Breaking down the weekend’s SEC slate, all in one place.

Game of the Week: LSU at Alabama (-3)

The stakes

Bama-LSU is well into its 3rd consecutive decade of speaking for itself. While this weekend’s collision is hardly the all-consuming blockbuster the rivalry has frequently delivered in the past, it is still the defining game of both teams’ seasons, still commands one of the sport’s biggest stages, and still arrives with all of the usual implications for the stretch run in the conference and national landscapes.

In the division race, the winner on Saturday emerges as the clear-cut frontrunner to rep the West in the SEC Championship Game for the 9th time in 10 years in the Playoff era. (Shout out to 2017 Auburn.) In the CFP race, the winner remains very much alive with a direct path to the Final Four running through Atlanta. In the Heisman race, a win stands to confirm prolific LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels as a leading contender as the field begins to narrow in the coming weeks, if not as the man to beat. And for all the existential angst that has surrounded Alabama’s less-than-dominant campaign to date, a 7th consecutive win after the Texas loss can reassure the outside world that even the most mortal outfit of Nick Saban‘s tenure is worthy of carrying the banner of the Bama dynasty through to the end.

For the loser? All of the above vanishes from reach, relegating 2023 to the long, obscure roll of seasons that were good but not quite good enough. Critics of Playoff expansion are right that the all-or-nothing dynamic that often accompanies late-season rivalries is one thing the sport stands to lose with the arrival of the 12-team field in 2024. Until then, the emotions that go into a matchup like Bama-LSU are as big as they come.

The stat: 35.8%

That’s Alabama QB Jalen Milroe‘s pressure-to-sack ratio this season, per Pro Football Focus, the highest rate among all FBS passers with at least 50 drop-backs. “Pressure-to-sack ratio” is what it sounds like: The percentage of total pressures a quarterback faces that result in sacks. By PFF’s accounting, Milroe has been pressured on 81 of his 207 drop-backs this season, and sacked on 29 of them — i.e. a little more than one-third of those pressures have resulted in sacks. That’s a lot! For context, the national median is in the 18-19% range, meaning Milroe has been almost twice as likely to take sacks under duress as the average FBS passer.

Alabama’s issues on the offensive line have been well documented, especially at left tackle, where 5-star freshman Kadyn Proctor has endured more than his fair share of growing pains in his first year on campus. (PFF has singled out Proctor for 9 sacks allowed, the most of any FBS player.) But Milroe himself has been a source of frustration on this point, for 2 reasons: 1), his mobility is not saving his bacon as often as you’d expect; and 20, the fact that, relatively speaking, he has often had time to avoid disaster. Milroe averages 4.15 seconds on pressured attempts before the ball leaves his hands, the most time of any SEC quarterback. No other SEC QB averages more than 4 seconds on pressured attempts; the league’s fastest gun, Missouri’s Brady Cook, averages just 3.04. On the Time to Throw vs. Sacks Taken axis, Milroe is an extreme outlier (note that time to throw on this graph reflects all attempts, both pressured and clean):

That’s a portrait of a young QB determined to make something happen at all costs, which is what Milroe makes as interesting and as maddening a player on paper as he is in real time. The strength of his game, on the screen and in the stats, is his ability to generate big plays downfield; on attempts of 20+ yards, specifically, he ranks among the national leaders (alongside Daniels) in completion percentage, yards per attempt, and touchdowns. He’s converted 15-of-25 3rd-down attempts with 7 or more yards to go, an astonishing 60% success rate in some of the least QB-friendly situations possible — that is, when the ball actually leaves his hands. In keeping with his boom-or-bust reputation, the inflated sack rate and the occasional reckless INT represent the “bust” side of the ledger. The kid certainly does make things happen. Whether they’re happening for him or to him, well, stay tuned to find out.

The big question: Where is Harold Perkins Jr.?

Last year’s matchup in Baton Rouge was a breakout performance for Perkins, who introduced himself to a national audience by hounding Bryce Young from every angle on the field. He split his 66 snaps in that game evenly between the slot (23), off-ball linebacker (20) and an edge role (23), showing off the full range of his skill-set for the first time. As a freshman, the idea of a “position-less” player with nearly unlimited versatility was a novel feature. As a sophomore, the jack-of-all-trades routine has begun to wear a little thin, mostly because it diminishes what Perkins nominally does best: Rush the passer.

Altogether, Perkins has continued to split snaps roughly evenly between edge, linebacker and nickel over the course of the season. Week-to-week, though, his role has varied considerably. In LSU’s opening-night loss to Florida State, he infamously spent much of the game lurking around the line of scrimmage as a spy in case FSU’s electric quarterback, Jordan Travis, attempted to escape the pocket; Travis, blessed with plenty of time thanks to the Tigers’ decision to neutralize their own best pass-rushing threat, planted his feet and repeatedly shredded the LSU secondary with his arm instead. In the 7 games since, Perkins’ snaps as a traditional linebacker have been scaled back — although not eliminated, by any means — in favor of more snaps on the edge and, especially over the past three games, the slot.

So far, Perkins has only been deployed as an every-down edge rusher once, in LSU’s Week 5 trip to Ole Miss. Given the green light to get after the quarterback, he generated a single QB hurry on 31 pass-rushing snaps, per PFF, while dropping into coverage only once; the Rebels scored 55 points on 706 yards of total offense, thus ending the full-time edge experiment. Perkins has been restricted mainly to situational blitzes ever since. Instead, he’s settled into a free-range nickel role, allowing just 35 yards on 14 targets in coverage in the month of October.

The problem is that, as solid as Perkins has been in space, the Tigers have not come close to identifying another reliable threat off the edge. He still has a significant role to play there; Ole Miss debacle notwithstanding, Perkins’ 13 QB pressures and 3 sacks are both tied for the team lead on just 98 pass-rushing snaps. The most productive member of the regular d-line rotation, All-SEC DT Mekhi Wingo, is out Saturday (and likely the rest of the season) due to an undisclosed injury; the rest of the rotation has 4 combined sacks. LSU clearly does not want to put the 220-pound Perkins in a situation where he’s likely to be outmuscled by a massive offensive tackle on potential run downs, but at some point the prospect of unleashing him against Bama’s struggling freshman left tackle, Kadyn Proctor, has to be too tantalizing to pass up.

The key matchup: LSU WR Malik Nabers vs. Alabama CB Kool-Aid McKinstry

As always in this game, next-level talent and good-on-good matchups abound on two of the most stacked rosters in the country. Of all the future pros on the field, though, no head-to-head battle is going to draw more attention from the scouts than the one between Nabers, the nation’s leading receiver, and McKinstry, the nation’s premiere cover corner.

Nabers and his running mate, Brian Thomas Jr., have inspired invocations of Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson circa 2019, and statistically they’ve backed that up. But Kool-Aid has lived up to the preseason hype in his own right, allowing just 12 receptions and 1 touchdown on 27 targets, per PFF; over the past 2 seasons combined, quarterbacks have completed just 45.6% of their attempts in his direction, for a meager 4.5 yards per attempt. Alabama doesn’t assign its corners to individual receivers, but between Nabers and Thomas on one side, and McKinstry and Terrion Arnold on the other, every throw Daniels makes outside the numbers promises to be the kind of hotly contested battle this rivalry is known for.

The verdict …

I haven’t said much here about Daniels, arguably the best player in college football this season, simply because listing his sterling résumé at this point is getting a little redundant. If it’s a meaningful statistical category, he’s at or near the top of the national rankings in it, period. Ditto for LSU’s offense as a whole, which through 8 games has put up near-identical numbers as the beatified 2019 national championship team at the same point in the season. He’s efficient, he’s mobile, he’s improved by leaps and bounds as a downfield passer, he’s delivered in the clutch. He has, somehow, remained in one piece despite repeatedly leaving his spindly frame vulnerable to unnecessarily violent hits. Since the opening-night disappointment against FSU, he’s put together a near-perfect campaign.

Daniels’ Heisman case at this stage comes down to one factor: Beating Alabama in his team’s biggest game of the year. And this version of Alabama, let’s face it, is beatable. The Tide have been resilient, and the defense in particular has carried the team to an extent we haven’t seen from a Bama D since Kirby Smart left for Georgia. It’s entirely possible that, enormously gifted as he is, Jalen Milroe emerges on Saturday night as the next great Crimson Tide quarterback, right on schedule. But everything we’ve seen so far says this is Daniels’ year.
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• LSU 31 | Alabama 27

Missouri at Georgia (-15.5)

Let’s give Mizzou it’s due: The Tigers are just 1 bad quarter against LSU from an 8-0 record, and nothing about their ascent smells fluky. Brady Cook is the nation’s most improved quarterback; RB Cody Schrader is an unlikely rising star; blue-chip WR Luther Burden III is as dangerous with the ball in his hands as anyone in America. (Burden, an East St. Louis product who spurned Georgia as a recruit to play closer to home, is almost certainly the only player on Missouri’s roster UGA seriously recruited.) Their most recent wins, decisive thumpings of Kentucky and South Carolina, were both driven by the defense and ground game, relieving Cook and Burden of the, uh, burden of having to light up the scoreboard every time out. For a few more days, at least, they’re one of the very few remaining teams nationally that can realistically stake a claim to controlling their own destiny all the way to the Playoff.

Can they beat Georgia, at Georgia? Eh. Missouri did give the defending champs their closest regular-season shave of the past 3 seasons last year in Columbia, in a 26-22 decision that the Tigers led virtually throughout. For that reason, though, there’s no chance of catching the Dawgs with their guard down again. Any doubts about Carson Beck and his surrounding cast in the absence of Brock Bowers were decisively answered in last week’s 43-20 massacre of Florida, in which RB Daijun Edwards, WR Ladd McConkey and WR Dominic Lovett (a Mizzou transfer) accounted for 314 of the team’s 486 total yards. There have never been any doubts about the defense to begin with. Burden is a special talent capable of putting up a big number against anybody, but he can’t stop a moving train all by himself.
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Georgia 34 | • Missouri 23

Texas A&M at Ole Miss (-3)

Flash back exactly 1 year, to the first Saturday of November 2022: Ole Miss is 8-1, ranked No. 11 in the Playoff committee’s initial Top 25, and can still make out a narrow but plausible path to Atlanta. It’s all downhill from there. The Rebels dropped 4 in a row to end the year — all but 1 of them as the betting favorites — and limped into the offseason unranked, wondering how long it would be before another opportunity like the one they’d just blown would come around again.

Fast-forward to the present: Ole Miss is 7-1, ranked No. 10 in the CFP committee’s initial Top 25, and can still make out a narrow but plausible path to Atlanta. (Sure, that path runs through a Week 11 trip to Georgia, and potentially a 3-way tiebreaker scenario that leaves the Rebels rooting for a late-season surge by Vanderbilt, but it exists.) Failing the division crown, a New Year’s 6 bowl slot is very much there for the taking as a consolation prize. Junior Jaxson Dart is as entrenched as ever behind center after surviving an offseason challenge to his job. Sophomore RB Quinshon Judkins is back on a 1,000-yard pace after a relatively sluggish September. The injury-plagued WR rotation is as healthy as it’s been all season. The defense has rebounded from the Week 5 shootout against LSU by dominating a series of bad offenses. Does this team have the staying power?

If so, it starts with dispatching a one-dimensional Texas A&M outfit that’s 6-11 vs. Power 5 opponents since its last trip to Oxford in November 2021 — in retrospect, the beginning of the Aggies’ descent into sustained mediocrity. A&M is legit on defense, led by a blue-chip rotation along the d-line and arguably the nation’s best linebacker, Edgerrin Cooper. The offense, on the other hand, still tends to look like a leftover from the wrong decade. There are plenty of weapons in the passing game, but if the line manages to keep Max Johnson upright opposite an underrated Ole Miss pass rush, it will be a first.
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• Ole Miss 26 | Texas A&M 21

Kentucky (-3.5) at Mississippi State

At 5-3, Kentucky is mired once again in the college football version of purgatory: Not quite far enough removed from the bad old days to get caught taking winning records for granted, but juuuust far enough that the prospect of Christmas at the Birmingham Bowl has decidedly lost whatever appeal it might have once had to anyone except Mark Stoops‘ agent. When is it fair to expect the program to take the next step? A winless October against Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee confirmed the Wildcats’ also-ran status in the East for the umpteenth year in a row, all but foreclosing the possibility of a winning conference record or a ranked finish. To add insult to injury, the only part of the skid the rest of the country even bothered to notice was Stoops’ off-the-cuff remark that the fan base had no right to express its frustration until it ponied up the money to compete with the likes of Georgia for top talent on the NIL market.

The good news in the short term is that there’s still a chance to salvage a respectable finish with winnable dates against Mississippi State, South Carolina and Louisville, as well as an upset opportunity against Alabama in Lexington. The not-so-good news: All 3 “winnable” games are on the road, beginning with Saturday’s trip to Starkville, where Kentucky hasn’t won since 2008. If the Wildcats can’t snap that streak against a struggling, injury-plagued MSU outfit off to a 1-4 start in SEC play itself, well, basketball season tips off Monday.
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• Kentucky 29 | Mississippi State 17

Arkansas at Florida (-5.5)

Good injury news this time of year is rare, but Arkansas got a little this week when RB Rocket Sanders returned to practice for the first time in nearly a month due to a lingering knee injury. The Razorbacks are “hopeful that he’ll be available” in Gainesville, per Sam Pittman, which might qualify as the most optimistic sentence anyone has uttered in regards to Arkansas’ offense in weeks. The Hogs rank dead last in the SEC in both total offense and yards per play, and were last seen stinking up the joint in a 7-3 loss to Mississippi State in Week 8 that cost offensive coordinator Dan Enos his job. Sanders hasn’t looked anything like his old, explosive self in his brief appearances this season, but for a reeling attack that’s lost 6 in a row, they’ll take all the help they can get.

As for the Gators, at 5-3 they’re hoping to rebound from last week’s 43-20 beatdown at Georgia by securing bowl eligibility — the lowest rung on the respectability ladder, but still one that demands a certain sense of urgency against the most beatable opponent remaining on the schedule. After Arkansas, Florida closes with a 3-game gauntlet against LSU, Missouri and Florida State, in which it will be a near-certain underdog in all 3. No one really considers Billy Napier to be on the hot seat in Year 2, but if he’s suddenly staring down the prospect of going out on a 5-game losing streak, that calculation changes in a hurry.
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• Florida 28 | Arkansas 20

Auburn (-12.5) at Vanderbilt

Has Auburn’s offense turned a corner? The Tigers’ Week 9 win over Mississippi State yielded season highs for yards (416) and points (27) against a Power 5 opponent, with RB Jarquez Hunter and QB Payton Thorne both turning in easily their best performances on the ground and through the air, respectively. Maybe that said more about Mississippi State’s struggling defense than it did about Auburn, but if nothing else the timing was perfect: The Tigers’ next 3 games against Vandy, Arkansas and New Mexico State are all opportunities to pick up speed ahead of the Iron Bowl. Whether they ultimately achieve liftoff or crash and burn, in the meantime the trip down the runway should be an interesting ride.
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• Auburn 33 | Vanderbilt 16

Connecticut at Tennessee (-35.5)

UConn shocked the world in 2022 — well, the handful of sickos who follow UConn football, anyway — by winning 6 games and crashing a bowl game under first-year head coach Jim L. Mora. The 2023 Huskies will not be following suit: At 1-7, the only positive spin on their season to date is that at least they’ve managed to keep the margins respectable, with 4 of the past 5 losses coming by single digits. Tennessee should clear that bar on Saturday by the end of the first quarter and never look back.
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• Tennessee 48 | UConn 10

Jacksonville State at South Carolina (-15.5)

Gamecocks vs. Gamecocks! The only 2 schools in the NCAA represented by poultry have never played, but as soon as Jax State announced its intentions to level up to the FBS ranks their collision was inevitable. The lesser Gamecocks are off to an encouraging start under second-year coach Rich Rodriguez, boasting a 7-2 record, a 7th-year quarterback (Zion Webb), and a defense that leads Conference-USA in fewest yards and points allowed. South Carolina, meanwhile, limps in at 1-6 vs. FBS competition, with a defense that ranks last in the SEC in total D and next-to-last in scoring. Games like this one are supposed to be a bigger deal for the C-USA upstart, but make no mistake: Right now, Shane Beamer needs it more.
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South Carolina 34 | • Jacksonville State 21

Scoreboard

Week 9 record: 5-0 straight-up | 2-3 vs. spread
Season record: 47-10 straight-up | 28-29 vs. spread

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