Nov 8, 2014; Baton Rouge, LA, USA; Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban celebrates after an overtime win against the LSU Tigers in a game at Tiger Stadium. Alabama defeated LSU 20-13. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports
College Football. A frenzied, free-for-all drama that could never be recreated in Hollywood, evolving week to week and month to month, in on and off the gridiron. All the while leaving fans, players and the media both in equal shock and in differing opinion.
SEC Football. In the land of ‘Merica, Sweet Tea, and the SEC, it gets the wildest. You can’t escape SEC fever anywhere in the SEC, not flat farmland in Aggieland, frontier in Missouri, Woo Pig and the beautiful Ozarks in Arkansas, rolling hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, cajun creole and Geaux Tigers, blood-boiling, divisive rivalries in Mississippi and Alabama, or palmettos and peaches on that South Carolina-Georgia border, or the swamp and the Gator chomp in the Florida panhandle.
No matter where you call home, no matter what the Southland means to you, we can all agree that 2015 has been one of the wildest seasons yet. Yet we’ve still got a month until bowl predictions come out. And that’s only if Navy loses another game.
We’ve seen it all, at least so we think. But if we haven’t, we’ve seen plenty in the SEC this fall. When Arkansas converted that fourth down against Mississippi last Saturday in overtime, it looked like something out of a backyard football game. When 300 pound Alabama lineman A‘Shawn Robinson high-jumped the LSU Offensive Line on that extra point? Wow. Just, wow.
And this drama isn’t regulated to on-field madness. South Carolina experienced a thousand-year flood and the walking out of school legend Steve Spurrier within a week. All that was before racial strikes in Missouri that would’ve costed the Tigers one million dollars if things continued.
In the spirit of the unforgettable on and off field fall drama that we call Southeastern Conference, Southbound and Down attempts to take a look into the crystal ball of the SEC’s postseason, from worst to first. But don’t be surprised if we miss a few…