SEC Football Q&A: SEC's Top Team, Will Muschamp's Hot Seat and Big Concerns
Don't look now, but it's already Week 4 of the college football season. At this point of the season, some teams have proved they have staying power, others haven't lived up to the hype, and there are still plenty of questions on the table.
Week 4 in the SEC provides several interesting matchups to keep an eye on, including Florida traveling to Tuscaloosa, LSU hosting Mississippi State and Auburn's trip to the Little Apple for a key Thursday night showdown with Kansas State.
Let's get you prepped for Week 4 with a little SEC Q&A.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
"@BarrettSallee who's the best SEC team RIGHT NOW after 3 weeks in your opinion?
— Brian Thrasher (@brianthrasher57) September 15, 2014"
Right now, I'd have to say Auburn because it's doing exactly what it did last year on both sides of the ball.
Sure, there was talk about quarterback Nick Marshall progressing as a passer during the offseason, and he hasn't really proved he has during the first two games of the season, What he did prove, however, is that it really doesn't matter all that much.
Auburn's multidimensional running game has picked up right where it left off. That scheme is so consistent that with one mistake, opposing teams are forced off their game plans, which typically leads to Auburn running away in the second half.
That's not to say that Texas A&M, LSU and Alabama don't have cases to be made. They do. But each of those teams has at least one lingering issue that hasn't been answered yet.
Texas A&M's defense looks more fundamentally sound, but South Carolina was really its only competition, and Heisman Trophy contender Mike Davis was in and out of the game in the season opener. Anthony Jennings seems to have the quarterback job at LSU on lockdown, but can he be a difference-maker against good teams? Alabama has its quarterback in Blake Sims and seems to have its issues at cornerback solved, but it really hasn't been tested since the West Virginia game.
Despite some relatively weak competition of its own, Auburn looks exactly like the team that won the SEC title last year.
"@BarrettSallee Barrett how hot do you think mushamp seat is? Or has Kentucky got that much better under stoops?
— Victor Hugh combs (@vhcombs) September 14, 2014"
Head coach Will Muschamp's status hasn't changed one bit as a result of that triple-overtime win over Kentucky last week, nor should it.
A win is a win for that particular Florida team considering where it was last season. More importantly, it answered some lingering questions against Florida.
Sure, quarterback Jeff Driskel struggled early, but he found a legitimate weapon at wide receiver—the first of which under Muschamp—in sophomore Demarcus Robinson. The Gators also discovered that running back Matt Jones is truly back, which is big news considering sophomore Kelvin Taylor is also capable of being a star in the SEC.
Defensively, it was a bit shocking to see the typically stout Gators give up 369 passing yards to the Wildcats. But that's an air raid offense, and they're going to do that to a lot of teams if quarterback Patrick Towles stays healthy and Kentucky's offensive weapons stay on the field.
If Florida goes 6-5, Muschamp will be gone. If it goes 7-4 (would have been 8-4 had Idaho not been canceled), he'll likely stick around—although it does depend on which teams those four losses are to and, more importantly, what the Gators look like in them.
Oh, without a doubt, everything that's going on at Vanderbilt.
As I mentioned above, I'm not too concerned with Florida's defense. Georgia's is definitely more of a concern, but it has the right coach—new defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt—to fix it. It just may take longer than I expected.
Vanderbilt is a hot mess right now.
Last week, the Commodores had four quarterbacks bracketed with "or" on the depth chart and started true freshman Wade Freebeck against UMass—their third starting quarterback in as many weeks. It's sophomore Patton Robinette's job on this week's depth chart although Freebeck will still play, according to head coach Derek Mason on his weekly radio show (via Adam Sparks of The Tennessean).
Mason has grossly mismanaged his quarterback position during a tumultuous time for the Vanderbilt program. The 'Dores already had to deal with major roster turnover from last year's squad, and the transition to a new staff only added to the challenge. Instability was inevitable, and all Mason has done is add to it.
This is a team that got blown out at home by Temple, run by Ole Miss—which was expected—and needed a blocked punt returned for a touchdown to get back into the game in a win over UMass that went down to the wire.
That's not supposed to happen to an SEC team—not even Vanderbilt.
It was bound to be a rebuilding year in Nashville, but nobody expected it to be this bad.
Barrett Sallee is the lead SEC college football writer and video analyst for Bleacher Report and co-host of the CFB Hangover on Bleacher Report Radio (Sundays, 9-11 a.m. ET) on Sirius 93, XM 208.
Quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. All stats are courtesy of cfbstats.com, and all recruiting information is courtesy of 247Sports. Follow Barrett on Twitter @BarrettSallee.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
