SEC Football: A sincere apology to the SEC West

The SEC West faced criticism earlier this year for an underwhelming mid-season record. As the division approaches a strong finish to the season, it deserves an apology.

One of the nuances of college football that makes the sport oh so special is the unpredictable nature of the game. Every Saturday, the college football gods often remind writers like me how dumb we truly are. Because when it comes to college football, every week is a new chapter, and for one to fully grasp the narrative of a team or a conference, one must read the entire book before jumping to conclusions. It’s like reading chapter two in a novel and trying to successfully foreshadow all of the events that may or may not occur in chapter three before you even flip to the next page. Sure, it can be done by the “experts”, but I’m no expert.

To all my readers out there, I’m very sorry. I let you down. In case you forgot, a month ago I published a piece on the SEC West’s regression entitled “The SEC West doesn’t look so big and bad anymore”. The sudden resurgence of LSU and Mississippi State in recent weeks made me eat all of the nearly 1,000 words in that article.

To be fair, when I published that article the SEC West was currently composed of three teams that most pundits would have regarded as solid, competitive teams — No. 1 (5-0) Alabama, No. 12 (4-1) Auburn and (4-1) Texas A&M. After that, as I noted, there was a bit of a drop-off.

Keep in mind, (3-2) LSU was fresh off an earth-shattering home loss to Troy and (3-2) Mississippi State was reeling after back-to-back blowout losses to Georgia and Auburn.

I took things at face value and ran with it because, at the time that I drafted the piece, the SEC West was indeed going through a bit of a rough patch.

So, I’ll admit it. I jumped the gun a little too quickly. I made some bold statements that came back to bite me.

How did these statements and predictions come back to bite me? Well, for one, I politely stated that LSU “looked more like a six win team at the moment”. The Tigers, believe it or not, are on the precipice of a 10-win season in Ed Orgeron’s first full year as the head man. Additionally, I dished out very little respect for Mississippi State, even after they came away with a 30-point victory over my beloved Tigers. And personally, I don’t fault myself for not fully respecting Mississippi State at the time. As I said before, they had just been doled blowout losses by Georgia and Auburn, respectively. Ironically, it appears that Dan Mullen may be a reader of Southbound and Down because after my piece went public on the interwebs, Mississippi State collected decisive wins over BYU, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and a sort of underwhelming win over lowly UMASS.

But no other instance came back to haunt me more than when both LSU and Mississippi State fought tooth and nail in competitive games with Alabama in back-to-back weeks.

The main thesis of my piece a month ago was that the SEC West was too top-heavy with teams like Alabama and Auburn simultaneously dicing their way through the division with little to no competition. As you know, just a few weeks later LSU would go on to beat Auburn. And a few weeks after that, LSU outplayed Alabama but still came up short in Tuscaloosa, further proving that the disparity in quality between the SEC West’s power players and its mid-tier counterparts may not be so noticeable after all. Mississippi State did an excellent job of further discrediting my hot takes again over the weekend when they nearly pulled off a colossal upset over the top-ranked Crimson Tide, cementing the Bulldogs as yet another dangerously competitive team in the SEC West that mustn’t be overlooked.

I assumed the obvious. And as an avid fan of college football, I should have known better. Because the word “obvious” doesn’t have a seat at the table when we gather around to discuss the latest college football playoff rankings or the latest shocking upset that the Saturday before provided us with. The word “obvious” simply doesn’t correlate with college football.

We sat and watched the Miami Hurricanes stumble their way through a lackluster schedule without a single loss. Fans of the sport around the nation were licking their chops, waiting for Mark Richt and his team to flop in the national spotlight. The obvious inclination was to doubt Miami ahead of their make or break two-game stretch against No. 13 (7-2) Virginia Tech and No. 3 (8-1) Notre Dame. It was widely assumed that Miami’s perfect record would be tarnished as the Hurricanes prepared for the two toughest games of their season. But what did Miami do? Oh, they just outscored the Hokies and Fighting Irish by a combined 51 points to earn a spot in the latest College Football Playoff rankings. Never assume the obvious unless the obvious is too reasonable.

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With all of this said, I would like to make one more point. Perhaps the biggest blunder of all was the fact that I criticized the wrong division. I talked all that smack about the SEC West regressing and being too top heavy when, in fact, the SEC East should have been the focus for an article of such criticism. Auburn’s recent thrashing of the then top-ranked Georgia Bulldogs this past Saturday stood out to me as a microcosm of the SEC West’s superiority over the SEC East. Somehow, the SEC East appears to have gotten worse and that has been made obvious to even the most casual of fans. Yes, I’m looking at you Tennessee and Florida.