If Auburn is going to win the SEC championship — and potentially the national title — it will likely have to get past Alabama.

However, that matchup won’t come for a while. And one Auburn legend wants to make sure the team realizes that.

Former NBA star Charles Barkley, who played for the Tigers from 1981-84, was on Auburn’s campus on Thursday and while there, he shared his opinions about what the football team should do with WVTM 13.

“We can’t even think about Alabama,” Barkley said. “You’ve got to play one game at a time, you can’t worry about something that’s two months away. I mean, they’ve still got to go to LSU and Florida. You take it one game at a time, and then you move on. But if you look ahead, if you worry that we play Florida in a couple weeks, we’ve still got to go to Baton Rouge, if you start thinking about that, no, Mississippi State’s the only thing that matters right now.”

Barkley was on campus to surprise the students at Miles College and share some other advice:

As for the football team, Barkley is right about the Tigers having a difficult schedule. Auburn already owns victories over a pair of ranked teams — No. 11 Oregon and No. 17 Texas A&M — and it has games remaining against No. 2 Alabama, No. 3 Georgia, No. 4 LSU and No. 9 Florida.

Of those matchups, the one against the Crimson Tide comes last, as Auburn and Alabama will play its Iron Bowl contest in the regular-season finale on Nov. 30.

In order for those later games to be important, the Tigers have to keep winning. On Saturday, they host Mississippi State at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN.