NO SEC TEAM WILL COMPETE FOR NATIONAL TITLE THIS YEAR
Wednesday 9/25/02
After the debacle in Knoxville this last weekend it is obvious that no SEC team will compete for the national title this year. That is fine with me of course since I despise the current bowl system and think the whole thing is a giant farce any way. As I have said before I love the conference championship game. Now obviously it isn’t perfect and doesn’t always match up the 2 best teams but that is just part of having divisions. After you get past that it is as fair as it gets. You can still get there with a loss or two (or even 3 losses with LSU last year) and a head-to-head win means a whole lot. I think just about every year it has decided at least one of the division champs. Things are decided on the field and the title game is played right after the regular season. Oh well it is not time for this discussion yet…
The point was that the conference title is now the goal of all the teams and maybe getting into a BCS bowl for the money. Florida obviously got a big leg up as they have done so many times by beating Tennessee. Now Tennessee must have Florida lose twice in-conference and not lose again themselves. A tough order for sure. However it looked liked the Vols had it coming to them. It sure looked like they got way overconfident and overlooked the Gators. Now I am one of those that thought Tennessee would handle the Gators but I sure didn’t think it would be easy. It looked like the Vols did. It was the worst coached game I have seen since Phil Fulmer has been there. The sad thing is that Tennessee didn’t even make the Gators earn it. They pretty much just gave it away on their home field. I still think Fulmer is the best coach overall in the conference and is very very good but except for 1998 seems to always stay one step away from great.
That is the disconcerting thing about Fulmer and Tennessee. Since winning the national title the Vols have lost key games where they were the favorite and the best team. In 1999 they lost to a Florida team that wasn’t near as good as they were. However they rebounded from that only to later lose to an Arkansas team they should have beaten. They were obviously the best team in the East and the only conference team that 1999 SEC champion Bama lost to. Last year in 2001, they had Georgia beat only to give them the win and then of course the infamous title game lost to LSU that denied them an SEC title and a shot at the national championship. In all of these games except maybe 1999 Florida the Vols were favored. So now Florida is the clear leader in the East followed by Georgia and Kentucky till they lose. I still think Tennessee will be right there but they will have to wait for somebody to lose before moving back up.
Meanwhile in the West… Auburn’s group of blue-chip freshmen WRs showed their stuff Thursday night as 2 of them had TD catches and the whole group had some other big catches. If the Tigers can just keep Dan Cobb calm the Auburn passing game might get better… It was obvious why Bama is still the best running team in the conference as they simply ran over a decent Southern Miss defense with “nine men in the box”. However it was also obvious that freshman Brodie Croyle is not quite ready for primetime yet as he was 4 of 15 for only 15 yards and 2 INTs (one returned for a TD)... It also looks like Ole Miss’ defense will not be improved this year but may even be worse? In the last 2 weeks Texas Tech and Vandy have shredded the Rebel defense… Some positives for Miss St did come out of the game with Auburn, the biggest being QB Kevin Fant. At times he looked very good throwing the ball. Miss St also looks to have some pretty good WRs. The biggest negative looked to be RB Dontae Walker. The guy has just mushroomed into almost TE proportions. He is definitely more of a FB than a TB now. I look for State to get their young talented RBs to get more and more playing time…