It’s easy to picture almost any SEC team beating almost any other SEC team.
The SEC had a busy Week 7. LSU whomped the hell out of Georgia. Tennessee looked competent in a game against an SEC opponent. Florida and Vanderbilt played one of the wildest games of 2018. Ole Miss and Arkansas played their usual carnival of lunacy. Texas A&M beat South Carolina by a field goal in a game that would’ve gotten more attention if there hadn’t been nationwide drama in the Saturday afternoon slot.
Week 7’s chaos doesn’t leave us any closer to understanding the majority of this conference, though.
In a league that’s already been hard to peg this year beyond its clear best team, answers actually seem further away now than they did on Friday. Really, we know almost nothingabout the most closely watched conference in college football.
Alabama’s the best team in the sport, obviously. By a lot.
Bama’s about 3 points better on a neutral field than any other team in the country, according to S&P+. The Tide seem like they’ve bought a one-way ticket to 15-0sville. They are even more terrifying than usual and a whole lot of fun, too. I am 93 percent sure they would beat the Buffalo Bills. I’d argue about it with the Arby’s drive-through attendant.
After Bama, the conference pecking order is almost impossible to figure out.
- Georgia’s still the second-best team in the conference, probably. The Dawgs have recruited like the Bama Death Star for a few classes now. They’ll be a force to be reckoned with for a while. But they took a firm punch to the face in Baton Rouge against a team that just lost to Florida a week before. It’s not clear how anyone could conclude after Saturday that Florida can’t beat Georgia.
- But how about LSU itself? The Tigers now have a marquee win against Georgia, though they’ve lost to Florida, who struggled with Vanderbilt. They had what looked like a marquee win against Auburn, but ...
- Auburn’s already-embarrassing 2018 now looks like a debacle after a home loss to Tennessee, which was on a losing streak against literally every other SEC team.
- Mississippi State looked great after beating Auburn, but Auburn now looks bad, and the Bulldogs still can’t pass. They’ve also scored 13 total points in losses to Florida and Kentucky.
- Florida’s beaten LSU and Mississippi State, but lost to Kentucky, which ...
- Well, how about Kentucky!? The Wildcats are a delight. They might be really good. But also, they lost to Texas A&M, which ...
- Wait, is Texas A&M the second- or third-best team in the SEC West? Maybe, right? The Aggies have given Alabama a better fight than anyone else. But they also struggled with Arkansas, the only definitely awful team in the SEC.
- Ole Miss is sometimes decent, not that it matters while the Rebels are postseason-banned.
Even distinguishing between the bad teams and OK teams is hard.
- What is Vanderbilt? The team that led Florida 21-3 on Saturday, or the one that got outscored from there by a 34-6 margin?
- What are Missouri and South Carolina, other than two decent teams that played one of the season’s odder games in Week 6?
- Is Tennessee the embarrassment it’s looked like for two years now, or is it a rising team now that it’s dealt with Auburn? But, again, is beating Auburn even anything? Should Auburn be down in this group?
Actually, one other thing we can say for sure: Arkansas is terrible.
Really, really bad.
But other than Bama and Arkansas, what’s certain here?
The SEC has one obviously amazing team and one obviously terrible team. It has two other teams (Georgia and LSU) who could still plausibly make the Playoff.
After that? There’s no clarity about anything. There’s not a single possible outcome between the league’s No. 3 and 13 teams that would be all that surprising.
The end result here will probably be what it was going to be all along.
Alabama will play in the Playoff. That will most likely be it, unless someone in the West (more likely LSU this year, not Auburn) beats the Tide in the regular season and then loses to the East champion (probably Georgia, but not for sure) in the league title game.
There’s a lot of talent in the SEC. But if you’re seeking reliability through Week 7, the only place you’ll find it is Tuscaloosa. And Fayetteville.