Questions Ahead of Week 11 of SEC Football

Written By Tucker Harlin

By Tucker Harlin

As always, here are the answers to my questions in Week 10.

DID TENNESSEE’S OFFENSE BREAK THE SEAL IN SEC PLAY? No, but it wasn’t far from doing so.

WHERE DOES ARKANSAS TURN WITH AN INJURED JA’QUINDEN JACKSON? It turned to its worst loss ever to Ole Miss

CAN SOUTH CAROLINA’S DEFENSIVE FRONT MATCH THE SPEED OF TEXAS A&M’S RUN GAME? Yes, and it tore some ACLs along the way.

IS A SUSPECT GEORGIA DEFENSE IN DANGER AGAINST DJ LAGWAY? Not if Lagway gets hurt in the second quarter.

Week 11 is your first week with official College Football Playoff rankings. The rooting interests of fan bases are changing as a result of different projections with the need to trust sworn enemies to take down fellow playoff contenders.

These are the three questions I’m asking ahead of SEC play in Week 11.

IS THIS THE WEEK CARSON BECK FINALLY COSTS GEORGIA AGAINST AN OPPONENT NOT CALLED ALABAMA?

In the moment, everybody sort of ignored the three-interception outing Carson Beck had against Alabama in September. No, it didn’t look good, but we also didn’t know the Tide was about to fall out of favor with the college football gods.

What nobody is ignoring are Beck’s multi-interception outings against Mississippi State, Texas, and Florida. The security blankets of Ladd McConkey and Brock Bowers won’t be at Beck’s disposal in Oxford this weekend.

Beck is going against an Ole Miss defensive front that’s not getting the attention it deserves right now.

If you take the loss to LSU out of the equation, the landshark defense has compiled 29 sacks and 48 tackles for loss in SEC play. Of those sacks and tackles for loss, over half are in the Rebels’ victories over Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Comparing Georgia to those offensive fronts is apples to oranges, although Beck on his own is one of the offense’s greatest liabilities.

But who am I to judge? He’s doing a lot better than me at the dating game.

CAN JALEN MILROE WIN IN A TRULY HOSTILE ROAD ENVIRONMENT?

This question seems very surface level, but the truth is Jalen Milroe hasn’t played often against crowds that are heavily against him.

It’s become more obvious with each passing week the driving force behind Alabama’s 2023 College Football Playoff appearance was Nick Saban. That team is fortunate to sit at 8-4 if Saban isn’t the man pulling the strings.

He’s not the puppet master this year, and chief puppet Jalen Milroe is having to fight hard to debunk the fraud allegations surround him.

Think about where Milroe won games last year away from Tuscaloosa: Starkville against a 5-7 Mississippi State team, College Station against a team that wanted its coach gone, Lexington against a team that’s won two SEC games there in three seasons, and Auburn against a coach that cared more about recruiting for 2024 than the season he was in.

The Tuscaloosa factor doesn’t seem to matter this season.

The two blowout wins the Tide has under its belt are against teams that lost their starting quarterbacks in the first half. Georgia is a defensive bust from a miracle comeback and the Tide couldn’t trust Milroe to throw the ball in the win over South Carolina.

The Tide is 0-2 on the road in SEC play this year. The first loss was in front of 70% Bama fans while the other left Milroe and company rattled in Knoxville.

The loss at Tennessee occurred late in the afternoon so I can only imagine what a trip to Death Valley at night will turn into for Milroe.

IS SOUTH CAROLINA WALKING INTO WEST END HUNGOVER?

Last week’s victory over Texas A&M was one of two pinnacles we can point to in the Shane Beamer era at South Carolina.

The other pinnacle is the two-week period in which the Gamecocks knocked both Tennessee and Clemson out of playoff contention. After those victories, the next year and change of South Carolina football was pretty miserable, beginning with a Gator Bowl loss to Notre Dame.

I think there’s a better head on the shoulders of the 2024 South Carolina team than the one from 2022, but I’m still not ready to rule out a slip up in Nashville this weekend.

Vanderbilt has been excellent about taking care of the football and keeping the metaphorical gun away from its foot, allowing opponents to make those mistakes instead. The Gamecocks don’t want to fall on their faces this weekend.

Tucker Harlin
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