The rest of the SEC has lived in terror for years at the prospect of Alabama adding a Heisman-caliber quarterback to its abundance of riches, and now that the nightmare has become a reality the results are even more unfair than anyone could have seen coming. Anyone, in this case, quite possibly including Nick Saban himself: For as much as he obsesses over maximizing his team’s potential, even the architect of the Death Star has seemed reluctant to let it run at capacity for any longer than is absolutely necessary. In Saturday’s 65-31 annihilation of Arkansas, that meant halftime, give or take, as it has in almost every other game this year. Midway through the season, Tua Tagovailoa at full throttle remains almost too terrible to contemplate.

Even at something like three-quarters speed the Crimson Tide are setting a record pace, not just for Alabama or for the SEC but for college football in general: At 56 points per game, they’re running right alongside the 1944 Army-West Point juggernaut as the highest-scoring team in D-I history, despite going to great lengths to throw on the brakes in every game. (More than 70 percent of Bama’s scoring this season has come in the first half, and virtually all of its scoring with Tagovailoa on the field.)

Tua is still on an all-time pace in terms of completion percentage, yards per attempt, and overall efficiency, despite having attempted just 21 passes in the third quarter and zero in the fourth; against Arkansas, he had 334 yards and 4 TDs passing at halftime, on just a dozen attempts, and called it a day after leading another scoring drive to open the second half. Roughly one of every five passes that leaves his hand goes for a touchdown; he has almost as many total TDs (20, including two rushing scores) as incompletions (25), and has yet to commit a turnover. The Tide are scoring, literally, almost every time he touches the ball.

Needless to say, the standard template for Saban-era dominance in Tuscaloosa does not emphasize high-octane passing. But in addition to the absurdity of Tagovailoa’s presence on a team that would still be in the thick of the national title hunt without him, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that his surrounding cast is leveling up relative to its predecessors, too.

Not that Bama hasn’t had its share of top-shelf receivers: Julio Jones begat Amari Cooper, who passed the baton directly to Calvin Ridley; the current receiving corps doesn’t boast an obvious headliner in quite the same vein. (Not quite yet, anyway.)

As a group, though, the combination of sophomores Jerry Jeudy, DeVonta Smth, and Henry Ruggs III and true freshman Jaylen Waddle has emerged in its own right as arguably the most versatile, explosive set of wideouts that Saban has had, or that anyone else has right now in college football. Any one of them could be a headliner on any given play.

As wide a gap as Tua has put between himself and his predecessors behind center, his top targets are distancing themselves at the same astonishing rate. Collectively, Bama’s top five receivers (Jeudy, Ruggs, Smith Waddle, and tight end Irv Smith Jr.) are averaging a triple-option-worthy 21.4 yards per catch with an Air Raid-worthy 21 touchdowns — more in six games than the 2009 or 2011 national championship teams managed in their entire seasons, and just one behind the 2015 championship team led by Ridley. Two-thirds of those scores have come from at least 20 yards out, not including Waddle’s contributions in the return game.

What the numbers don’t convey, but which is all too obvious in real time, is the routine effortlessness with which they all seem to operate, gliding past overmatched defenders as the ball arrives in perfect sync from Tagovailoa to carry his target to the end zone without breaking stride.

There’s a case to be made that apparent ease is largely a product of the lackluster schedule to date, which, fair enough — naturally the going’s going to get tougher in November and December, when DBs from Arkansas, Ole Miss, and UL-Lafayette are replaced by ones from LSU, Auburn, and Georgia. We’ve seen that story before. But the unprecedented combustibility of this attack through the air, without sacrificing any of Bama’s usual capability on the ground, makes it a qualitatively different beast than any Saban-era offense that has come before it, and possibly any offense, period. So much so that it’s fair to assume that a mediocre version is one that’s still very capable of hanging 30 on an elite defense over the course of a full game.

We have to assume that for now, because until someone gives Saban a reason to keep his foot on the gas we’re not likely to see what it’s truly capable of with the pedal to the metal. Eventually the test will come, the sparks will fly, and we’ll have some idea of the full measure of where Tua’s Tide stacks up with other Hall-of-Fame college offenses. Until it does, the notion that it has the potential to go beyond what we’ve seen so far is just part of the spectacle.

Notebook

Around the conference.

Alabama 65, Arkansas 31

Rat Poison Watch: Fortunately for Saban’s perfectionist instincts, Saturday was not an on-brand afternoon by the Bama defense: Arkansas piled up 405 yards with 22 first downs on its way to the first 30-point effort against the Tide since Clemson scored 35 in the 2017 national championship game. The Razorbacks had 3 passing TDs — 2 in the first half, not in garbage — while averaging 5.8 per carry on the ground and producing the rare 100-yard rusher (Rakeem Boyd). This from a team that still ranks dead last in the conference in total and scoring offense.

That’s easy to shrug off when the offense scores 65, which it can seemingly manage against most the schedule at will. Looking down the road, though, it’s hard to distinguish a meaningless lapse on the road in an obvious blowout from potential vulnerabilities that a more well-rounded team (like, say, Georgia) is capable of exploiting. You can bet in Saban’s mind there is no difference.

Also: Bama’s freshman kicker, Joseph Bulovas, clanged an extra point, the Crimson Tide’s fourth failed PAT of the season. (The other three were off the foot of Austin Jones, before he was benched.) There’s no indication that Bulovas is in danger of ceding the job back to Jones, but either way the kicking issues remain the Tide’s most persistent problem.

Mississippi State 23, Auburn 9

Taken by itself, the story of the night for Auburn was missed opportunities: Seven trips inside the MSU 35-yard line yielded a grand total of three field goals. One apparent touchdown went by the wayside when QB Jarrett Stidham missed a wide-open receiver on a trick play. Another went tumbling out of the back of the end zone when RB JaTarvious “Boobee” Whitlow fumbled at the goal line at the end of a 41-yard run in the third quarter, giving the ball back to Mississippi State via touchback with nothing to show for his effort.

At one point Auburn went nearly 17 consecutive minutes of game time without running a single play on offense, a drought facilitated in part by a muffed punt that allowed the Bulldogs to turn a stalled drive into a crucial touchdown on the last play of the first half. Altogether the Tigers finished with a nearly 24-minute disadvantage in time of possession.

Taken along with the rest of the season to date, it looks like the beginning of a potential crisis. With two losses within the division, Auburn is already effectively eliminated from the SEC West race even it manages to pull itself together (again) in time to for defining November trips to Georgia and Alabama. And the trajectory since the season-opening win over Washington has been in exactly the opposite direction: At the midway point, this is shaping up as the most lifeless attack of Gus Malzahn’s 6-year tenure as head coach in just about every significant way:

At this point, the ebbs and flows of the Malzahn Experience are well-established: When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s bad it’s time to start looking up how much it will take to buy out Malzahn’s contract. (Spoiler: Way too much for a team that, at worst, is still likely to finish with a winning record.) They break out the pitchforks on The Plains every few years or so and clearly this is one of them. But even at the lowest point of the Jeremy Johnson/Shaun White era, it has never looked quite as bad over an extended period of time as it has over the past month.

That can’t all fall on Stidham, who has regressed statistically into Johnson/White territory but hasn’t had nearly the help he enjoyed in 2017 from his supporting cast. The offensive line is banged up and struggling to protect; the receiving corps has been hit by injuries and attrition; neither Whitlow nor Kam Martin looks like the kind of every-down, 1,000-yard feature back Auburn is usually able to take for granted.

Stidham himself has been a nonentity in the running game, winnowing down parts of Malzahn’s playbook that have been successful in the past. Including sacks, the Tigers have been held below 100 yards rushing three weeks in a row, which prior to this year had never happened on Malzahn’s watch more than twice in the same season.

The silver lining is that the next two games, against Tennessee and Ole Miss — especially against Ole Miss — should be good opportunities to find some semblance of identity, chemistry, and rhythm heading into an off week on the last weekend of October. But the road back to competence is only going to get steeper from there, and for the same unit that struggled against Arkansas and Southern Miss there’s obviously a long way to go.

Florida 27, LSU 19

If Florida is going to make a sustained run in the East it’s going to be on the strength of its defense, full stop. Under blitz-aholic coordinator Todd Grantham the Gators have improved in terms of scoring D by almost two full touchdowns per game compared to 2017; variously, they rank second nationally in takeaways, first in the SEC in sacks (20, just 3 shy of last year’s total), and lead among Power 5 teams in pass efficiency D. They’re hitting opposing quarterbacks and creating turnovers with as much gusto as any team in the country.

Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

But the win over LSU was also a glimpse of an offense beginning to figure itself out, too, despite its lack of game-breaking personnel. Dan Mullen’s gift as a play-caller has always been his ability to manufacture a viable ground game out of whatever spare parts are lying around, and the Gators are rounding into form: Against LSU, sturdy vets Lamical Perine and Jordan Scarlett slugged out 150 yards between them on just shy of 5 per carry, supplemented by QB Feleipe Franks (42 yards on 6 carries) and Wildcat dynamo Kadarius Toney (25 yards on 4 carries).

Nobody’s about to mistake that group for the Tebow/Harvin/Demps rotation that left tread marks across the league a decade ago, but 215 yards rushing against LSU is 215 yards rushing against LSU — that number marks Florida’s best output on the ground against the Tigers since 2008, with Mullen calling the plays for Tebow, et al. as the Gators’ offensive coordinator. That’s a step.

And while Franks remains decidedly on the front end of the learning curve — let’s not overlook that Florida had three times as many punts as touchdowns Saturday and went 3-and-out 5 times — Mullen also had a couple tricks up his sleeve in the red zone that ensured the opportunities the Gators did get paid off with touchdowns: The second of their three touchdowns came on a one-man play-action fake by Franks, who posed just enough of a threat as a runner to suck in the defense and allow TE Moral Stephens to slip out for a wide-open catch in the back corner of the end zone; the third was set up by a throwback pass to Franks that gave them 1st-and-goal at the 2; Perine dove in for the go-ahead TD on the next play.

It’s no coincidence, either, that both of those crucial calls came out of the bag on first down, when the Tigers’ antennae were most attuned to stopping the run. For the first time in a long time, Florida actually gave them good reason to be on alert.

Texas A&M 20, Kentucky 14 (OT)

First of all — and I say this without a hint of irony — in the kind of game where field position was a top priority Kentucky’s Max Duffy and Texas A&M’s Braden Mann put on a punting exhibition for the ages. Tasked with bailing out a dead-end offense, Duffy booted 10 punts for a staggering 487 yards, nearly triple the Wildcats’ output in total offense. Three of those attempts pinned A&M inside its own 20, on bombs that covered 63, 58, and 49 yards, respectively.

Not to be outdone, Mann padded his All-America résumé by blasting a series of moonshots of his own, including one that traversed 65 yards and another that went in the books at 82 yards before bounding into the end zone for a touchback. The former was downed at the UK 6-yard line; the latter is the longest punt in any FBS game this season.

Mann entered the game leading the nation at 53.6 yards per punt, and actually extended his advantage — that number now stands at 54.9. At that rate he’s well on his way to becoming the first FBS punter to average 50 yards since the turn of the century, and at the rate Texas A&M’s offense was going Saturday night, he’ll have more than enough attempts to qualify.

The corollary to heroic punting was some truly dreadful offense, particularly on the part of Kentucky, whose limitations were exposed in mind-numbing fashion. The Wildcats struck early, on a 54-yard jet sweep to Lynn Bowden that put them up 7-0; from that point on, it was a death march, yielding 2 first downs, 6 3-and-outs, and 8 punts on as many series. Even including its lone scoring “drive,” UK didn’t run a single play in regulation on Texas A&M’s side of the 50:

It’s easy to look at the box score and wonder how RB Benny Snell, a (now-former) Heisman candidate who had at least 25 carries in each of Kentucky’s first three SEC games, only got 13 in College Station despite averaging a perfectly respectable 4.6 yards per carry. But it gets a little tougher in context. Kentucky was rarely in a position to run beyond first down, and on third downs, especially, it was consistently in must-pass territory: After converting a couple of 3rd-and-short opportunities in the first quarter, the Wildcats failed to convert on their next nine attempts in regulation, every single one of which saw them facing 3rd-and-7 or longer.

QB Terry Wilson was efficient enough over the first month of the season with Snell and the rest of the ground game (including Wilson himself) rolling along at more than 250 yards per game. Forced into bad situations, though, the odds of him throwing his way out were virtually nil. Subtract the long touchdown to Bowden — officially a pass; in reality a glorified a handoff — and Wilson finished 12-of-19 for 54 yards, with a long of 16. The fact that Kentucky managed to take the game into overtime anyway is a major testament to Mark Stoops’ defense, which supplied the ‘Cats’ second touchdown itself. But you can only hide a one-dimensional quarterback in this league for so long.

South Carolina 37, Missouri 35

This one almost certainly has no bearing on the long-term outlook in the SEC East, but it was the wildest, weirdest, and most surreal game of the season to date in the midst of a biblical deluge:

1. After scoring on its opening possession, Missouri attempted what looked like an onside kick; the ball failed to travel 10 yards, setting up a short field for South Carolina to promptly even the score. At halftime, Mizzou coach Barry Odom claimed it wasn’t a deliberate onside attempt but an unintentional flub by his kicker.

2. A Carolina receiver got suplexed.

https://twitter.com/espn/status/1048625063325585409

3. An apparent 70-yard touchdown run by Missouri’s Damarea Crockett was overturned and spotted instead at the Carolina 11-yard line, where Crockett stepped out of bounds; Mizzou was subsequently hit with three consecutive penalties, forcing a punt on 4th-and-33 from the USC 34-yard line.

4. Mizzou punter Corey Fatony dropped the ensuing snap and was tackled for a 13-yard loss.

5. On Missouri’s next possession, QB Drew Lock blindly lofted a screen pass in the direction of a back who had already tripped over one of his own linemen, resulting in an almost effortless, slapstick pick-6 for the Gamecocks.

6. On Missouri’s next possession, the Tigers drove to the Carolina 2-yard line, only to botch another snap and settle for a 25-yard field goal attempt by Tucker McCann, who missed.

7. In the fourth quarter alone, South Carolina had one punt blocked, dropped the snap on another punt, and attempted a fake field goal, which failed. Missouri converted the miscues into 12 points.

8. The Gamecocks notched their second interception of the game on a pass that landed on the stomach of a Missouri receiver and rolled off into the hands of USC’s Jamyest Williams.

9. Missouri trailed by two points, 34-32, and had the ball at midfield with less than 3 minutes remaining in the game when play was abruptly suspended on account of lightning. The teams retreated to the locker rooms for an hour and fifteen minutes before returning to play out the 2:41.

10. Despite the miserable conditions, McCann and his Carolina counterpart, Parker White, combined to connect on 8-of-9 on field-goal attempts, including a 57-yard, go-ahead boot by McCann on the first play after the delay. White subsequently hit the game-winner from 33 yards out.

11. The decisive kick was set up by a 27-yard strike from Michael Scarnecchia, a fifth-year senior making his first career start in place of the injured Jake Bentley, to another little-used veteran, redshirt junior tight end Kyle Markway, who had just one previous reception on the season after missing almost all of the previous two years to injury.

12. Mizzou averaged 6.2 yards per carry to South Carolina’s 2.7, outgained the Gamecocks by more than 100 yards overall, and lost.

Superlatives

The best of Week 6, non-Tagovailoa division …

1. Florida LB Vosean Joseph: Joseph, a junior, was the headliner on a banner afternoon for Florida’s front seven, turning in a career day for total tackles (14), tackles for loss (3.5), and sacks (2) for a unit that held LSU to its lowest point total of the season. Individually, Joseph’s tally included 4 third-down stops that forced the Tigers to punt, including a TFL and a sack on consecutive possessions in the first quarter; the Walter Camp Foundation duly tabbed him as its national Defensive Player of the Week. As a whole, the Gators forced 8 punts, 6 3-and-outs, and 3 turnovers, an effort that evoked some vintage Florida defenses in more ways than one.

Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

(See also: DEs Jachai Polite and Jabari Zuniga, who accounted for 3 of the Gators’ 5 sacks — including a strip sack by Polite, who’s making a habit of that sort of thing — and generally made their presence felt on a regular basis.)

2. Texas A&M RB Trayveon Williams. Williams’ graduation from part-time speedster to every-down workhorse is officially complete. Against Kentucky, he logged 30 touches, tying last week’s career high, for 210 total yards and the highlight of the night via his game-winning touchdown in overtime. With some help from the A&M defense, Williams also surged ahead of Benny Snell Jr. for the SEC rushing lead, and replaced Snell on the very short list of backs nationally averaging both a) 20 carries per game and b) 6 yards per carry.

3. Mississippi State DE/OLB Montez Sweat. Not that anyone who’s watched Auburn’s offensive line the past few weeks expected a matchup with a potential first-round edge rusher to go well, but the end result may have been the worst-case scenario: Sweat was in Jarrett Stidham’s face all night, registering 3 sacks, 2 QB hurries, and a forced fumble — all at the expense of Auburn’s redshirt freshman right tackle, Calvin Ashley, a former 5-star recruit pressed into action by an injury to starter Jack Driscoll.

Officially, that left Sweat in the conference lead with 7.5 sacks on the year, just a half-sack off the pace nationally.

4. Mississippi State’s offensive line. On the opposite end of things, the Bulldogs slowly pulverized the Tigers’ front seven into a fine paste. In the end, MSU ground out 349 yards rushing on 6.1 per carry, producing two 100-yard rushers (Nick Fitzgerald and Kylin Hill) and chewing up an incredible 41:53 in time of possession in the process. It was the kind of performance that looks a lot better on paper at the end of the night than it did while it was actually unfolding, which is to say it was the kind the big men relish.

Altogether, that output was good for the third-highest rushing total against an Auburn defense in Malzahn’s tenure. The only two ahead of it: A 400-yard effort by Wisconsin — led by Heisman finalist Melvin Gordon — in the 2015 Outback Bowl, and a 411-yard romp by LSU in 2015, aka the Leonard Fournette Game. Otherwise, Mississippi State is the only opposing offense in that span to top 300.

5. Georgia QB Jake Fromm. Fromm’s season has been overshadowed so far by Tagovailoa’s white-hot start in Tuscaloosa, and to some extent even by his own understudy, Justin Fields, who continued to earn relevant snaps in Saturday’s 41-13 win over Vanderbilt. But Fromm has made obvious strides in Year 2, especially as a downfield passer: Georgia’s first touchdown against Vandy, a perfectly placed, 75-yard bomb to Terry Godwin, was Fromm’s fifth completion of 40-plus yards in six games.

(By comparison, he connected on just 9 40-yard passes last year in 15 games.) Fromm finished 17-of-23 for 276 yards, 3 touchdowns, and zero picks, good enough to move him into the top five nationally for the season in completion percentage, yards per attempt, and overall efficiency.

Honorable mention: Ole Miss QBs Jordan Ta’amu and Matt Corral, who combined to go 31-of-34 passing for 517 yards with 5 TDs to five receivers in the Rebels’ blowout win over UL-Monroe. (Ta’amu and Corral also racked up 142 yards and 3 TDs rushing on an absurd day for the Ole Miss offense, even by the standards of running up the score against a Sun Belt patsy.) … Texas A&M DTs Kingsley Keke and Justin Madubuike, who combined for 3 of the Aggies’ 6 sacks against Kentucky, as well as a forced fumble and a pair of QB hurries by Madubuike. … Kentucky DB Darius West, who registered a team-high 10 tackles against A&M to go with an interception and a 40-yard fumble return for the Wildcats’ only score of the second half. … LSU DB Grant Delpit, who had 10 tackles against Florida to go with an interception and 2 QB hurries. … Alabama LB Dylan Moses, who was credited with 10 total tackles, 2 TFLs, and a forced fumble in Bama’s win over Arkansas. … Alabama DT Quinnen Williams, who continued his stellar campaign in the middle of the Tide’s D-line by adding 2 more TFLs and a pair of QB hurries to the effort.. … Mississippi State DB Mark McLaurin, who finished with 10 tackles, a TFL, and a game-changing forced fumble that turned an apparent Auburn touchdown into a touchback. … Auburn DB Jeremiah Dinson, who finished with 15 tackles, a TFL, and an interception against Mississippi State. … Missouri LBs Terez Hall and Cale Garrett, who combined for 19 tackles, 4 TFLs, and 4 QB hurries against the Gamecocks. … South Carolina LB Bryson Allen-Williams, who filled in for the injured D.J. Wonnum at “Buck” end and racked up 6 total tackles, 3 TFLs, and 2 QB hurries in his place. … And Texas A&M punter Braden Mann, who in addition to averaging just shy of 60 yards per attempt against Kentucky blasted all three of his kickoffs into the end zone for touchbacks.

Quote of the Week: Joe Moorhead

After Mississippi State snapped its 2-game losing streak with a reassuring win over Auburn: