The Week In Football: The SEC Gets Their Teeth Kicked In

How great is it that college football is finally back? How amazing was this weekend? Oregon-Auburn was incredible, Florida State blew a huge lead to Boise State, and Tennessee… lost to a Georgia State team that was…. 2-10 in 2018. That part wasn’t great.

Let’s just start there…

The Tennessee program is in shambles

I wrote about this extensively two days ago, but Saturday’s loss to Georgia State was one of the worst in the history of this once proud program. Jeremy Pruitt has lost any of the goodwill he had built up with the fan base. Sorry Coach, but that’s what happens when you lose to a bad Group of Five team at home in the opening game of a season that the fan base expected to be a year where the team was much improved. Saturday’s result makes the BYU game this weekend the most important outing of Pruitt’s young head coaching career. Lose that one and start 0-2, and there will probably be a fan revolt followed by 20,000 people showing up for the Chattanooga game on September 14^th.

I don’t have season tickets, and I would never own them, but if I did, there’s no way in hell I’d ever buy them again. Why would I waste my money and basically my entire Saturday going down there just to watch that crap week after week? The players have changed, the coaches have changed, the administrators have changed, and none of it has mattered because it’s been a decade-plus of the same exact BS every single year.

Isn’t it incredible to think that this program once went 45-5 from 1995-1998? That they’ve captured 16 total conference championships? That they used to beat Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and everyone else in the SEC with some consistency?

They’ve got 11 games to turn it around in 2019. Otherwise, Pruitt comes into next season on the hottest seat in the country unless Clay Helton somehow survives another year at USC (and we’ll get to him later). He might be there sooner if they lose Saturday night.

The SEC had a really bad weekend

Missouri went on the road and lost to Wyoming in Kelly Bryant’s quarterback debut, South Carolina lost as a double digit favorite to a UNC team that went 3-9 in 2018, and Ole Miss gained just 173 yards of offense in a 15-10 loss to Memphis. Throw in Tennessee’s aforementioned meltdown, Arkansas slogging their way through a seven point victory over Portland State, and FCS team, and Alabama’s slow start against a bad Duke squad, and it was far from the kind of start the conference would’ve hoped for.

Some wild Mizzou stats here: the Tigers under Barry Odom are now 0-7 when they have two weeks or more to prepare for an FBS opponent. Odom is also 5-19 at Mizzou when his team fails to score 40 points or more. They looked so pedestrian this weekend that it made me fee like Tennessee had a great chance to go in there and win in November, until I remembered that the Vols suck and couldn’t even beat a crappy Group of Five team.

The “Will Muschamp would be pumping gas somewhere if he wasn’t a football” coach is a drum I’ve been beating for a long time, and I think it’s safe to say I’ve been proven right in that. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to find a way to beat an at best average ACC team when you have a three year starter at quarterback and months to prepare for the game. The Gamecocks led 20-9 with 5:10 left in the third quarter and preceded to do this with their next six drives:

·         3 plays, 4 yards, punt

·         5 plays, 25 yards, punt

·         3 plays, -8 yards, punt

·         5 plays, 20 yards, interception

·         4 plays, 11 yards, interception

·         1 play, -10 yards, end of game

I know the expectations at South Carolina aren’t as high as they are at other schools, but I can’t imagine the school is thrilled with Muschamp now being just 22-18 overall and 12-12 in the SEC, particularly with a dynasty just down the road at Clemson.

Sure, the SEC still has Georgia and LSU who looked very impressive on Saturday night, and Alabama did end up winning by 39. The problem is that middle and bottom of the league, at least this weekend, looks significantly weaker than it was 5 years ago.

It is kind of hard to make the case that the SEC is a gauntlet that’s impossible to run through when one of the proudest programs in your league that has almost unlimited resources can’t beat Georgia State.

Auburn stole Oregon’s Soul

I don’t know how I’d get over this one if I was a Ducks fan. Oregon led 21-6 late in the third quarter and preceded to get outscored 21-0 after that. Auburn true freshman quarterback Bo Nix looked rattled as hell for large portions of the night, and threw up about twenty balls for grabs, including the game winner.

Oregon lost this game in the first half when they made two separate red zone trips and only came away with 3 points. One of the drives ended with a missed 20 yard field goal and the other with a fumble. If they ended those possessions with just two field goals, Seth Williams’s TD catch with nine seconds remaining just ties the game, and Oregon goes to overtime with the better quarterback in Justin Herbert, even if he struggled getting the offense going at times, particularly in the second half.

This game was basically a mirror image of last year’s Stanford game. The blown double digit lead after halftime, the redzone turnovers, and the dominance for 75% of the game were all present again. Sheesh.

The worst thing is that this loss has pretty much eliminated Oregon from playoff contention. Assuming that LSU, Alabama, and Georgia all beat Auburn, who is probably AT BEST the 3^rd best team in the SEC West. So if it came down to Oregon and one of those three who beat Auburn, how could the playoff committee in good faith put the Ducks in? If the Pac 12 wants to be in the playoff for the first time since 2016, they’ve got a lot riding on Washington and Utah.

Florida State crapped their pants against Boise State in the Tallahassee heat

Who would’ve thought that the Seminoles would be the ones that couldn’t handle the August humidity? Of course, I guess that’s what happens when you allow a road team starting a true freshman quarterback to come into your building and put up 621 yards of offense and control the ball for 40 of the 60 minutes. The ‘Noles scored all 31 points of their in the first half and followed that up by putting up just 52 yards of offense after the intermission.

Willie Taggart is another guy in the Will Muschamp-Clay Helton “How the hell did I get this job when I should be a tube sock salesman” class of coaches, and I think it’s fair to start speculating that he’ll be out of a job by the end of the season. He’s wildly unpopular, as evidenced by the fact that there were large swaths of Doak Campbell Stadium left unfilled for the opening game of the season against a legitimate opponent. Sure, the game got moved from Jacksonville last minute, but wouldn’t that make it easier for those around the Tallahassee area to travel to the game? If Taggart was popular, don’t you think people would show up?

Taggart has been a disaster from the day he was hired. Honestly, it’s probably not a great idea to hire someone with a career losing record (like Taggart had before he got the job) to run a big time program.

USC needed a late interception to hold off Fresno State

The Trojans were sloppy the entire night, and allowed a Fresno State team that returned just three offensive starters to hang around well into the Los Angeles night. A fantastic end zone pick by a USC defensive back was the only thing that prevented the Bulldogs from getting to attempt a game tying two point conversion.

More bad news for USC: their starting quarterback JT Daniels tore his ACL in the first half and will be out for the season. Here’s some more: the next five USC games are brutal. They host #25 Stanford, travel to BYU, host #14 Utah, and go to #13 Washington and #9 Notre Dame. Wow. If the Trojans struggled to put away Fresno State, how the hell are they going to deal with that gauntlet?

I guess the only good news if you’re a Trojan fan is that you’ll finally be rid of Clay Helton, maybe even by October! Of course, there’s no guarantee they’ll get the coaching search right, considering they’ve hired Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian, and Helton as their last three head coaches.

Not breaking any new ground here, but when there is a change made, Urban Meyer has to be your first call right? Maybe he tells you no, but it’s worth a shot. There’s pressure at Southern Cal, but it’s nowhere near the same as what he’d faced at Florida or Ohio State. He can go there and kind of blend into the crowded L.A. sports scene.

The Oklahoma offense didn’t miss a beat

Jalen Hurts played maybe the best game of his college career in his OU debut, as he tossed three touchdowns, ran for three, and became the first Sooner to ever throw for over 300 yards and rush for over 150 in the same game.

Even the Oklahoma defense was better, for a time, holding the Houston offense scoreless until almost halftime. Granted, they did end up surrendering 241 rushing yards.

We’ll learn a lot about Texas this weekend when they host LSU, but assuming they have an impressive showing (and I think they will), it looks like the Big 12 is going to come down to the Sooners and the Longhorns again, and first place in the league will probably be decided at the Cotton Bowl on October 12. And the loser of that game will probably be in second place, which means they’ll play again in the Big 12 Championship Game.
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Have a great Labor Day, and enjoy Notre Dame-Louisville tonight! Or, enjoy it as much as you can enjoy a 30 point beatdown.