Week 1 brought a shift in power, the ACC’s hierarchy upended despite Florida State and Clemson not meeting head-to-head. In Week 2, another throne is on the line. It’s unlikely to shift as decisively as the ACC’s, but this is in most respects the second skirmish in what will soon become an intricate, years-long war to control college football’s greatest conference, and with it, to rule college football as a whole. Let’s look at the potential kings of the new SEC, and then get to tomorrow’s football game.
Georgia
Georgia is the current king, though you could argue Nick Saban is running a shadow government in exile. Georgia’s great strength is that it arguably has the best combination of institutional support, recruiting location, tradition, and NFL presence of any program in the country. That doesn’t make it easy to win at Georgia—Mark Richt was not a bad coach, and he didn’t win titles at Georgia—but it does make it possible, and it’s not necessarily possible everywhere.
Alabama
Alabama is in the enviable position of having made one spectacular hire almost twenty years ago. Those who make decisions in Tuscaloosa have been able to keep their hands off during the Saban era. When that era ends, though, what follows? Saban turns 72 this October, and while he certainly appears spry, he’s about as close to Joe Paterno’s retirement age, 84, as he is to Urban Meyer’s current age, 59. Alabama is in a strong recruiting location that’s getting stronger, and it has effective boosters, but that can be said about a lot of schools in the SEC. Take away Saban, and how similar would Alabama’s last 16 years have looked to Auburn’s? What about Mississippi State’s?
Texas
If anyone has better ingredients than Georgia, it’s Texas, and yet it has been difficult, both recently and historically, to win in Austin. The Texas Longhorns only claim four national championships, and one of those—1970—would not have been given to Texas in the current format, with the Horns losing by two scores in the Cotton Bowl. Since 1970, Texas only has one title. That’s a lot fewer than Clemson, and Clemson does not have Texas’s ingredients.
There’s a case to be made, though, that as college football becomes more professionalized, Austin will become a better place to foster a program. It’s the second-most populous city with established power conference football within its city limits, trailing only Los Angeles, and even with Houston (Houston) and Dallas (SMU) jumping in the list, it’s the most “college town” of any of those cities by a mile. It’s a place big enough to make the college teams fight to get attention but small enough that there’s a natural local loyalty to the school. What athletic director Chris Del Conte seems to be trying to do—and this is the vision it appears the Manning dynasty has bought into—is build an NFL franchise that plays college football. He might just pull it off.
Oklahoma
Up across the Red River, Oklahoma has its own case to be an SEC powerhouse, with a devoted fanbase and a better location than is often realized, sitting just as close to Dallas as Tuscaloosa sits to Atlanta. Oklahoma has done plenty of winning of its own over the last few decades, and while it’s never broken through and topped the SEC (it came very close with Baker Mayfield), it still slots in as at worst a top-6 SEC program right now, in only Brent Venables’s second year. The downside here may be the worst of any, but if Georgia implodes and Nick Saban retires and UT-Austin continues to fail to figure it out, Oklahoma could step in and assume control. As Saban has shown, once you have control of the SEC, success can multiply. It’s tough, but you can build success on a foundation mostly made of prior success. (This is how life began in Earth’s early ocean.)
Tennessee
Only six schools have won an SEC title outright since the conference racially integrated in 1967 (Kentucky shared the 1976 title). The least recent of those six has the third-best program right now, with Josh Heupel working miracles in his second year in Knoxville and enjoying some exciting prospects despite low national expectations in Year 3. The case for Tennessee as the next king of the South? They’re the best SEC program right now not named Georgia or Alabama, and one of those two is coached by an aging man while the other is coached by a guy who can’t get even his staffers to stop driving like they’re Dom Toretto.
LSU
As has been widely recited vis-à-vis Brian Kelly, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron each won a national championship in Baton Rouge. For myriad reasons, it’s a good place to win, and while that winning is often brief, it usually returns quickly when it leaves.
Florida
It wasn’t just Urban Meyer who won at Florida in somewhat recent college football. Steve Spurrier did it too. Florida shares a lot of advantages with Texas and Georgia, though it’s more similar to Georgia between that pair, with a little bit of the Floridian chaos factor thrown in. I don’t know if Billy Napier is or isn’t the guy for Gainesville, but like Athens and Austin, that town is one in which if you find the right coach, his ceiling is a decade like that which Saban just enjoyed. The ceiling isn’t that high in Knoxville or Norman, and the longevity option isn’t there in Baton Rouge or Auburn.
Auburn
Speaking of Auburn: Much like LSU, this school has enough foam in its mouth that it can make winners of surprising people. Gene Chizik won a national championship at Auburn. These guys can win SEC titles, and they might again soon. It appears to be a race right now between Hugh Freeze and the wrath of God, which is usually what’s going on at Auburn (and LSU).
Texas A&M
The only one of these schools to not prove it can do this yet on the field, Texas A&M has so much money and so little else it cares about that it’s hard to count them out. It makes for a long list, but if you were to look up in five years and find that any of these schools had just won back-to-back SEC titles, you wouldn’t be shocked. It would be shocking with the other seven.
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That was a long exercise, but I hope it illustrates what’s at stake tomorrow night in Tuscaloosa. Power struggles are always ongoing in college football, and in the SEC, the power struggle actually does mean more, because the SEC is the best college football league in the country. These, then, are two of the three to five strongest impending claimants to the throne. This isn’t a conference game, but in the long term, it’s going to look like one.
As for the game itself: The details are that it’s at 7:00 PM EDT tomorrow and it’s being broadcast on ESPN. Texas memorably hung with Alabama last year, Quinn Ewers leaving early but carving up the Tide defense before he got hurt, current Purdue quarterback Hudson Card turning in a gamer performance for the ages. With the exception of one or two plays, Alabama stuffed Bijan Robinson and the Texas run game, but Alabama struggled to get things going on offense itself, with one Jase McClellan breakaway constituting nearly a quarter of the total Tide offensive production.
Questions are abundant for both these teams, and they start with that Alabama offense. The Bryce Young-led outfit was by no means bad last year, but they struggled notably against Texas and again in the loss to LSU, and without Young they struggled against Texas A&M. Even against Mississippi, the offense had scored only 17 points midway through the third quarter, and it settled for two key field goals in the fourth to escape.
Jalen Milroe quarterbacked that Texas A&M game, and his efficiency numbers weren’t awful, but Bill O’Brien didn’t have him pass much. Tommy Rees is in the offensive coordinator position now, and Rees developed a reputation at Notre Dame for offensive creativity while succeeding with a few very different quarterbacks, from the blue-collar Ian Book to the lead-footed pocket-passing Jack Coan to even, at times, Drew Pyne, an undersized passer not unlike Rees himself. Milroe wasn’t a spectacular recruit—he was a four-star guy—and it’s unclear what qualities he has compared to what Rees has worked with before, but the receivers Rees now gets to play with in Tuscaloosa are going to be leagues more talented than what he was working with at the end in South Bend. It’ll be interesting to see what he does with them, and it’ll be interesting to see how Milroe performs against a Texas defense that was quietly probably the best in last year’s Big 12.
When Texas has the ball, it’s the Quinn Ewers show, but of equal if not greater importance is what happens in front of him. The offensive line revitalization effort appears to be working for Steve Sarkisian, with the doomful questions and half-hearted hype about the unit from last summer replaced with quiet excitement and talk about youth and depth. Bijan Robinson is gone to a starting role with the Falcons, but as it is with NFL contracts and running backs, it’s dubious how important individual rushers are in the college game. The offensive line group is rather young, starting just one senior (Christian Jones), and they’ll have their work cut out for them. If they struggle to establish traction in the trenches, a lot is going to fall on Ewers’s shoulders. If they do get a good push going, it’s game on.
Ewers is an interesting college football character. The mullet is gone, as is the breathlessness which accompanied anticipation of his play last year, but the skills which made him such a touted recruit should remain. For one quarter last fall, he looked like a Heisman candidate, but then the injury happened and he wound up averaging just 1.5 touchdowns per game through the air. If he is what he can be, he’s going to be a first-round draft pick next spring, clearing the way for Arch Manning. If he is what he was last year, Texas’s defense is going to need to win this game, or Texas is going to need Alabama to have taken a big step back as a program.
That program piece is ultimately what this measuring stick measures: Does Nick Saban have with him another rally to the top? Just how much progress has Steve Sarkisian made in Austin? Which of these schools is first in line to challenge Georgia, this year and beyond? This is not a fun, once-a-decade matchup between two marquee brands. This is the second chapter in a rivalry which will define the next few decades of this sport we love. Texas vs. Alabama. Saturday night. Tuscaloosa. The battle is on.
The (Other) Important Games
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Notre Dame @ NC State (ABC)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Utah @ Baylor (ESPN)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Oregon @ Texas Tech (FOX)
Three of our seventeen most serious playoff threats face tough road games tomorrow, each favored by single digits against a nonconference foe.
Notre Dame has played a spotless opening two games, but the Irish have yet to play anyone very respectable, and Dave Doeren’s NC State is a team designed to pull opponents into the mud, making the Wolfpack’s underwhelming opener at UConn hard to care about too much. If the Irish survive, questions will linger. If the Irish win big, excitement’s going to rise, especially with Clemson’s beatability lowering the top end of Notre Dame’s schedule from brutal to conventional. If the Irish lose, all questions will be answered and the power conferences can breathe a sigh of relief, with another playoff lane closed.
Utah handled Florida last week without too much trouble, but Cam Rising is not expected to return just yet, and while Baylor just played its worst game since going 2–7 in Dave Aranda’s first year, and while Baylor is without its own starting quarterback in Blake Shapen, this is a tough one for the Utes. A big part of Utah’s issue these last few years has been how few games they can make afterthoughts. This is no different, with the team we’d call the Pac-12 favorite likely needing to completely shut down the Bears’ offense in Waco, something that isn’t going to be easy or automatic. The time change, though only an hour, doesn’t help.
While eyes are on Tuscaloosa, Oregon’s playing a tough one in Lubbock, also against a Big 12 team coming off a bad loss. Texas Tech’s loss wasn’t as bad as Baylor’s, and Texas Tech’s expectations were higher than Baylor’s, but Texas Tech is still not in a happy position, and its weaker defense opens the door for an old-school Oregon track meet. The Ducks won’t get much attention if they win, but they have a chance to make a statement here, and they also have a chance to cripple their playoff dreams before conference play even starts.
The (Other) Interesting Games
- Friday, 7:30 PM EDT: Illinois @ Kansas (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Nebraska @ Colorado (FOX)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Troy @ Kansas State (FS1)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Iowa @ Iowa State (FOX)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Mississippi @ Tulane (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Texas A&M @ Miami (ABC)
- Saturday, 6:00 PM EDT: SMU @ Oklahoma (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 6:30 PM EDT: Cincinnati @ Pitt (CW)
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Wisconsin @ Washington State (ABC)
- Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: Auburn @ Cal (ESPN)
This list could have been longer, but keeping it to a reasonable length, here’s what we’re looking at:
Tonight, Illinois and Kansas each try to get to 2–0, a significant milestone for both teams. Each is coming off a wildly successful 2022, and expectations might not be high for the Bret Bielema Illini (especially after they narrowly survived Toledo), but they’re big for Lance Leipold at Kansas.
In the marquee matinee, Deion Sanders and Colorado resume their rivalry with Nebraska, meeting for the first time since 2019 and the third time since 2010. As the Big 12 North disappeared, Nebraska’s grip on this series began to slip, and now Colorado’s won the last two meetings. We’ve said plenty on Colorado, there is so much to say, but as for the Huskers: This is a strange early test for Matt Rhule, who’s already 0–1. The Nebraska defense should be a lot better than TCU’s was last week, but Colorado has a whole lot of speed, and Nebraska’s offense is going to need to do some keeping up of its own. If the Huskers handle the trenches, they could pour cold water on this fire, but if they let Colorado dictate how the game is played, look for a lot of Travis Hunter running around in space.
Kansas State faces an interesting test, our Big 12 favorite trying to avoid what they did last year against Tulane. Troy is a favorite (the favorite, according to many) to win the Sun Belt thanks to James Madison’s continued FBS transition. This is one where K-State can build a lot of belief by taking care of business.
The Cy-Hawk game has lower national stakes than it’s had in a few recent editions, but Iowa’s a contender in the Big Ten West and Iowa State showed enough last week to at least get this Iowa State fan excited. The question’s going to be whether each team can score, and I would like to point out that Iowa State’s defense is supposed to be quite good. It can’t look that way tomorrow—there’s no upside to playing defense against Brian Ferentz—but if the Hawkeyes only score once or twice, please remember that I told you the Cyclone defense is good.
Mississippi and Tulane play a ranked matchup, and it’s one of those which could be a big deal come November. Tulane, as one of the two or three best Group of Five teams and the reigning informal Group of Five champions, has New Year’s Six expectations and sleeper College Football Playoff aspirations. It would need a lot of chaos and a lot of help to get there, but the first step is beating a Mississippi team both programs hope is about to compete in the SEC West. We’re skeptical of their capability to do that, but at the very least, Lane Kiffin in New Orleans is a recipe for fun.
A much less fun game is scheduled near Miami, where Texas A&M meets the Hurricanes. We’re going to start hearing a lot of sleeper talk about whoever wins this. It’s possible it’ll be deserved.
Oklahoma’s trying to follow up last week’s beatdown of Arkansas State with a blowout of SMU. The line for this is right between two and three scores. If Oklahoma wins big, it’s going to speak to the Sooners’ potential to retake the Big 12 before they leave. If SMU can even keep it close, it’s going to be a big boost for a program that’s never finished above third in its division in the AAC.
Cincinnati and Pitt are both intriguing, sleepers to make their conference championship games. They’re also quite close geographically, and it’s not hard to imagine this being a conference game again in a decade or so.
Wisconsin has a ton of excitement around it thanks to Luke Fickell, and while the opener wasn’t the smoothest win over a MAC team that’s ever been seen, it was a victory. The Badgers face a scrappy Washington State that’s currently looking like the sixth team in a five-team Pac-12. The Cougars want their respect, and I will say this: It would maintain a lot of narratives if Wisconsin were to lose this game.
In the late games, I prefer Auburn and Cal to the other options. Cal just scored slightly shy of one million points against North Texas, while Auburn is entering the second game of the Hugh Freeze era, which could mean we’re already close to ten percent of the way done. Jokes aside, the SEC West might be pretty open behind Alabama. Underestimate Freeze at your own risk.
The Dormant Volcanoes
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Youngstown State @ Ohio State (BTN)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Delaware @ Penn State (Peacock)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: UNLV @ Michigan (CBS)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Ball State @ Georgia (SECN)
- Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Tulsa @ Washington (P12N)
- Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Austin Peay @ Tennessee (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 8:30 PM EDT: Southern Miss @ Florida State (ACCN)
- Saturday, 9:00 PM EDT: UC Davis @ Oregon State (P12N)
- Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: Stanford @ USC (FOX)
Of the remaining ten programs we’re calling serious playoff threats, Louisville (a threat largely thanks to their schedule) played Murray State last night, so they’re already through Week 2. The other nine are listed here, all playing as heavy home favorites. Oregon State might be at the most risk, with UC Davis a top-ten FCS program, but if Oregon State struggles against UC Davis, they probably aren’t good enough to win the Pac-12 anyway. The most interesting thing about these nine games might be just how willing the Big Ten is to test the fans of its three biggest programs. “Will you watch UNLV? How about Delaware? What if it’s on Peacock?”
The FCS
- Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Weber State @ Northern Iowa (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Montana State @ South Dakota State (ESPN+)
Two big crossover events here between the FCS’s two best leagues. (Murray State isn’t really in the MVFC, for anyone who checked in on that Louisville game last night. Murray State is technically in the MVFC, but Murray State is not an MVFC football program. Please remember this. The MVFC is otherwise loaded, and it is unfair to Missouri State, who will probably finish with a top-25 team and a losing record, that this association is being made.)
Movelor has South Dakota State and Montana State 1st and 2nd in the whole FCS, with the Jacks a 9-point Movelor favorite. It has Northern Iowa and Weber State 9th and 10th, with UNI favored by three. For context: On a neutral field, these four schools would be favored by a point or so over Nebraska, SMU, Vanderbilt, and Northwestern, respectively. That’s the quality of football we’re talking here. Not bad!
