied up, we’ll crown the modern-era king of Tigers football.

We chose 1970 as a cut-off because of three changes/innovations that moved football into the modern era. First was integration, which came to the SEC around that time; by 1971 all 10 SEC schools had integrated their teams.

Second was the liberalization of substitution rules that occurred in around 1965, which allowed for distinct “platoons” for both offense and defense. This meant the virtual extinction of the two-way player that had so common in the game just a few years before.

Third was the change to eligibility rules, which allowed freshmen to play on the varsity beginning in 1972. College football players beginning in that era could make a more immediate and longer-lasting impact than they ever could before.

(* — We fudged this slightly in the case of two all-time Auburn greats who actually began their varsity careers in 1969. However, each had his greatest impact in 1970 and 1971.)

The 1970 cutoff made for some difficult omissions, including 1940s and 50s stars like Travis Tidwell and Zeke Smith, as well as 1960s legends such as Tucker Frederickson and Jimmy Sidle. And even limiting ourselves to the last 55 years, we still had to leave out a number of all-time greats.

So here’s our bracket (above), seeding our Auburn legends in the standard matchups of 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, etc. We seeded them based on individual honors while in college such as national awards, All-America and All-SEC recognition, as well as team success, along with some other, more-subjective criteria.

Winners from each pairing will advance to the next round until we are left with only one. Fill out your bracket, and vote in the polls below!