In baseball, it’s referred to as “WAR.”

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is what baseball statisticians use to try and calculate how valuable a player is to his team’s success. The higher the WAR, the more valuable the player is. In other words, take that player off the team and how big of a loss would it be?

There’s no official WAR stat in college football, but if there were, I can’t help but feel like Jarrett Stidham would have one of the highest marks in the SEC in 2018.

The Auburn quarterback enters his second year as the captain of Gus Malzahn’s ever-complicated ship. Between the preseason Heisman Trophy buzz and the 2019 first-round buzz, Stidham doesn’t lack preseason accolades or expectations. He’s a household name nationally, and locally, Tigers fans wouldn’t mind if he went out on a Cam Newton-like note.

Stidham already showed last year that he’s more Newton than Jeremy Johnson, which is perhaps why the sky is the limit in what figures to be his final year at Auburn. The skepticism about Stidham’s floor is gone. Now, he’s the 1 player that Malzahn can’t do without. Take a player of Stidham’s caliber away, and there’s plenty of skepticism about Auburn’s floor.

It’s because of that reason that Stidham enters 2018 as the SEC’s most valuable player.

Credit: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

To be clear, “most valuable” and “best” are two very different things. I won’t have Stidham as my first-team All-SEC quarterback. In fact, I’d probably say Tua Tagovailoa, Jake Fromm and Drew Lock are all better bets to earn that honor. But if you were to take those three quarterbacks and Stidham off their respective rosters, it’s Stidham who would leave the largest hole.

There are a few layers that go into that. Obviously if Stidham weren’t a game-changing quarterback, this wouldn’t be the case. Despite Auburn’s postseason collapse, Stidham completed 73 percent of his passes for 451 yards, 3 touchdowns and 0 interceptions, and he also added 54 rushing yards and 2 scores on the ground in 2 Auburn victories vs. No. 1.

That’s upside. There are very few quarterbacks in the country who have the ability to look average against the top-ranked team in the nation, much less beat them twice. As valuable as SEC Offensive Player of the Year Kerryon Johnson was, the Tigers aren’t reaching that level without Stidham’s play. Period.

Last year, Johnson was the driving force in the first month of the season while Stidham tried to settle into Malzahn’s offense. This year, it might be the opposite. Auburn’s running back situation is unclear. It could take the first month of the season for Malzahn to figure out the best way to use his backfield.

With the questions in the backfield, can you imagine if Stidham weren’t available for the first month? Yikes.

Malik Willis is a capable running threat — 3 of his 16 carries last year went for at least 48 yards — but we saw in the spring game that the sophomore was nowhere near Stidham’s level as a passer yet. And with all due respect to talented true freshman Joey Gatewood, the comparisons to Newton looked extremely premature given his accuracy issues.

Auburn fans know how one-dimensional a Stidham-less offense would look. The last thing the Tigers’ unproven group of running backs needs is 8-9 defenders in the box every play. What they need is someone who can stretch the field like Stidham so that those running lanes open up.

There’s going to be a collective gasp every time Stidham stays down a little longer on a hit. Auburn fans will probably tense up when they see Stidham keep it on the zone read (something he improved a great deal as the season progressed). Shoot, a Stidham-less reality probably creeped into the back of Auburn fans’ minds because of his offseason shoulder surgery.

Though Stidham is expected to be fine for fall camp, it felt like Auburn’s injury list grew by the day during spring ball. Losing receivers Will Hastings and Eli Stove to torn anterior cruciate ligaments wasn’t ideal, and neither was watching centers Kaleb Kim and Nick Brahms miss A-Day with injuries.

The combination of injuries and inexperience — the Tigers have the second-fewest offensive starters returning in the SEC — is why Auburn’s margin for error is slim entering 2018. At least it is on the offensive side of the ball. I mean, we saw how different of a team the Tigers were without Johnson at 100 percent in the postseason.

Without a healthy Stidham to steer the ship, I can’t help but wonder how fast Auburn’s SEC West hopes would sink. Perhaps it would resemble the 2016 Texas A&M team that fell apart when Trevor Knight went down. Maybe it would look like the 2015 Florida team that crawled to a 4-4 record after Will Grier was suspended.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t get the feeling a Stidham-less Auburn team would look like 2017 Georgia did when Jacob Eason suffered an injury in the season opener, or like 2017 Ole Miss did when Shea Patterson was lost for the year.

Nobody in the SEC is irreplaceable like Stidham. I don’t know what his WAR would be, but I know that it’d be high. If he can continue to improve his decision-making, Stidham could become a leading candidate for the title of “best SEC player.”

For now, though, “most valuable SEC player” seems like the most appropriate preseason title for him.