7 things I’m absolutely overreacting to after Week 6 in the SEC and college football
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It took 11 years, but Kirby Smart‘s finally won all that there is to win.
He finished that job on Saturday night. Georgia defeated Alabama 20-17 at Bryant-Denny Stadium in a wind-and-rain-riddled, referee-aided rock fight. The win was Georgia’s first regular-season win over Alabama and first in Tuscaloosa under Smart — and the program’s first since 2007. For Smart, it was a second-consecutive win over the Crimson Tide, for so long the lone nemesis in Smart and Georgia’s imperious rise to the top of the college football universe.
Sure, Nick Saban is gone. No matter. This was and is Kalen DeBoer‘s best Alabama team yet and Smart knew it. That’s why he stayed on the field and celebrated as long as he did — with players, with the few thousand red-and-black-laden Georgia fans sprinkled among the legions of disappointed Alabama faithful.
There’s a long way to go, but what’s clear is Smart, who spoke candidly this summer about learning what mattered more than football: family, child-rearing, his numerous charitable endeavors — still has his championship fire. Did Georgia get a break late in the game? Absolutely. Were they the better football team? Also absolutely.
These 2 teams could meet again. Texas‘s Red River Rivalry loss to Oklahoma and LSU‘s stunning loss at Kentucky opened a wide path for a prospective rematch in Atlanta. There’s half a season to go, but if it’s Alabama and Georgia yet again in Atlanta, the college football universe is better for it. For now, it remains Kirby’s world. We’re just living in it.
Along with Georgia’s big win, here are 7 things I’m absolutely overreacting to after Week 6 in college football.
We don’t appreciate Georgia: Volume 3
A running theme at overreactions this season has been the consistent national underreaction to Georgia’s excellence.
Georgia’s a freight train, a mean machine in red and black that’s won back-to-back SEC titles in the 3 “down” years since winning back-to-back national championships. When you consider that Lane Kiffin (more below) hasn’t won a single conference championship in his 12 years as a Power 4/5 head coach, it’s instructive that Smart’s Georgia is hanging banners in “down years.”
This Georgia team is the most complete since the 2022 national champions. It starts with defense at Georgia, which it always does. Led by the best linebacker corps in America, Georgia ranks 8th in yards allowed per play, 8th in success rate defense, and 3rd in SP+ defensive efficiency (Bill Connelly’s metric measuring how efficient a defense is adjusted for opponent and tempo). Georgia wasn’t flawless defensively against Alabama, but it limited Keelon Russell to a season low 6 yards per attempt and after Alabama reached 100 yards rushing on its first 10 attempts, the Dawgs hunkered down and limited the Tide to just 61 yards on 19 carries the rest of the evening.
Georgia’s defense is always championship-worthy, though. That’s what makes Gunner Stockton’s emergence as a guy who can win you a game, rather than avoid losing it, so valuable.
Stockton delivered on both drop-back passes (5 completions of 15 yards or more) and on the biggest plays of the game, completing 9 passes of 10 on third down for 104 yards. The last of those third-down completions, to Elyiss Williams on that final drive, saved the Bulldogs from having to punt and kept Alabama from having good field position.
Don’t forget the now-trademark toughness, which was on display again Saturday as you can see on the touchdown run above, the second-straight week Stockton’s challenged a safety to tackle him in the red zone.
Georgia’s the most diverse offense in America this year, at least from a spread the wealth standpoint, with a nation-leading 14 different players who’ve scored touchdowns. Stockton’s decision-making is a huge part of that — not just taking what the defense gives, but understanding what options exist in Mike Bobo’s scheme pre-snap and executing.
Georgia won this round against Alabama without battering-ram touchdown leader Chauncey Bowens and star running back Nate Frazier. In his stead, third-stringer Dwight Phillips Jr., in his third year with the Georgia program, tore through the Tide for 120 yards on 17 carries, a testament to Georgia’s depth, which is the latest sign that Kirby Smart’s relentless recruit and retain strategy remains the best way to roster build. When the Dawgs get Frazier and Bowens back, they’ll be even more multiple.
“We are a resilient team. We’re tough. We can play in different environments,” receiver London Humphreys said after the win. “We are just going to keep getting better.”
That’s a frightening thought for the rest of college football.
Can we stop the Fire Kalen DeBoer nonsense?
You never want to be the guy that follows a legend, and when the legend is the best coach to ever do it, well, good luck.
But aside from the usual unusually disgruntled Finebaum callers, what’s the critique of DeBoer going to be now?
Of course you don’t want 9 losses in the first 2 seasons. Under Nick Saban, it took several years to lose that many games. Of course you don’t want to lose to Vanderbilt for the first time in half a century. But the Alabama team on the field in year 3? That team is a Kalen DeBoer team. Tough on both lines of scrimmage. A budding star at quarterback. A commitment to the run game (one that continues to improve, with 161 yards against Georgia).
Media scribes like me aren’t the only ones noticing.
“He’s done a great job. This is his team,” Saban himself said on College GameDay prior to the game.
Saban’s right –as he is on most issues, save the Protect College Sports Act, where he’s egregiously wrong — and save 2 huge moments Saturday night, Alabama leaves undefeated.
You can’t control a bad no-call on pass interference. You can control how you respond to the late personal foul called on Tide cornerback Dijon Lee Jr. DeBoer understandably lost his mind.
The call didn’t cost Alabama the game. One play never does. But it showed DeBoer’s fire to take Alabama back to the summit of college football, and in the era of NIL, where players are (rightly) well-compensated, it’s fair to expect coaches to hold well-paid players accountable for their mistakes. DeBoer’s team may have lost Saturday night, and there aren’t moral victories at Alabama. But the Tide don’t have the look of a team that’s going to lose again during the regular season. That could get us to Round 2 with the Dawgs soon.
A wild result at the Cotton Bowl, but Texas was playing with fire before this loss
Call the loss inexcusable for Steve Sarkisian and Texas if you’d like. That’s a reasonable position to take given this Oklahoma team looked like a group that might struggle for bowl eligibility over the first month of the season. Strange things happen at the Cotton Bowl when Oklahoma and Texas get together, though, and this upset is just the latest in a long novel of immense Red River Rivalry surprises.
Still, the more reasonable conclusion — and fair Sarkisian criticism — is that Texas wasn’t truly No. 1 good to begin with, a flawed team whose warts were exposed loudly on Saturday afternoon.
Arch Manning and the offense have scuffled all season, save their miraculous, out-of-body experience of a fourth quarter against Ohio State. That hasn’t changed, and was clear on Saturday, when Arch Manning tossed 2 terribly costly interceptions on balls he shouldn’t have thrown in the first place and the Texas run game once again couldn’t save the day. The Horns gained 382 yards, but nearly half of those came on 5 explosive plays which gained 131 yards. That explosive play percentage was under 10% for the fourth time this season, by the way, par for the course for a team that ranks 14th in the conference in explosive plays. If you can’t get a consistent push in the run game and you are turnover prone in the passing game, you have a problem on offense. That’s Texas right now — but it’s nothing new, as we wrote in late September.
What was new is that this time, the Texas defense couldn’t bail it out. John Mateer finally had his moment, saving his best football of the season for the 4-play, 31-yard drive that won the game for the Sooners.
I’m not certain Oklahoma “fixed” any of its systemic problems in this win. The offense still sputtered and the team is still largely a defensive juggernaut that needs to find creative ways to score or get turnovers to win. But winning — especially in a rivalry game — changes things. Oklahoma may go on a little run now, which would quiet the specter of doubt circling Brent Venables in Norman.
Texas? Well the clouds of doubt are only getting scarier. Is Arch a championship-caliber quarterback? Will Texas waste another great defense? If not now, when for Steve Sarkisian?
Unless Texas gets the larger issues on offense fixed, this team simply can’t compete for, let alone win, a national title. At Texas, fair or unfair, that’s always the expectation.
Will Stein is cruising towards SEC Coach of the Year, just as we all expected, right?
In an offseason that saw Lane Kiffin make a $91 million move to LSU, Pete Golding was hired and promptly reached a College Football Playoff, and SEC blue-blood Florida also make a coaching change, it makes sense that the program who hired their guy last and is known universally as a “basketball school” has the frontrunner for SEC Coach of the Year.
That’s where things are, though, after Kentucky stunned LSU 35-34 in overtime on Saturday night. The win was the second-consecutive 35-34 overtime win for Kentucky on a last play 2-point conversion.
That’s something that ESPN reported has never happened in college football history. As a result, Kentucky’s 5-1, 3-1 in the SEC, and suddenly controlling its own destiny in the College Football Playoff hunt. A week ago, Kentucky did it on the road. This time? Kentucky beat mighty LSU at home and blue clad fans stormed the field.
“I didn’t really know what happened. I was watching the (pass) routes. And then we started rushing the field,” Will Stein, the first-year UK football coach said after a 35-34 win over No. 10 LSU. “So it’s pretty crazy.”
Stein’s smart portal evaluations and game planning have flipped Kentucky instantly, improving Kentucky 50 spots (from 105th to 55th) in total offense and over 30 spots in SP+ efficiency offense. As if for effect, Oregon’s offense has declined dramatically since Stein came home to Kentucky, and the Ducks fell out of the AP Top 25 for the first time in several years in their first month and a half this season without Stein. Sometimes causation is correlation.
More vitally, Stein’s made Kentucky football fun again. The sturdy offensive and defensive lines built by Mark Stoops remain. But they are now playing offense in a modern scheme, one where a 10-point deficit does not seem like a 30-point deficit and where Kentucky, not Texas or Oklahoma or Lane Kiffin’s LSU, is one of the most exciting offenses in college football.
Stein’s doing it without fear. Going for the win in consecutive weeks is just the beginning. How about scoring a touchdown after a Lane Kiffin timeout — determined to go for it behind one of the SEC’s best offensive lines?
Kentucky football. Innovative and confident. Just like we expected, right?
Another year, another lost opportunity for Lane Kiffin
Between buyouts and a new, record-setting contract, LSU paid or will ultimately pay over $140 million dollars to bring Lane Kiffin to Baton Rouge.
The juice may yet be worth the squeeze. Kiffin’s undoubtedly one of the game’s best offensive minds and is a strong roster builder in the era of the portal. Coupled with LSU’s seemingly infinite resources, the marriage may be a happy one that delivers LSU fans the type of Saban-like run they fancy is possible in Baton Rouge.
The downside risk, of course, was obvious at the time of the hire and feels reasonable to address now, with LSU sitting at 4-2 and all but mathematically out of SEC Championship Game contention, in need of immense help to make the College Football Playoff in Kiffin’s first season.
Kiffin’s had Mercedes-Benz jobs before. He was the head coach at Southern California, a place with multiple national championships this century. He was fired on an airport tarmac after 3 and a half mostly middling seasons. He was the head coach at Tennessee. He managed to irk Urban Meyer, accusing the championship coach of cheating, a salacious allegation that earned a swift rebuke from the SEC (Lane is elite at receiving those, as we were reminded by Greg Sankey this August and September) Kiffin’s lone Vols team was also mediocre, finishing 7-6, before he bolted for Southern Cal. At Ole Miss, Kiffin was outstanding, demonstrating a mastery of the modern world of NIL and the transfer portal and building the Rebels into a national contender. He also suffered a handful of unthinkably bad losses, like losing in The Swamp to a mediocre Billy Napier Florida team or losing a home game to a woeful Kentucky outfit earlier that season. Those defeats kept Kiffin out of the Playoff.
All told, Kiffin’s coaching in his 12th season as a Power 4/5 head coach. He’s never won a conference title in a Power conference. With the exception of last year, an 11-1 campaign at Ole Miss, there’s always been something “missing,” even in the best seasons. Perhaps at LSU, he’ll shake that rep.
Right now? Lane’s a guy who is great at Twitter (when he’s tweeting) and exceptional at hot yoga. He’s not a guy who wins championships.
Another year, another horrific Florida defense
Speaking of new coaches… Jon Sumrall‘s Florida was boat raced for the second time in October on Saturday, losing 38-19 to South Carolina in The Swamp to spoil Florida’s homecoming.
The biggest culprit, as it’s been every season in Gainesville this decade, was a porous defense.
The Gators resuscitated LaNorris Sellers’s draft hopes in one fell swoop, allowing the beleaguered Gamecocks starter, once a highly coveted NFL prospect, to throw for 279 yards and 4 touchdowns in a resounding Gamecocks win. Sellers added a rushing touchdown for good measure. The Gamecocks likely saved Shane Beamer‘s job — for now — in the process.
The Gators simply could not get off the field on third down, allowing South Carolina to convert 10-16 third downs, including 8 first-half conversions, in defeat.
As much as Florida is known for high-flying offenses that delivered championships and Heisman Trophy winners under Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer, the real backbone of Florida’s sustained excellence from 1980-2010, when it won more games than any program in the SEC, was defense.
From 1990-2019, only Ohio State and Alabama fielded more top 20 defenses than the Gators (25). This decade, the best Florida’s finished in total defense is 51st (2021).
Florida’s new defensive coordinator, Brad White, brought SEC credentials from Kentucky, where he led 4 top 20 defenses in a row. Thus far, he’s flopped. The Gators were gashed on the ground and in the air by Mizzou and South Carolina and even in wins over Auburn and Ole Miss, opposing offenses won plenty of reps.
The fair question now is whether White orchestrated that or it was largely due to the presence of Mark Stoops. That’s fan fodder for now but may become coordinator change fodder come December.
The existential question for Jon Sumrall — the one that will define his tenure in Gainesville — is whether the Gators can get back to their identity on defense again. Fast. Physical. Aggressive. That’s how Florida’s championship teams laid their foundation. That’s what must be rebuilt for Sumrall to succeed.
Extra Point: I see you, Mizzou
I’m not sure a program outside Athens, Georgia, develops running backs better than Eli Drinkwitz‘s Missouri.
The Tigers miss Ahmad Hardy, one of the best running backs in America, terribly as he recovers from a gunshot wound suffered this summer. The good news? Jamal Roberts, his intended backup, is now the SEC’s leading rusher after blowing by Texas A&M for 222 yards and 2 touchdowns in Missouri’s 27-6 win over the Aggies.
Drinkwitz continues to develop star backs and put them behind big, physical, well-coached offensive lines. The results speak for themselves. Again.
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Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
