Weekly takeaways, trends and technicalities from the weekend’s SEC action.

We’re two months and somewhere between 6 and 8 games into the COVID-ravaged 2020 season, depending on who you root for, and the end is in sight. (More mercifully for some than for others.) Rather than the grand finale to the regular season, Thanksgiving weekend this year marks the beginning of the stretch run leading to the SEC Championship Game on Dec. 19, a 3-week window that still stands to shape both this surreal year and the long offseason to come in 2021. Here are 6 looming questions for the next month and beyond.

1. Is Alabama a Playoff lock?

Saturday’s 63-3 annihilation of Kentucky was Alabama’s most lopsided win over an SEC opponent since September 2017 and arguably its most complete game in all phases in the same span. With the Tide entrenched at the top of the polls and Playoff hype beginning in earnest this week, it also raises the eternal question: Is Bama beatable?

As usual, the question is more relevant to an eventual Playoff collision with Clemson or Ohio State than it is to the Tide’s more immediate opponents, Auburn and Arkansas – although of course Alabama has seen undefeated seasons come to an abrupt, unexpected end in the Iron Bowl in 2013 and ’17. If the team we saw on Saturday is vulnerable, though, it’s difficult to say exactly where. QB Mac Jones is a bona fide Heisman candidate who leads the nation in both QBR and pass efficiency vs. Power 5 opponents and has delivered his best games to date in Bama’s biggest games vs. Georgia and Texas A&M. Najee Harris and DeVonta Smith account for more yards per game (273.2) than any other RB/WR combo in the country while somehow still managing to be underrated nationally. Ditto the offensive line, 5 future pros who have logged a ton of snaps together. And the defense, much-maligned earlier in the year, has gotten healthy, found its footing and flipped the script in a hurry: Since halftime of the Georgia game, Pete Golding‘s unit has scored more touchdowns over the last 14 quarters (3) than it has allowed (2).

Statistically, weaknesses for an outfit that leads the league in scoring offense and scoring defense are inevitably few and far between. Shoot, even the kicker is a strength now: Sophomore Will Reichard is perfect on field goals (8/8) and PATs (46/46), easily the most consecutive attempts of any FBS kicker this season without a miss or block.

Barring some last-second scrambling to get the postponed LSU game back on the schedule – highly unlikely at this point, given that every plausible make-up date across the conference has already been filled – Alabama only needs to win 1 of its last 2 to clinch the West and set up a presumptive SEC Championship showdown against Florida, a de facto Playoff game in itself.

At that point, the Gators’ surging, high-octane passing attack will pose the most obvious challenge to Bama’s defense since it gave up 647 yards and 48 points to Ole Miss in the highest-scoring game in SEC history. The Tide have come a long way since then, but not at the expense of anyone remotely on the level of Kyle Trask and his surrounding cast. That’s the test that will tell us where they stand moving forward, and possibly whether they have anything that matters to move forward to.

2. Can Kyle Trask to win the Heisman?

Trask has been more machine than man this season, cranking out eerily consistent stat lines on a weekly basis. Milestones are starting to fall at about the same rate. But his bid for history comes down to the common factor that has linked every Heisman-winning QB out of the SEC for the past decade: Beating Alabama.

Unlike Newton (2010), Manziel (2012), and Burrow (2019), all of whom cemented their front-runner status in instant-classic November wins in Tuscaloosa, Trask won’t get his crack at Bama until the SEC title game, by which point he’ll already be a mainstay of the weekly Heisman lists, if not the outright favorite. (Florida’s next 3 games to close out the regular season are against Kentucky, Tennessee and LSU, none of which seems inclined to knock him off his Burrow-esque pace.) The national spotlight and very likely Playoff implications will set the stage for his closing argument.

It would help, of course, if that argument included Kyle Pitts, who missed the last 2 games due to an apparent concussion and may miss more.  Trask’s star has actually risen faster with his best downfield target on the sidelines, as Pitts’ output (not to mention the accompanying highlights) has largely been absorbed by the rest of the receivers as a group – 3 players caught a touchdown pass from Trask in Saturday’s 38-17 win over Vanderbilt, just as they have in every other game this year. But a program-defining date in the conference title game is the last place you want to be caught shorthanded.

3. Does Texas A&M have a Playoff path?

First of all, before we get ahead of ourselves the Aggies still have beat LSU this weekend in College Station, as well as Auburn and Tennessee on the road to have any shot – hardly a run they can take for granted. ESPN’s Football Power Index gives them just a 28.7% chance of pulling off that trifecta, with the trip to Auburn especially posing an obstacle.

If they do, though, things get interesting. We don’t know yet where A&M is going to debut this week in the Playoff committee’s first weekly Top 25 of the year, but we can say they need a specific set of circumstances to break their way:

  • Chalk in the ACC, Big Ten and SEC. That is, the current front-runner in each of those leagues – Notre Dame, Ohio State and Alabama – need to remain unbeaten, thereby clearing the field of the dark horses (specifically Clemson, Northwestern and Florida) standing between A&M and the 4th slot. A Clemson title in the ACC, Northwestern title in the Big Ten, and/or a Florida title in the SEC would all but guarantee the Aggies are left out in the cold.
  • Chaos in the Pac-12. Just 3 weeks into its revived conference season, the Pac-12 has already seen a major culling of the herd, leaving Oregon, USC and Washington as the only unbeaten teams – none of them by encouraging margins. At any rate, it’s possible that the Pac-12’s late start and reduced schedules will be enough to convince the committee to snub an undefeated Pac-12 champion for playing too few games while A&M played essentially a full schedule minus the C-USA cupcakes. It’s not a given, though, so Aggies fans should be keeping an eye on the Huskies, Ducks and Trojans and rooting against them.
  • Losses by BYU and/or Cincinnati, just to be safe. This year’s non-power darlings have both looked like worthy challengers to break the glass ceiling despite meh schedules featuring zero ranked opponents. (Although that could still change.) In the past, the committee has tended to prioritize high-value wins more than the number of the loss column, which could be good news for A&M based on its win over Florida and (hypothetically) Auburn. It would be much better, though, for a Cincinnati and/or BYU losses to render the question moot.

The other, even more farfetched scenario involves back-to-back Bama losses vs. Auburn and Arkansas, which would throw the SEC West title to A&M and put the Aggies in position to play Florida with a Playoff ticket at stake But for any of that to make sense they have to take care of their business first.

4. Does Georgia have a quarterback?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer, nuanced answer: Almost certainly yes. You know, Saturday’s 31-24 win over Mississippi State was only one game, against a thoroughly mediocre defense, at that. Thirty-one points is just barely above Georgia’s season average. But as far as the new QB was concerned, it was exactly the game Bulldogs fans were hoping to get from first-time starter JT Daniels, who arrived at exactly the right moment to turn a desperate situation behind center into a potential strength for the foreseeable future.

Daniels’ stat line (28-for-38, 401 yards, 4 TDs, 0 INTs) in his first live game action in more than a year since suffering a torn ACL at USC was impressive enough, making him the first UGA quarterback to throw for 400 yards and 4 TDs in any game since Aaron Murray in the 2013 Capital One Bowl. He was also the weekend’s highest-graded QB nationally according to Pro Football Focus. But the ends were less notable in this case than the means:

For a team that has spent most of the past 2 years lamenting the sorry state of its downfield passing game compared to other SEC contenders, Daniels was a revelation. His 318 air yards led the nation for the week, accounting for nearly 80% of his total output. He connected on 6 passes of 25+ yards to 4 receivers, including the Bulldogs’ 2nd- and 3rd-longest TD passes of the year on heaves of 40 and 48 yards, respectively.

He flashed accuracy into tight windows. He was 10-for-11 on 3rd-down passes with 5 conversions on 3rd-and-7 or more to go. He picked up the slack for an uncharacteristically anemic ground game that finished with 8 yards (including sacks) on 0.3 per carry– Georgia’s worst rushing performance on both counts since at least the turn of the century. Even on some of the plays that went down as negatives in the box score, he flashed as much athleticism as any full-time Georgia QB in years.

In other words, he looked for all the world like the 5-star quarterback that UGA hoped it was getting when it pursued Daniels in the transfer portal, and that UGA fans have been clamoring to see for more or less the entire season. Why did it take so long, after it was clear that Stetson Bennett IV and D’Wan Mathis were in over their heads in the most important games on the schedule? Why did we keep hearing so much about Daniels’ alleged lack of mobility in practice after a) he was medically cleared to play, and b) [gestures above]? This is the guy you relegated to the scout team? This is the guy who was stuck on clipboard duty throughout the loss to Florida? Kirby Smart faced the questions on Saturday night and should be bracing for more.

The future, on the other hand, suddenly looks much brighter. Barring injury, Daniels looks like the entrenched starter for the remainder of this season (currently consisting of South Carolina, Vanderbilt and a bowl game) and presumably for 2021, as well, when he’ll return to massive expectations both for himself and for a loaded roster that has been just a quarterback away from a serious championship run the past couple years. The next big thing, 5-star commit Brock Vandagriff, is scheduled to arrive in January with none of the pressure to be The Man from Day 1 that he would have faced if Daniels hadn’t seized the job. These are the reasons Georgia recruited Daniels in the first place, back when his eligibility for this season was still unclear and he figured to be biding his time behind fellow transfer Jamie Newman, anyway. If his audition was any indication, he may well be on his way to becoming the insurance policy that paid off. Better late than never.

5. Is Jeremy Pruitt doomed?

Tennessee’s 30-17 loss at Auburn was a microcosm the Vols’ season to date – initial spark, followed by a slow, steady descent – and did nothing to change the grim trajectory of Pruitt’s 3rd season as head coach as the losing streak hit 5 games and counting. Every time it seems like Tennessee may be on the cusp of showing some signs of life, it gets cracked on the head by a blunt object and goes right back down for the count.

https://twitter.com/SECNetwork/status/1330337618052206594?s=20

This isn’t the space for a full postmortem of Pruitt’s tenure; suffice to say nothing has changed since this time last year, and if anything the outlook looks worse: The Vols still have Florida and Texas A&M on deck on the other side of this weekend’s trip to 0-7 Vanderbilt. The Commodores should be ripe for the picking for Tennessee’s 3rd win, and for Pruitt’s sake he’d better hope they are. The prospect of going 3-7 is bleak enough – UT hasn’t finished a season with fewer than 4 wins since 1924. The prospect of going 2-8 probably triggers an automatic reset.

6. Can Ole Miss set the SEC record for total offense?

The Rebels lead the conference at 564.9 yards per game with (as of right now) 2 games left to play against Mississippi State and LSU. That puts them almost right on LSU’s 2019 pace in all games (568.4 ypg), and slightly ahead of the Tigers’ average in conference games (550.0 ypg), both SEC records. If they manage to eclipse those marks – especially the latter, given the circumstances – Lane Kiffin can end his first year in Oxford by laying claim to one of the most prolific attacks in league history.

An easy misconception about Kiffin’s offense is that it’s primarily a high-flying spread passing attack that puts the ball in the air early and often. It is true that QB Matt Corral has emerged as one of the SEC’s most productive passers, averaging a school-record 337 yards per game on just shy of 11 per attempt, and that WR Elijah Moore is on the verge of smashing every single-season Ole Miss receiving record in just 9 games. Kiffin himself reinforces the primacy of the long ball with his sideline theatrics with the ball in the air.

In fact, though, the strength of the offense is its balance: Ole Miss easily leads the conference in rushing yards and attempts per game, keeping it on the ground on almost 60% of its total snaps – only Kentucky (63%) is running it at a higher rate. The Rebels are on track to join Texas A&M in 2012 (Johnny Manziel’s Heisman year) as the only SEC teams to average 300 passing/200 rushing over a full season, even without the even fit of a true workhorse back.

That’s in contrast with LSU last year, which passed a majority (52.5%) of the time, and with the SEC’s other elite attacks this year, Florida (52.5%) and Alabama (45.2%, skewed significantly by garbage time). With Ole Miss’ defense, garbage time is a foreign concept. And with only Mississippi State and LSU’s defenses standing in the way, the records are there for the taking.

Superlatives

The best of the week.

1. Georgia QB JT Daniels and WR Jermaine Burton. Daniels’ debut was one of the most encouraging performances by a Georgia quarterback in ages, and Burton’s night (8 catches for 197 yards, 2 TDs) was right up there among the best outings by a Georgia receiver, period: 197 yards was good for the 3rd-best output for a UGA wideout since the turn of the century. For a true freshman on the receiving end of multiple deep shots from a first-time, blue-chip starter, it felt like the beginning of a very long, fruitful collaboration.

2. Tennessee RB Eric Gray. Gray was the bright spot in the Vols’ loss at Auburn, churning out 173 yards with 1 TD on 7.9 per carry and adding another 49 yards receiving. That marked his 3rd time in triple digits in the last 4 games, all in a losing effort.

3. Florida QB Kyle Trask. Trask was razor-sharp as usual in the Gators’ win over Vanderbilt, finishing 26-for-35 for 383 yards and 3 TDs without a turnover. He’s the first QB nationally to throw 30 touchdown passes this season, and the first in SEC history to do it in just 7 games.

4. Alabama WR DeVonta Smith. Smith shredded Kentucky’s secondary in typical fashion, hauling in receptions for 144 yards and 2 TDs — accounting for most of Mac Jones’ 16-for-24, 230-yard afternoon all on his own. His 32nd and 33rd career touchdowns passed Amari Cooper and Chris Doering for the SEC career record.

5. Arkansas LB Grant Morgan. Morgan finished with a career-high 19 tackles in the Razorbacks’ 27-24 loss to LSU, only 3 of which went for Tiger 1st downs, adding 2 TFLs, a PBU and QB hurry. With that, he became the first FBS defender this season credited with 100 total tackles on the year.

Honorable Mention: Alabama DB Jordan Battle, who finished with 5 tackles and a pick-6 in the Tide’s blowout win over Kentucky. … Alabama RB Najee Harris, who did his usual damage en route to 110 scrimmage yards (83 rushing, 27 receiving) and a pair of TDs on the ground. … Auburn DB Smoke Monday, who was credited with 4 tackles, a PBU and a QB hurry in addition to his pick-6 vs. Tennessee. … Missouri LB Nick Bolton, who racked up 14 tackles and 2 TFLs in the Tigers’ 17-10 win over South Carolina. … Arkansas QB Feleipe Franks, who finished 17-for-26 for 339 yards and 1 TD plus 43 yards and 1 TD rushing in the Razorbacks’ loss to LSU. … Mississippi State QB Will Rogers, who acquitted himself very well at Georgia, going 41-for-52 for 336 yards, 1 TD and no turnovers in a surprisingly competitive effort. … Vanderbilt QB Ken Seals, who was 22-for-34 for 319 yards and 2 TDs in the Commodores’ loss to Florida. … Florida DEs Zachary Carter and Brenton Cox, who combined for 9 tackles, 2 sacks and 4 QB hurries in Nashville. … And Kentucky DB Kelvin Joseph, who was the lone bright spot on the UK defense with an interception and no catches allowed on 3 targets in the Wildcats’ loss at Alabama.

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The scoring system for players honored in Superlatives awards 8 points for the week’s top player, 6 for 2nd, 5 for 3rd, 4 for 4th, 3 for 5th and 1 for honorable mention, because how honorable is it really if it doesn’t come with any points? The standings are updated weekly with the top 10 players for the season to date.