Barring any complete meltdowns, we should be seeing these teams compete for a national championship come January. Georgia and Alabama both making the top tier adds drama to their critical matchup this weekend: winner stays, loser drops. Texas controls its own destiny as the No. 1 team heading into week five. The only ones who can get in their way are themselves going forward.<\/p>\n
Tier Two: Dangerous Against Everyone Besides Ole Miss
Team: LSU<\/p>\n
With head coach Lane Kiffin and quarterback Sam Leavitt, the Tigers have the talent to beat anyone in college football. The problem is that one loss: LSU was not able to come out of a hostile environment against Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, with a victory, something that will haunt Kiffin the entire season. As long as they can avoid a matchup against Kiffin\u2019s former team in the playoffs, the Tigers could make some noise in December.<\/p>\n
Tier Three: Playoff Bid Ruiners
Teams: Kentucky and Missouri<\/p>\n
Both teams have picked up quality wins, including a top-10-ranked win each at the time of victory. Realistically, the Wildcats and Tigers don\u2019t have much chance of being playoff teams this season. But with Missouri still facing Texas and Georgia, and Kentucky facing LSU, these teams still have a chance to grab marquee wins and hurt top-tier conference opponents\u2019 playoff cases.<\/p>\n
Tier Four: Here Because of Your Logo
Teams: Ole Miss, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi State<\/p>\n
All four of these teams have had a loss this season in which, simply put, they did not look good. While Ole Miss and Florida both have statement wins this season, they followed them with a blowout loss to another conference opponent. Tennessee and Mississippi State have shown flashes of great offense, but their unstoppable force was met by an immovable object in each of their losses.<\/p>\n
All will stay in playoff contention, especially because of the rigor of this conference, but it\u2019s hard to imagine them ultimately being anything more than a first-round exit.<\/p>\n
Tier Five: High Expectations, Low Results
Team: Texas A&M<\/p>\n
Texas A&M started off the season as a top-10 ranked team in the AP Poll and are now unranked. After a loss at home to Kentucky and a blowout loss at LSU, the Aggies would most likely have to win out their gauntlet of a schedule to have any chance at relevance in the playoff discussion.<\/p>\n
Tier Six: Better Luck Next Year!
Teams: Auburn, Vanderbilt and South Carolina<\/p>\n
Here are the remaining SEC teams already looking forward to rebuilding for next season. This was the media\u2019s expectation for these teams, so it\u2019s not a major disappointment, but there will be questions about what needs to change culturally for this not to become a normal trend.<\/p>\n
Tier Seven: John Ma-tier
Teams: Oklahoma and Arkansas<\/p>\n
Arkansas has not played well at all this season after being blown out by Utah, Georgia and Texas A&M. This result could be anticipated of the Razorbacks, who are rebuilding under first-year head coach Ryan Silverfield. After a Week 2 loss to Michigan, Oklahoma narrowly escaped unranked New Mexico and was dismantled by Georgia. If the Sooners suffer a demoralizing loss to No. 1 Texas on Saturday, they might not recover.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barring any complete meltdowns, we should be seeing these teams compete for a national championship come January. Georgia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-460961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}