If anything says anything about how silly this college football season is turning, check out ESPN’s announcement that College Gameday will be in Nashville for the Auburn/Vanderbilt game. This is the same Gameday that normally covers all the media darlings week to week. Vandy is becoming the darling.
Being undefeated and now sitting atop the standings of the SEC East, the nation will be rooting for the Commodores. Auburn is the perfect opponent. The Tigers can’t score points, which increases Vandy’s chances of beating a nationally ranked opponent. The country loves a good underdog story and Vandy is the perennial underdog. I just checked eBay and tickets for this game are stupid high (for Vandy). As ESPN promotes this game all week, I’m sure those bids will only go higher.
And Bama is back. Yea. And I’m Tommy Lee Jones. Bama is off to a roaring start. There’s no doubt. Give the crimson and white a little credit, especially with all those true freshmen. Yet Bama still has LSU, Auburn, Ole Miss, and even with two loses, Tennessee. LSU and Tennessee are away games. And even that those Bulldogs in Starkville are at the bottom of the standings, they did manage to beat Alabama last year. There are plenty of opportunities for those bammer true freshman to rumble, fumble, and stumble. And I predict they will.
And speaking of feel good stories, when does Ole Miss play Arkansas? That’s a game I want to see. Arkansas treats Coach Nutt worse than a salty cashew. He goes to Ole Miss and convinces a couple of sure handed NFL prospects to stay for their senior season. These guys are starting to believe. The Rebels have Bama and LSU on the road, and Auburn at home. They too could get on a roll.
Ole Miss’s win at the Swamp proves that SEC football is as close to the NFL as the college game can get. This one is funny to me because in a recent class, “Power and Influence,” we read a case about Urban Meyer. The point of the case was that Urban’s reputation and performance allowed him to influence the polling to get Florida into the National Title game and ultimately with the win over Ohio State, secure the title.
The only thing I agreed with in the case is that the national title hunt is political. At the end of the day and now coaching kids he recruited, his system isn’t as consistent as it was when the competition consisted of a pile of feathers. Sorry Dan, but Urban still has to learn some lessons before we write business school cases about his track record.
With all these teams losing, it surely looks like a couple of one loss teams will play for all the marbles at the end of the year. Auburn isn’t out of it. They are long-shots but not out of it. LSU could easily stumble just as Florida, USC, and Georgia did this weekend. Stumbling twice is unlikely but possible and that is the only way my Tigers have a shot.
War Eagle, ya’ll!
