The Sunday Blog returns after a wild opening weekend of college football. Oh, wait, it’s not over yet. Still, it’s time for Four From the Field.
1. It was a mixed bag for the SEC. Again, the league may be top heavy but it has more good teams than any other conference and certainly the best one. Kentucky’s loss didn’t help and neither did the egg Mississippi State laid. And then there is Georgia’s defense predictably struggling in its loss to Clemson. Still, the wins by LSU and Alabama resonate and Auburn and Ole Miss and South Carolina all had impressive wins.
2. That might have been the smallest crowd for a Florida game since the last expansion (ignore the number that was announced because it wasn’t close to being accurate). But to me the story wasn’t how many empty seats there were but how many people sat through that miserable day. Those are dedicated Gator fans.
3. We have taken it as inevitable that the SEC will got to nine conference games in 2015, but I’m hearing that isn’t the case. For once, the schools who don’t want nine games are going to stand up to ESPN. They only need eight votes to kill it and schools such as Kentucky, Mississippi State, Vandy and Missouri don’t want a ninth game because it makes bowl eligibility tougher and UF, Georgia and South Carolina don’t want it because of their rivalry games at the end of the year.
4. We have already seen how much more parity there is in college football with teams like Eastern Washington and North Dakota State beating teams from Power Five conferences. But the score that blew me away on this first weekend was three-touchdown underdog McNeese State’s manhandling of South Florida. “It was totally unexpected,” said coach Willie Taggart, who apparently left a better team behind at Western Kentucky than he inherited in Tampa. “For me, just watching the game … we folded. We did not continue to play with great effort. We did have some guys that quit on us. We’re not going to allow that.”
