gregg carr 2025 NFF COLLEGE FOOTBALL HALL OF FAME CLASS

Gregg Carr

By Matt Fortuna

"If you're not thinking about quitting, we're not working you hard enough."

Those words resonated with Gregg Carr. They came from Pat Dye, his Hall of Fame coach whose first season leading Auburn coincided with Carr's first season playing for the Tigers. Dye had lofty goals when he arrived on the Plains. But he reminded his players every step of the way that they would have to pay the price to reach those goals. As for what that meant?

“We learned pretty quickly,” Carr said. “Paying the price was really just learning the basics of tackling and blocking and working hard and being well-conditioned and being tougher and grittier than everybody else. And during that four-week process of spring football, we lost a lot of talented players who quit the football team.”

Call it baptism by fire, or survival of the fittest. Either way, Carr thrived. He led Auburn in tackles twice. His 1983 Tigers team beat Michigan in the Sugar Bowl to finish with a No. 3 final AP ranking, and he earned First Team All-American honors his senior year. And now Carr has taken his rightful place beside his coach in the College Football Hall of Fame.

Carr becomes the ninth former Auburn player to make the Hall, and the 14th overall member of the Tigers program to accomplish the feat. Dye was enshrined in 2005. Carr never missed an opportunity to thank the coach for those lessons before his passing in 2020.

“He kind of apologized for the hard work he put us through,” Carr said. “But it's interesting, when I left Auburn, the lessons I learned on that football field made a difference in all my endeavors. It still continues to affect me. It affected my children. Just the lessons learned, which is being focused and goal-oriented and having the proper mindset and being dedicated to what you're doing if you really love what you do."

“And so, I always thanked Coach Dye when I saw him for giving me all the opportunities that he gave me because my life would have been completely different had I not had those experiences. And those experiences are not the experiences your parents can teach you. Your parents couldn't do the things that Coach Dye and his staff did with us, but those are the experiences we needed.”

A word about that family that Carr loves to mention: His late father, Bill, and his stepmother, Sandra, were loving parents who preached to Carr and siblings Dennis and Lisa the importance of education. Carr and his wife Julie have paid those messages forward with their five children: Evans, Jordan, Sara, Grace and Ann Harrison, all of whom are successful in their own right.

Football, by the way, makes up merely a fraction of Carr’s many success stories. He went to Auburn to become an engineer, he left the school and became a Pittsburgh Steeler, and then he played four pro seasons before diving into the world of medicine. He is still an orthopedic surgeon today in his hometown of Birmingham.

"I came to Auburn not to play football; I came to Auburn to go to school, because I fell in love with that atmosphere," Carr said. "They talk about an Auburn Spirit. There's a feel you get at this little college in Southeast Alabama that's just a family feel, it's a real feel, it's a real vibe that you feel when you get here. To me, it was a great setting for getting an education and preparing me for the next step of my life."

As far as Carr’s on-field success goes, he says he was simply doing his job. His life is a blessing for reasons that have nothing to do with football. Yet none of it is possible without football. He lists off nearly a dozen Auburn defensive linemen — led by coach Wayne Hall — and credits them for allowing linebackers such as himself, Christopher Martin and Jeff Jackson to stuff the stat sheet as often as they did. He calls coordinator Frank Orgel a father figure.

“Coach Dye used to say that football was the only game that really taught a player a lot of thingsabout themselves, because you get every emotion with football,” Carr said. “And football wasfun, but football is hard work. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. And the only fun partof football, I think, is winning. But there's a lot that goes into football — the friendships are fun,but there's a lot of hard work that goes into football. Winning is the tip of the iceberg. But thespring practices, the winter workouts, the stresses involved with game preparation and playingthe games, there's a lot of stress and there's a lot of work with football.”