Connelly’s SEC West preview: Bama, LSU and the best division in college football

Over the past 20 years, three of its teams have combined to win 10 national titles. It has boasted one of the best dynasties the sport has ever seen (Bama) and almost no actual bad teams — in the past 10 years, only four of its teams have finished outside of the SP+ top 60. All seven are projected in the top 30 to start 2023.

The SEC West has been the standard-bearer for all divisions for much of the 2000s. Its champions lost 11 of the first 17 SEC championship games, but have since won 12 of 14.

The final iteration of the West division brings us plenty of questions. Is there such a thing as too much change for Nick Saban at Alabama? Can an even deeper LSU team defend its title? How many quarterbacks does Lane Kiffin need? Will coaching and/or coordinator changes cause setbacks or surges for Mississippi State, Arkansas and Auburn? How the heck is this Bobby Petrino experiment going to work out in College Station?

With the end of divisional play on the horizon, let’s take a stroll through college football’s best division one last time. Let’s preview the SEC West!

Every week through the offseason, Bill Connelly will preview another division from the Group of 5 and Power 5 exclusively for ESPN+, ultimately including all 133 FBS teams. The previews will include 2022 breakdowns, 2023 previews and burning questions for each team.

Earlier previews: Conference USA, part 1 | Conference USA, part 2 | MAC East | MAC West | MWC Mountain | MWC West | Sun Belt West | Sun Belt East | AAC, part 1 | AAC, part 2 | Independents | ACC, part 1 | ACC, part 2 | Pac-12, part 1 | Pac-12, part 2 | Big 12, part 1 | Big 12, part 2 | Big Ten West | Big Ten East | SEC East

2022 recap

Though Alabama had Heisman winner and future No. 1 NFL draft pick Bryce Young at quarterback, LSU used a last-second home win over the Tide to snare a surprising West title in Brian Kelly’s first year in Baton Rouge. Kelly used a combination of Ed Orgeron’s holdovers and a transfer portal infusion to make immediate noise; the Tigers weren’t the division’s best team on paper (they finished 13th in SP+), but they won the right games and set a pretty high bar for the Kelly era. Alabama still managed to finish No. 2 in SP+, behind only Georgia, but Kelly deprived Saban of a shot at an 11th SEC title.

Elsewhere, the division featured more disappointments than successes. Ole Miss lost five of its last six to finish 8-5, Arkansas lost six of nine in the middle of the season to slip to 7-6, Auburn finished under .500 for the second straight season, firing coach Bryan Harsin in October and hiring Hugh Freeze as his replacement, and Texas A&M celebrated signing the No. 1 recruiting class in the country by bottoming out offensively and finishing 5-7.

And of course, Mississippi State coach Mike Leach died from a heart condition in December. That will have the most lasting impact, and it had nothing to do with what happened on a football field.

---

2023 projections

Bama has finished either first or second in the country in SP+ for 13 of the past 14 years (the one outlier: finishing a humiliating third in 2019), so of course the Tide are projected to stand atop the West again. But it’s noteworthy that (A) they’re projected fourth nationally and (B) LSU is only a couple of points behind in fifth. Also, the Tigers have a slightly easier conference schedule, which makes this an almost 50-50 race between the two. And if a third contender emerges, it could be any of the division’s other five teams. They’re all projected to finish with between 3.3 and 4.1 conference wins.

---

Burning questions

Does change catch up to Nick Saban at some point? Strange as it sounds, success makes your job harder. Winning big might raise your players’ draft stock and result in a few more going pro earlier than you planned. And it can definitely raise your assistants’ stock — they leave for head-coaching jobs, and you have to find someone new. Eventually, you make an iffy hire, and your program suffers.

Nick Saban’s greatest superpower, then, might be his ability to make his program change-proof. Almost every time he’s had to make a coordinator change, he’s stuck the landing.

Through 2022, Saban had made 11 coordinator changes at Alabama. Despite a high bar, seven of the changes improved Alabama’s offensive or defensive SP+ averages. Based on the numbers, Jim McElwain was an upgrade over Major Applewhite, and Doug Nussmeier was an upgrade over McElwain. Lane Kiffin raised the offensive bar further, and when Mike Locksley improved on those averages, Steve Sarkisian improved them even further. On defense, Kirby Smart was an upgrade over Kevin Steele, and in a short tenure, Jeremy Pruitt actually topped Smart’s averages.

Relatively speaking, however, Saban’s last hires on each side of the ball struggled. Bill O’Brien oversaw two outstanding offenses in Tuscaloosa, but his 2022 offense ranked seventh in offensive SP+, Bama’s worst ranking since 2017. And after a run of nine straight top-10 finishes in defensive SP+ from 2009 to 2017, the Tide’s defenses have finished outside the top 10 for five straight years, including all four of Pete Golding’s tenure.

Now come two more changes. O’Brien left for the New England Patriots in the offseason, and Golding left for Ole Miss. Former Notre Dame assistant Tommy Rees has become Saban’s ninth offensive coordinator, and an old friend, Steele, has returned to lead the defense. (Well, he’ll lead it as much as anyone other than Saban ever leads it.)

On the field, quarterback Bryce Young, leading rusher Jahmyr Gibbs and three all-SEC offensive linemen are gone, as are the defense’s top two linemen, linebackers and safeties. Saban has managed this sort of change brilliantly before. But he was evidently unsatisfied enough with his potential Young replacements — sophomore Jalen Milroe and redshirt freshman Ty Simpson — that he brought in Notre Dame’s erratic but exciting Tyler Buchner after spring ball.

After an incredible run of quarterback play from Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Young, it appears the position is as uncertain as it’s been since the mid-2010s. Bama still won big with said uncertainty — it made the CFP with Blake Sims in 2014, won the national title with Jake Coker in 2015 and nearly won another with Hurts as a true freshman in 2016 — but they were also playing the most consistently elite defense in the country then. If the Tide offense slips a bit, will the defense automatically fill the gap?

Now, this is still Alabama. Buchner, Milroe and Simpson are all former blue-chippers, as is basically everyone else on a roster that features both veterans and high-octane youngsters. At running back, there are both senior Jase McClellan and top-25 freshman Justice Haynes. At receiver, there are veterans Ja’Corey Brooks and Jermaine Burton and potentially bigtime sophomores such as Kobe Prentice and Isaiah Bond.

On defense, the Tide have stalwarts in tackle Tim Smith, edge rusher Dallas Turner and corner Kool-Aid McKinstry, veteran transfers in linebacker Trezmen Marshall (Georgia), corner Trey Amos (Louisiana) and safety Jaylen Key (UAB), potentially spectacular sophomores such as tackle Jaheim Oatis, linebacker Deontae Lawson and corner Terrion Arnold and five-star freshmen in edge rushers Qua Russaw and Keon Keeley, safety Caleb Downs and corner Desmond Ricks.

Anytime we talk about concern at Alabama, it’s concern that the Tide are merely one of the four or five best teams in the country instead of the clear No. 1. First-world problems to the nth degree. Still, ranking fourth would be a step backward, as would missing out on a spot in the SEC championship game for a second straight year. As ridiculously high as the bar is set, that’s still where the bar is set, and Saban has one heck of a challenge in clearing it.

Can LSU find a few more chunk plays? Heading into 2022, I labeled Brian Kelly’s first LSU team as unprojectable. Kelly inherited from Ed Orgeron a robustly talented team that had underachieved since winning the 2019 national title. He spent his first offseason briefly trying on a Southern accent, then roped in key contributors for virtually every position: quarterback (Arizona State’s Jayden Daniels), running back, receiver, offensive guard, defensive tackle, safety, cornerback (especially cornerback) and even punter and long snapper.

Early results of this grand chemistry experiment were inconclusive. After six games, the Tigers were 4-2 and just 25th in SP+.

Five wins and six weeks later, they were 13th. That’s where they’d finish. Driven primarily by the electric Daniels, the Tigers jumped to third in rushing success rate, and Daniels found a solid rapport with wideout Malik Nabers. The offense overachieved projections for six of the final eight games, the defense in five of seven. After going 11-12 in Orgeron’s last two years, LSU went a solid 10-4, good enough to steal the West title from Bama but also flawed enough to leave room for improvement. And then Kelly hopped right back on the talent acquisition horse, signing the No. 6 class in the country and adding another batch of intriguing transfers.

The 2023 LSU roster overflows with experience. Eighteen offensive players saw at least 200 snaps last season, and 13 return; nine of 18 return on defense too, including breakout edge-rushing star Harold Perkins Jr. Tackle Maason Smith, one of 2021’s better defensive pieces, returns from injury, and Kelly brought in 10 players who were at least part-time starters at other FBS schools, including Notre Dame running back Logan Diggs, Texas defensive end Ovie Oghoufo, West Virginia defensive tackle Jordan Jefferson and Oregon State linebacker Omar Speights. Alabama signed a more highly ranked overall recruiting class, but the number of LSU’s instant-impact transfers, it could be that Kelly signed the most useful class as far as the 2023 season is concerned.

With a challenging schedule that starts with Florida State and includes eight opponents projected 27th or better, the depth Kelly has created will be tested. And if the Tigers can unearth a few more big plays, that would help immensely. LSU ranked sixth in success rate last season, but in my marginal explosiveness measure — which looks at the magnitude of a team’s successful plays and adjusts for down, distance and field position — they ranked just 101st. The defense had a similar dynamic: 20th in success rate but 50th in marginal explosiveness. Both units were excellent in the red zone, but easy points are a big-game panacea, and LSU often didn’t win that battle.

(And as you might recall from the blocked PAT that ended the season-opening Florida State loss, special teams could use some fine-tuning as well.)

Kelly is an efficiency-based coach, and it has won him lots of games from Division II to FBS. His 2023 Tigers will likely be even more efficient than the 2022 edition, but explosiveness might be the key to them taking a step toward genuine top-five status.

Does Bobby Petrino have the answers for Texas A&M? It’s become an almost baked-in piece of the college football narrative: A&M head coach Jimbo Fisher is going to field a wonderfully talented team, his defense is going to be top notch (or close to it) and he’s going to put way too much on his quarterback’s plate and underachieve because of it.

In five seasons at A&M, Fisher has fielded top-20 defenses with increasingly disappointing offenses. After tumbling from 28th to 65th in offensive SP+ in 2021, Fisher faced some pressure to upgrade what was increasingly feeling like a retrograde attack. Instead, he doubled down on what he knew. A&M fell even further, to 71st, lost five of seven one-score games and finished a shocking 5-7.

The coach with the most gaudy contract in college sports has started with the preseason No. 6 team in the country and finished unranked for two straight years. This offseason, he went off to finally search for answers to his offensive problems, and he came back with … Bobby Petrino. Cantankerous birds of a feather stick together.

A former Louisville and Arkansas head coach, Petrino has authored quite a few outstanding offenses in his career, and while he’s also burned plenty of bridges, he could at least briefly come up with snappy answers in College Station. Having Conner Weigman will help. The five-star sophomore quarterback had his moments of effectiveness despite last year’s degree of difficulty.

Weigman’s supporting cast will feature not only sophomore Evan Stewart, junior Moose Muhammad III and sophomore tight end Donovan Green, but also Ainias Smith, who has scored 22 career touchdowns but missed most of 2022 with injury. The running back corps is mostly unproven but boasts recent star recruits and big Colorado State transfer David Bailey. Up front, 10 Aggies linemen started at least one game last season — the odds of having to start that many different guys and not fielding a disappointing offense: about 0.2% — but nine of them are back, along with a pair of experienced transfers.

Even last year, with extreme youth up front and no help from the offense, the A&M defense ranked 18th in defensive SP+. It’s got top-10 potential now. The line returns countless former star recruits, including tackles McKinnley Jackson and Walter Nolen, who combined for 10 tackles for loss and 23 run stops in 2022. The pass rush is unproven, but it should be difficult to run on the Aggies, especially with linebackers Chris Russell Jr. and Edgerrin Cooper roaming.

The secondary was a strength last season and has to replace corner Jaylon Jones and nickel Antonio Johnson, but like-for-like transfers Tony Grimes (North Carolina) and Josh DeBerry (Boston College) will help, as will further maturation from some of last year’s star recruits.

Fisher makes too much money and has far too many former blue-chippers to struggle the way he has of late, but A&M will be better on both sides of the ball and should flip some of those close losses. A top-five schedule, which includes trips to Miami and Tennessee in addition to the West gauntlet, will keep the win total tamped down. But the Aggies should at least get back to 7-5 or 8-4.

Can Ole Miss find stability in instability? We’re only a couple of years into college football’s transfer explosion, and we’re already accustomed to the archetype of a first-year coach loading up on players from the portal. It makes sense — chances are, if you’re a freshly hired coach, you’re going to be looking at a depth chart with holes to fill. Of the six coaches who reeled in at least 16 transfers in 2022, three were first-year guys (including Brian Kelly), one was a second-year guy and one was desperate (Georgia Tech’s Geoff Collins). The other was Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin.

This year, five coaches have brought in at least 25 transfers. Three are first-year guys (led, of course, by Colorado’s Deion Sanders) and one is second-year SMU coach Rhett Lashlee. The other … is Lane Kiffin.

Kiffin has put together a 0.639 win percentage in Oxford thus far, the best for an Ole Miss coach’s first three seasons since John Vaught successor Billy Kinard started (and ended) 16-9 from 1971 to 1973. Kiffin has embraced portal life from what he felt was an analytical viewpoint. “The whole theory of signing a ton of high school kids because you have them for five years, that’s not true anymore,” he said last year. “What’s gonna be the percentage that leaves now that they can?”

Last year’s transfer haul brought him a starting quarterback (Jaxson Dart), a 900-yard rusher (Zach Evans), a 900-yard receiver (Malik Heath) and six defenders who saw at least 395 snaps. (Funny enough, the best newcomer was actually a freshman, running back Quinshon Judkins.) But the defense regressed from 25th to 49th in defensive SP+, and after a great start, the offense underachieved SP+ projections in five of the final six games. Ole Miss fell by two wins and eight spots in SP+ (from 10th to 18th), and Kiffin’s response was to load up on even more transfers.

Coaches will preach about how much culture matters to a given program — how important it is to have long-serving upperclassmen preaching the gospel to younger players and reinforcing a program’s values. It’s difficult to establish such a culture when you’re signing more than 20 transfers per year, and the coming seasons in Oxford will tell us just how important that is. But there’s no denying the amount of talent the portal is providing the Rebels.

On offense, Kiffin’s 2023 haul includes two quarterbacks (including Oklahoma State veteran Spencer Sanders), mid-major receiving stars Zakhari Franklin (UTSA) and Tre Harris (Louisiana Tech) and all-conference linemen in UAB guard Quincy McGee and Washington tackle Victor Curne). On defense, Kiffin added ace pass-rusher Isaac Ukwu (James Madison), havoc-heavy linebacker Monty Montgomery (Louisville) and, to address a pretty passive pass defense, five defensive backs who defended at least seven passes last year. And with all these new, disruptive pieces, he added a transfer coordinator too: Alabama’s Pete Golding.

Top to bottom, from offensive tempo to a liberal fourth-down strategy to portal usage, Kiffin has an aggressive program. We’ll see how the Rebels’ fast and reasonably culture-free roster responds to both last year’s late fade and trips to both Alabama and Georgia. This is quite an interesting experiment.

Does Zach Arnett need a transition year? I wasn’t looking forward to writing this section. This is a preview, and it’s time to talk about Mississippi State and how Zach Arnett might perform as a rookie head coach in the SEC. And no matter what, it’s going to feel terribly awkward.

Arnett moved to head coach when the legendary pirate, Mike Leach, passed away in December at the age of 61. Leach was one of the few active coaches who could legitimately claim to have changed football; first with mentor Hal Mumme, then as head coach at Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State, he did more to normalize the forward pass in the college game than pretty much anyone. And he did so with enough personality — and the stories that came with said personality — to fill a library’s worth of books. (I would read them all.) He was cranky and stubborn and distractible and frustrating and hilarious. College football is not the same without him. And the entire framing of MSU’s 2023 season will be based around how it responds to his absence and what Arnett attempts to change.

At first glance, he might be changing quite a bit on offense. He hired Kevin Barbay as offensive coordinator; Barbay’s 2022 Appalachian State offense was very good but ran the ball more frequently than the national average — Leach’s offense, of course, was the most pass-heavy in the country — and set up solid vertical passing with a mostly mistake- and loss-free run game. Even if there is a slow shift from old offense to new, there will be a shift.

Arnett also brought in Vanderbilt dual-threat quarterback Mike Wright to compete with or complement returning starter Will Rogers, plus, gasp, a pair of tight ends in Geor’quarius Spivey (TCU) and Ryland Goede (Georgia). He also lost six receivers, including last year’s top three, to the portal. A veteran-heavy line is going to be learning almost a completely new job, as is Rogers, who might, double gasp, take snaps under center.

There is far more familiarity on defense. MSU ranked 20th in defensive SP+ with Arnett’s Rocky Long-inspired 3-3-5, and the Bulldogs return two-thirds of a dynamite linebacking corps — Jett Johnson and Nathaniel Watson, who combined for 22 TFLs, 8 sacks and 32 run stops — plus an excellent tackle duo in Nathan Pickering and Jaden Crumedy. There’s concern in the secondary, where four of last year’s top five are gone and transfers such as corners Chris Keys (Indiana) and Raydarious Jones (LSU) might be relied upon. But last year’s backups were veterans and are mostly back in 2023; this unit isn’t starting over with freshmen by any means.

After a couple of mediocre seasons in Starkville, Leach’s Bulldogs broke through in 2022 with a lovely nine-win season against a top-10 schedule. They were 0-3 against SP+ top-15 teams and 9-1 against everyone else. They’re projected to regress a bit, and with six opponents projected between 16th and 33rd in SP+, they could find themselves in quite a few close games. But with not only the change but the type of change they’re dealing with, it’s fair to figure variance levels are pretty high here.

Can the transfer portal fix Arkansas’ defense? Shine can wear off pretty quickly in the SEC. After a nine-win breakthrough in 2021 — a season that included wins by double digits over Texas and Texas A&M and a tight loss at Alabama — Sam Pittman’s Razorbacks entered 2022 ranked 19th in the AP poll and quickly moved to 10th in September.

A dismal performance against Bobby Petrino’s Missouri State team — the Hogs trailed by 10 in the fourth quarter before surging back to win 38-27 — was a warning sign. Inconsistent offense and a downright mediocre defense prompted a run of six losses in eight games. A 21-19 defeat to Hugh Freeze and Liberty was a low point, and only a wild bowl win over Kansas salvaged a winning season.

After the season, Pittman lost both coordinators — offensive coordinator Kendal Briles to TCU, defensive coordinator Barry Odom to the UNLV head coaching job — and went in two different directions with the replacements. Veteran Dan Enos takes over on offense; once Bret Bielema’s Arkansas OC, he hasn’t really led a good offense since he left Fayetteville in 2017. On defense, Pittman turned to the relatively young Travis Williams, Gus Malzahn’s DC at UCF for the past two years. He engineered a couple of decent top-50 defensive SP+ finishes in Orlando with a defense that forced the issue but got burned quite a bit.

Nine of the 17 defenders who played at least 300 snaps last year are back, but Pittman added an entire lineup’s worth of transfers — four linemen, two linebackers and five DBs. Nickelback Alfahiym Walcott (Baylor) could be an exciting addition to pair with ultra-aggressive corner Dwight McGlothern and safety Hudson Clark. End John Morgan III (Pitt) will be key to avoiding regression in the pass rush.

Enos is a pretty big departure from the tempo- and run-heavy Briles. Quarterback KJ Jefferson will theoretically be passing more this fall, and he’ll be doing so without the top five members of last year’s receiving corps. Running back Raheim Sanders is the only returnee who caught more than 12 passes. Of course, Enos isn’t stupid; he’ll likely lean on the strengths of both Jefferson and Sanders, who combined for 2,242 rushing yards (not including sacks) and 19 scores. They are a uniquely big duo — Jefferson is 6-foot-3, 246 pounds; Sanders is 6-foot-2, 237 — though they’ll be running behind a line that is replacing three starters, including all-conference tackle Dalton Wagner.

As is the case for everyone in the West, the Hogs’ schedule is rugged. After a reasonably soft nonconference slate, their Week 4 trip to LSU is the first of seven straight games against projected top-30 teams. If the offensive coordinator change doesn’t stifle Jefferson’s unique strengths, and a couple of transfers stick in the receiving corps, the offense has top-20 potential. And the defense should improve enough to keep Arkansas in lots of close games. Winning them will determine if Pittman gets his shine back or if he finds hot-seat status.

How long will it take Hugh Freeze to craft something at Auburn? What happens when your main rivals are Alabama and Georgia, aka winners of the past three national titles and eight of the past 14? You make irrational decisions sometimes. Your boosters do, at least.

Before Bryan Harsin, each of the six Auburn head coaches since Shug Jordan had a history of top-15 seasons and recent success when they were ousted. Gus Malzahn had two top-10 finishes and a $21 million buyout, and the school still pushed him out after an up-and-down 2020 season. Two years later, they spent $22 million to run Harsin out of town. If ESPN’s recent “dead money” project became a book, Auburn would have a spot on the cover.

Harsin was by no means effective on the Plains, of course. The former Boise State head man never seemed comfortable in the job, and by Year 2 his team played like it knew he was doomed. The offense was explosive but one-dimensional and the defense never really showed up in a 6-7 campaign that saw Harsin ousted at the end of October.

Auburn shelled out eight digits to declare it could do much better than Malzahn, and instead it did worse. To try to catch back up to Alabama and Georgia, it hired a guy who beat those schools three times in the 2010s: Hugh Freeze.

Freeze is a very good football coach. In 10 years at Arkansas State, Ole Miss and Liberty, he went 83-43 with three 10-win seasons and three ranked finishes. His offense is fun and flexible, and he can win the occasional big-time recruiting battle. You’ll end up on the NCAA’s radar the moment you hire him, you might end up with some social media harassment issues to deal with and you might end up firing him for pretty embarrassing reasons. But you’ll win some football games.

A soft nonconference slate should assure bowl eligibility or something close, but it’s still hard to tell how many games Auburn might win in Freeze’s first season. The roster had to be spackled together after imbalance and attrition issues. Auburn’s 2022 offense could only run, so Freeze brought in Michigan State quarterback Payton Thorne and five receiver transfers. The offensive line lost six of last year’s top seven, so he inked four transfers there. The run defense was dreadful, so he signed nine defensive line and linebacker transfers.

Freeze and veteran offensive coordinator Philip Montgomery should know what to do with the speed this new offense possesses — running backs Brian Battie (South Florida) and holdover Jarquez Hunter each averaged at least 6.4 yards per carry (dual-threat QB Robby Ashford averaged 6.6, not including sacks), and all-or-nothing North Texas transfer Jyaire Shorter averaged 27 yards per catch. But the O-line doesn’t have much depth, and while the secondary was mostly awesome last year and returns intact (D.J. James and Nehemiah Pritchett comprise one of the league’s best cornerback duos), we’ll see if there are setbacks after a total reset in the pass rush.

---

My 10 favorite players

QB Jayden Daniels, LSU. One of the most singular talents in college football. He’s an ultra-efficient passer (69% completion rate), ultra-efficient runner (7.6 yards per non-sack carry) and nonstop scrambler. He will run into trouble sometimes, but he’ll run an opposing defense’s legs into the ground too.

RB Raheim Sanders, Arkansas. When the burly runner from Rockledge, Florida, is dominating, Arkansas is winning. He averaged 8.4 yards per carry in seven Hog wins last season and 4.2 in losses.

RB Quinshon Judkins, Ole Miss. With all the transfers Ole Miss was breaking in, a freshman shined the brightest. Judkins was not only the leading freshman rusher in the country with 1,565 yards, but he topped the No. 2 freshman by nearly 500 yards.

Slot Moose Muhammad III, Texas A&M. With a rotating cast of quarterbacks in a moribund offense, Muhammad still managed to average a team-best 9.4 yards per target, 16.1 yards per catch and 2.2 yards per route. What might he do in an offense that’s actually effective?

WR Jyaire Shorter, Auburn. In the past 10 seasons, only two players have averaged at least 2.5 yards per route with a catch rate under 50% (and 50 minimum targets): Michigan State’s Jalen Nailor (2021) and Shorter at North Texas (2022). Doing so requires a lot of deep routes. Deep routes are fun.

DT McKinnley Jackson, Texas A&M. The 6-foot-2, 325-pounder led the Aggies with 13 run stops, which is cool, but his pursuit abilities are even cooler: Jackson made a tackle every 8.8 snaps, which is good for a linebacker! Linebackers aren’t 325 pounds!

DT Jaden Crumedy, Mississippi State. The 315-pounder from Hattiesburg enjoyed a breakout season in 2022 … when it finally began. He missed the first eight games of the season with injury but recorded 6.5 TFLs, 5 run stops and 2 sacks in his abbreviated campaign. Give him a full year and watch him rack up something gaudy.

Edge Harold Perkins Jr., LSU. In the last seven games of his true freshman season, the blue-chipper from Cypress, Texas, erupted for 11 TFLs, 6 sacks, 8 run stops, 2 pass breakups and an All-American level 17% pressure rate. Expectations: sky high.

LB Deontae Lawson, Alabama. Perkins’ breakout distracted us from another freshman linebacker star. In 11 games (and four starts), the Mobile native made 11 run stops, broke up four passes and allowed a paltry 13.1 QBR in pass coverage.

CB Kool-Aid McKinstry, Alabama. Don’t even bother looking downfield against McKinstry. It’s not worth your time.

---

Anniversaries

In 1998, 25 years ago, Clint Stoerner laid the ball on the ground. Unbeaten No. 10 Arkansas had unbeaten No. 1 Tennessee dead to rights, as they say, but then one of the most memorable and inexplicable fumbles ever changed everything and kept the Vols’ title hopes alive.

Arkansas would lose two of its next three games.

Also in 1998, Mississippi State went to Atlanta. Three teams (Alabama, LSU and Auburn) have accounted for the last 16 West titles. But from 1995 to 2006, things were far more democratic — Arkansas, Auburn and LSU each won three titles, Bama won two, and, in 1998, Jackie Sherrill’s Mississippi State ripped off a three-game winning streak against Bama, Arkansas and Ole Miss to win the school’s first and only division crown. The Bulldogs even led eventual national champion Tennessee in the fourth quarter of the SEC championship game before the Vols secured the title with a couple of late touchdowns.

In 2003, 20 years ago, Nick Saban won it all at LSU. For three decades before hiring Nick Saban, LSU was a sleeping giant. The Tigers enjoyed just four top-10 finishes between 1966 and 2001, and they had finished under .500 for eight of the 11 years before Saban’s arrival. But they won 26 games in his first three seasons, and in 2003, keyed by dominant line play and All-American cornerback Corey Webster, they fell to Auburn but beat 10 other power-conference teams by an average score of 34-11. A 34-13 win over Georgia in the SEC championship game and a 21-14 triumph over Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl delivered the school its first national title since 1958.

Also in 2003, Ole Miss came so close. LSU ended up with the spoils, but 2003 nearly had a very different story. With Eli Manning throwing for 3,600 yards, Ole Miss overcame a bumpy early start and beat Florida, Alabama and Arkansas in a five-game winning streak that brought the Rebels to the brink of their first West title. All they had to do was beat LSU at home. An early pick-six gave the Rebels the lead, but a missed field goal and a late turnover on downs spoiled two comeback opportunities in a 17-14 loss. Ole Miss and Texas A&M remain the only schools to never win the West.

In 2008, 15 years ago, Saban’s Alabama ignited. NCAA sanctions and some mediocre coach hires had led Bama into a rut. In the 10 seasons from 1997 to 2006, Bama had more losing seasons (four) than ranked finishes (three), and the Tide had enjoyed just one winning season in four years when Saban arrived. But then he did exactly what he did at LSU. After a bumpy transition year that featured a loss to Louisiana-Monroe and an Independence Bowl bid, Bama took off. The Tide blew out No. 9 Clemson and No. 3 Georgia early in the season and rolled to 12-0 before falling to Tim Tebow and Florida in the SEC championship game. They would win their first national title the next year. There were a few more rings after that.

In 2013, 10 years ago, the refs put one second back on the clock. Thank goodness they did.

Also in 2013, nine wins felt disappointing in College Station. After enjoying their first top-five finish in 56 years, and after Johnny Manziel became the first A&M player to win the Heisman in 55, Kevin Sumlin’s Aggies entered 2013 with sky-high expectations. Manziel and receiver Mike Evans were still amazing, but wild losses to Alabama and Auburn knocked them out of title contention, then losses to LSU and Mizzou rendered them a mere nine-win, top-20 team. Sumlin continued to produce solid teams but lost the faith of the fan base and was ousted after averaging 8.5 wins per season. The school ponied up to replace him with Jimbo Fisher. Fisher has averaged 7.8 wins.