Who ya got: Week 6

Behold.

This is one of those weekends when the rest of the college football world should skip their games, pull up chairs and just gape.

For the first time, the SEC has donned its kingly robes -- draping Saturday with a daylong display of crackling matchups that again establishes the conference's claim to the throne. Let's meet the Royal Family:

Michael Gordon:

Auburn at Arkansas: Deceiving win over Texas A&M may have Hog fans again overestimating this team. Their defense is awful. Auburn's is mediocre, but will do enough to let Tiger offense punch holes in another one-armed Bobby Petrino team. Auburn 42-30.

Georgia at Tennessee: Another big home stage for Lane Kiffin, another illustration of just how badly the Vols need a quarterback. Georgia, 20-10.

Kentucky at South Carolina: Are chickens capable of coughing up hairballs? If so, this is the week. Carolina could be caught looking ahead to Tuscaloosa. But Kentucky enters Week 3 of a brutal SEC stretch, still relying on a quarterback who hasn't shown he can play. Carolina, 28-16.

Vanderbilt at Army: Cadets will punch Vandy in the nose. Will the 'Dores respond. Sort of. Vandy, 20-17.

Alabama at Ole Miss: Up to now, Ole Miss resembles Julius Peppers -- physically imposing but apparently bored. If the Rebs are to erupt, the time is now. I'm scared. But I'd be more scared if Houston Nutt had his typical offensive line. Tide, 28-17.

Florida at LSU: First quarterback to play well wins. Did Jordan Jefferson turn the corner with his 4th-quarter performance against Georgia? Who takes snaps for the Gators? Florida defense will be flying after the ball. The Tigers' offense still gives me pause. I know, Saturday night in Death Valley and blah, blah, blah, cher. Florida, 21-17.

Courtney St. Onge:

Alabama 30, Ole Miss 13
Auburn 38, Arkansas 35
Florida 28, LSU 20
Houston 31, Miss. State 20
Georgia 21, Tenn. 17
South Carolina 24, Kentucky 14
Vandy 27, Army 13

R. Trentham Roberts:

While wondering why Mr. Gordon thinks so little of my alma mater that he doesn't even take the time to pick them to get blown out by Houston...

Florida at LSU: The other day I took at look at Les Miles' 10 most heart-stopping wins. (Click here if you want to see it.) After a while, it ain't luck. It makes me BELIEVE. (For the purposes of this edition of the blog, anyway.) LSU 21, Florida 18.

Alabama at Ole Miss: The red and blue garbage cans are already dotting the Grove. (Click here for the webcam.) Hope there are a lot of them, because Rebel fans won't be able to keep their liquid lunch down. Alabama 28, Ole Miss 7.

Auburn 49, Arkansas 48

Tennessee 21, Georgia 17

South Carolina 24, Kentucky 20

Vanderbilt 30, Army 13

Houston 42, Mississippi State 30

Sorry for the omission, Trent, but I thought you'd suffered enough.

mg

Florida-LSU: Who ya got? (It's your turn to vote)

You should be seeing a poll off to the right.

In the spirit of SEC compliance with NCAA rules and regs, please try to vote no more than twice.



Three if you have to.

UF v LSU

I'm finding it kind of hard to get mentally psyched for Saturday's game versus LSU.

I just don't hate LSU like I hate Georgia or Tennessee. Even Alabama and Auburn get my blood boiling, but LSU doesn't really anger me all that much.

By all accounts, the last three match-ups have meant everything. Literally. The winner of the last three UF/LSU games has gone on to win the national championship.

Of course I want Florida to win.. and win big. Wouldn't all of you other SEC fans be disappointed if Florida didn't try to run up the score?

But the only time I've ever visited the LSU campus was not for a football game.

I spent several days at LSU after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area. I was working for WCNC-TV at the time and a few of us were sent to help our colleagues at WWL-TV in New Orleans. As we were driving there, my news director called. New Orleans was closed, he said. The levees had just broken.

So, we went to Baton Rouge instead. Our colleagues were in the process of setting up a temporary home at LSU's journalism school.

Over the next several days, emergency workers from around the country descended on LSU. They organized themselves on the football field, waiting to be dispatched where they were needed most.

I met many families who fled their homes and were living out of their children's dorm rooms. They were thankful to have a dry floor on which to sleep.

It was a heartbreaking assignment. So many people lost so much. LSU served as their safe haven.

That's my only experience with LSU, so there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the people there.

That, of course, does NOT mean I don't want Florida to win on Saturday. It just means that I don't feel the need to trash-talk like I do for some other SEC games.

Go Gators!

-Bonnie Kunkel

------

From Cliff Mehrtens:

Bonnie, after reading your post, it is hard for me to rip on Florida, over-hyped Tebow or anything else.

All because of Hurricane Katrina.

I went to New Orleans soon after the storm, and saw horrific things. I'm glad LSU served as refuge.

I also remember what it felt like to watch LSU play in Arizona a couple weeks after the storm.
It was comforting. It was escape. It was three hours of not being sad.

Katrina changed a lot about Louisiana. It's not fun to recall it, and it still affects many down there.

I'll watch the game intently. It's the Tigers against the No. 1 team in the country.

But no bashing this week.

I hope Tebow heals completely.

I hope Louisiana does, too.

Smackdown: Alabama-Ole Miss

Michael Gordon:

Say what you will about our friends from Oxford, they do have an appreciation for the past.

"I love Mississippi," Gov. Ross Barnett said in 1962, part of the most infamous halftime speech in the history of SEC football. "I love her people ... I love and respect our heritage."

Coming from a state with its own fixation on the past, I, too, respect certain Mississippi traditions, particularly this one: 45-9-2. Allow me to translate: Ole Miss almost always loses to Alabama.

Think about it, the land of the Brewer Boys and Johnny Vaught, Eli, Archie and all the rest almost always get swamped by the Tide -- 5 out of every 6 for you Ole Miss historians who never quite got the hang of math. Put another way, the neighbor boys have played each other 56 times, and Alabama has won or tied 47 of them.

That imbalance would not be so astounding if the opponent were Vandy or Mississippi State. But Ole Miss still prides itself as being among the conference elite. That conclusion, like so many things at Ole Miss, relies on an increasingly parochial interpretation of an increasingly distant past. The University of Mississippi has indeed won three national championships and more than 600 games. But its last SEC championship was in 1963.

Today, Oxford still has The Grove, the ghosts of Faulkner and Willie Morris, that wondrous gene pool from which spring too many Miss Americas to count, plus the largest clan of able bottle-throwers this side of Baton Rouge. Yet the fans show up to the Alabama game with their good bourbon and their luscious dates and their Confederate flags, and they lose all the same.

Keep it up, boys. As the Confederacy showed us, there's honor and mythic power in supporting a doomed cause. Do the honorable thing again this Saturday.

Alabamians, haunted and seduced by our own history, cherish this one part of your heritage. In fact, every October we count on it.

R. Trentham Roberts:

Let me just start out by saying, and I'm not quoting anyone here, that I love Alabama and its people.

I love how they will stand there and look you right in the eye and go off on your old race-baiting governor when they know, and they know you know, that they are the good people who loosed George Corley Wallace Jr. on an unsuspecting world. And that if you were to point out this curious line of reasoning in polite coversation, they would not so much as blink, even as they trot out their time-honored response: "What about it?"

Truth be told, Ole Miss and Alabama are two peas in a pod most times. As my colleague made clear, both schools have fashioned for themselves a living, breathing history that's been known to put the U. in Unpleasantness. Both are petri dishes of doctors, lawyers, Capitol chiefs. And both never tire of those game-long incantations that sound like they came from a guy showing off his Esperanto skills at closing time.

But football is where the two schools part ways. Their records speak for themselves, no doubt. It was gracious of you to concede three asterisk-pocked national titles to Ole Miss, pre-empting any questions one might have about Alabama sneaking off with the crown jewels while the rest of the country was busy with the Great Depression. (Damn you, Gordon, and your City of Vulcan mind tricks!)

And I'll give you this: Your state flat knows how to recruit. From Wernher von Braun to Joe Willie Namath, when y'all go hunting for talent, you don't come home empty-handed.

So yeah, maybe -- probably -- Alabama wins again. You want to, you expect to, you need to. It's what gets you up in the morning, what makes you thrust out your chin and proclaim, "WE are the sun. YOU are the lesser light." (I guess I'd also want to hang my hat on such a belief if my home state took more pride in being the birthplace of Forrest Gump than, say, Hank Williams or Helen Keller.)

And once the game's over, us Mississippi folk who don't know any better will just have to go on about our business. Especially on the Coast, where I'm from. You see, we still can't quite figure out how we managed, all by our lonesome, to concoct a perfectly legal system by which we convert your gambling losses into our tax base.

Guess we're just dumb that way.

By request: Georgia-LSU ending

Here's how it all went down on CBS. You can see the Georgia celebration that got flagged -- once in real time and then a couple of minutes later from a different angle.



And here's another quick look from yet another angle:

SEC to Georgia: Our bad, but drop dead anyway!

Think Dawg fans were baying about the celebration penalty following what appeared to be Georgia's winning touchdown against LSU? Wait until you hear the roar now.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=4534433

What we learned . . . .

Michael Gordon:

1. That Auburn's offense will cause universal headaches. The Tigers' Tora! Tora! Tora! attack spread Tennessee out like salt water taffy, and the defense was good enough, albeit against UT's worst offense since . . . last year!

2. That Alabama must make some adjustments on its run defense. Kentucky hurt the Tide too often by simply knocking them off the ball. Bama, though undefeated, must do a better job filling the hole left by the injury to Dont'a Hightower. Fortunately, they still have Rolando McClain, the best single football player in the SEC.

3. That the SEC -- and college football in general -- has got to get a grip on the "celebration'' penalty. The two called at the end of the Georgia/LSU game were preposterous. As bad as it was, the flag thrown on Charles Scott's point-to-the-sky gesture was the lesser of the two and had less impact on the game. But I half-expected the zebra to announce, "After the play, unsportsmanlike conduct -- No. 32 and God." Compare those flags to the ones not dropped on Notre Dame's last two scores against Washington, when the Irish end zone looked like the preening celebration at the close of a bad gladiator movie. This rule needs a review, a long one.

4. That LSU will go only as far as their quarterback, Jordan Jefferson, will take them. He took them down the field twice in the fourth quarter against Georgia, after being dragged through the hedges for the first three. Compare that performance to those of Kentucky's Mike Hartline and UT's Jonathan Crompton. Want to know how much they're struggling? Neither would be a sure bet to start at UNC.

Peter St. Onge:

Auburn 26, Tennessee 22 - Another test, passed. Auburn will face only a couple of defenses as good as Tennessee's, and the Tigers moved the ball in Neyland Stadium better than Mr. Tebow did on the Vols in Gainesville. Auburn's defense? It battled. It slowed Tennessee's run game often enough. And yes, it benefited from that inept Vols passing game. Still, Auburn controlled the game. On the road. In the SEC. Against a heralded D-coordinator. We're not a top 10 team, talentwise, but we're good enough to scare those who are.

R. Trentham Roberts:

* That Nick Saban is cooking up some not-so-kind karma when he goes to throwing against Kentucky with a minute and a half left and up by 18 -- from the Wildcats' 14. Not that it'll much matter against Ole Miss, because from what we've seen of the Rebs so far, they have no shot to win.

* That LSU is like that character from the movie who says "Us Yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead." Florida had best watch out if the Bengals are hanging around late.

* That even this weekend's undercard is going to be good -- Auburn @ Arkansas and Georgia @ Tennessee.

* That while I hate to go the Rep. Joe Wilson route on the Rolando McClain speechifying, he's not really a cut above Eric Berry, Brandon Spikes, Eric Norwood and Chad Jones, is he? (And that's just on the defensive side of the ball).