The mouth of the South had plenty to say about Texas A&M and its coach Kevin Sumlin Monday morning during his weekly appearance on WJOX 94.5 FM program The Opening Drive. Not many are willing to say it quite like Paul Finebaum but if you expected the SEC Network host to tear into the Aggie coach like so many others the morning after blowing a 34-point lead to UCLA, you’d be wrong.

Somewhat surprisingly, Finebaum wasn’t ready to put Sumlin on the firing line during his guest radio appearance — not yet anyway.

While Finebaum believes Sumlin should be given a stay of execution, he did point to a date on the calendar that should give us a firm answer regarding the future of the football program in College Station.

Here’s what Finebaum had to say when asked if Sumlin is done after that embarrassing UCLA loss:

“Wow, that’s something you have to take a deep breathe on and let it settle,” Finebaum said on the air. “There’s naturally an overreaction, until then, until the last couple minutes of the game — I thought A&M looked like a different team. You cannot wipe away that way that game ended. That will live with this program for a long time.

“What happens now, you can’t fire a coach for one game. He had every opportunity in the world to undo the narrative leading in and that failed miserably. So what happens now is you go week to week and two to three weeks from now there will be an Arkansas game that will be critical and then the schedule speaks for itself. Alabama is on there, so are other critical teams and games.

“There’s an off week in mid-October that becomes the line of demarcation. What is his record going to be, I think Florida and Alabama are on the schedule (Georgia and Ole Miss as well), where are the Aggies when we get to that off week? If he has three or four losses, that very well could be the end.

“I don’t think they are going to overreact — you can’t do that. It makes no sense to pull the plug on the coach after one game.”