[MUSIC] Hey, what's going on? This is the Saturday Down South podcast. I am, Connor Gera. Will True or False, you are invincible? Man, it's starting to feel more and more like it as they keep trying to kill me. You know, you are back from Vegas after witnessing LSU USC. You're not at 100% right now, you're not at your absolute best. Which, look, everybody that comes back from Vegas, I think, realizes they need at least a week. When you're over 30, you need a week to be able to recover from Vegas. And that's without watching LSU blow another opener. >> Yes, correct. So, some housekeeping here, I do have COVID, I contracted COVID during this trip. So if I say something extra stupid, just let me know, I am wearing- >> No, it means you're good. It means you're immune, like you're fine, you can't hold that against Will, so keep that up. >> Exactly, I could say whatever, I could say, you know, LSU natty and just pretend I don't remember it. >> Sure. >> Here's the vibe, I'm on, it is a Wednesday and I'm wearing an almost Friday shirt with Mike Jordan playing golf on it. Couple of things about, so the trip was awesome. I basically got sick, like day two, and I got to ride some dune buggies with my buddy, John, it's like between both of our birthdays. I'm actually about to turn 30 on the 20th. So I should actually be good by then, which is a blessing honestly. So we do these dune buggies day one, I'm like cool. And then I start feeling bad, and I was just joking with counteroff hairs, like the most 30 year old trip of all time, cuz I literally just go, you know what, nothing I do is gonna be as cool as those dune buggies, I am just gonna kinda hang out. Like I knew I was like pretty seriously sick, I didn't know what it was, so I stayed in, didn't hit like the casinos, didn't like do anything crazy and be drinking or anything, cuz I knew it was gonna be a nightmare. If I like, I'm, you know, I ain't as good as I once was, right? But you're as good once as you ever were. And that was the dune buggies, right? I was like, you know what, I'm good. And so, you know, I got to watch all the games on Saturday, but yeah, I was there with John and then Peyton flew in a little bit later in the week. And we ended up hanging out, having some time with the boys. We've all been working really hard, playing some Xbox, bringing my Xbox for the best idea ever. We actually ran an Airbnb, which was also great. So it really just ended up being kind of like a staycation with the boys. Got to, you know, we went out and watched some college football and stuff. And like I said, I just now tested positive. So I was feeling kind of icky, but the height of the feeling bad was definitely during that game, which is hilarious. I got to watch, I've been to three straight openers, guys. I've watched Brian Kelly blow all of those games, but I'm so serious, guys. I'm so serious walking out of this one was the best one because I've been saying on this podcast four months, hey, losses don't really matter that much anymore. So I'm just sitting here and like, oh my God, an out of conference loss against a big didn't even week one. Brother, you already survived the first one of these? I survived a car crash. Okay. Yeah. COVID in a non-conference. Okay. Then what? Well, you are invincible. That's, that's, yes, that is correct. If you can handle that, and if that's your perspective. And look, I'm not telling those who fans that that was a moral loss. It was nothing like a moral loss. That is a game in which if you were like Brian Kelly afterwards, pound in the podium, I do not blame you whatsoever. That was, that was just straight, Denny Green. He totally stole that. The bears are who we thought they were. Yep. We let them out the hook. The fact that LSU lost that game, it took me a while to process it. And we've talked at Nausea about LSU and openers and all these different things. But that was a game in which you went into the fourth quarter thinking LSU is about take this over when by two touchdowns. That's how I felt. I thought they were starting to get the ground game going. John Emery looked great. Unfortunately, as we saw from Wilson Alexander before this recording, John Emery out for the year with a torn ACL, which is a bummer for the former superstar. Goodness. I mean, he looked amazing, man. That was literally going to be my silver lining. I was texting you after the game was like, well, at least we found our running back. Yeah. I mean, that, that to me was like the, like besides the fact that I didn't care it. Nussmeyer continues to look the part, I'll agree to disagree with what Brian Kelly said afterwards about being outplayed, like he definitely outplayed him. It's like, yeah, well, Miller Moss made more plays down the stretch. I understand there's a couple of plays that Nussmeyer wanted back. But to me, if I'm an LSU fan, the thing that is, that is keeping me up at night and most frustrated, that is maybe a bigger picture issue than even the defense, this heralded offensive line. Well, how many rushing yards do you think Alice, you had in the fourth quarter of that football game? Not a ton, man. Yeah, they finished with just over a hundred. They had three on six carries in the fourth quarter of a game with an offensive line that we keep talking about how good Emory Jones will Campbell are and those guys are great and having a two-fault start to tackle. There were some false starts happening across college football that we're still doing that thing. We haven't quite gotten over it yet. Like, it feels like it's happening a bit too soon. I know it happens more in the NFL, but I feel like I saw a lot of that on Saturday. I saw it again on Sunday, but it was a little too ready for the fistfight, I feel. I think the fistfight hadn't started and he was already trying to punch me. Yeah, not to just put that on Will Campbell or anything like that, but the interior of that LSU offensive line, you're like, man, what exactly is this going to be a group that can run the football? If it was you can run the football, then win that game. Well, the point that you brought up that we were texting about is really overlooked of how little time LSU took off the clock when they're either about to tie it or take the lead. Brian Kelly messed that up and he deserves blame for not necessarily being able to run the football in those spots or have, I think they called two passing place consecutively out of the two-minute break. We're not allowed to call it two-minute warning, we're going to call it two-minute warning. LSU wasted zero time and when they did that, I was kind of like, well, there's a lot of time for USC to be able to go down the field and win this football game and then sure enough, that's what happens. Yeah, I mean, being a Louisiana sports fan has made me kind of like a suffering savant. So like, I saw this in terms of my other suffering as it was happening, right? Which is like, you know, they get down there at second eight of the 14, right? So like, it's right at that two-minute, right? So there's two minutes left, they have two opportunities to keep the clock running. They are down three points. So your worst case scenario at that point, right, should be you kick a fuel goal with under a minute left. Under a minute, yep. Or you at least make them burn a timeout or so, right? Instead, here's the funny thing that makes, this makes even funnier. So I say in terms of the suffering, I thought about this in terms of the NOLA no-call, right? Because this is a point I was just bringing up about that play, which is that New Orleans, that no-call was egregious. Okay. Like they got robbed, everybody should feel the way they feel about that. It was ridiculous, expecting that fell to do the right things, never going to happen. The Saints, an almost identical situation where the two-minute warning at the goal line, they had a run called, you read Audible out of it, through a slant route that Michael Thomas was covering straight through at the ground. That play, the NOLA no-call, should have never happened because the Saints should have kept the clock running and not allowed for enough time for that fuel goal that ended up winning or tying the game, saying the overtime, right? Same exact deal here. This is what's actually so funny that people, see, people are getting the easy joke with Brian Kelly, here's the real joke people should be telling. He should have been more of a boomer, actually. Brian Kelly was too innovative, okay? He ran an RPO. Why did he run an RPO? Emory Jones on, I guess what was, oh, sorry, not Emory Jones. John Emory, and it says, "Name until on God," he called, man, that's so sad. John Emory on, you know, like, he could have waltzed into the end zone if they simply had handed that RPO off, and instead, the ball hits the ground. Now, granted, the receiver was open, right? Ball still hit the turf. Cool thing about having COVID is I was not drunk at all for this game, I was locked in. I could tell you exactly how he lost this game, buddy, so point B. Brian Kelly was being too new school, he was being too, like, and again, we could blame the new OC, we could blame Joe Sloan, I get that. I will give Brian Kelly at least a little bit of credit for taking the blame, because I've never seen him do that in his career, so whatever, he blamed us, but the thing that's so interesting is from a game-planning standpoint, all I needed was a boomer coach, where everyone talks about how, you know, he smells like been gay, and he dances on recruits. All I needed was that guy to run a half-back dive, get a full back in there or something, you know, just hand it off up the middle, bleed the clock down, and if you're going to go to OT, go to OT, this game didn't go to OT, that's the thing. So at the end of the day, like, they had a shot to score a touchdown because John Emery was cooking, I know he's injured, but if you go back and look at that play, he slides through, unopposed, yeah, he doesn't have the ball, but there was no one there to stop him, he was big as hell, he was getting ahead of steam, you know. So point being, I think that they were trying, Brian Kelly actually outthought himself here, which is a whole new way to lose a football game, most of the time he just puts his head down and says, well, if these players would play harder, we might have a chance to win. He was legitimately furious because he knew what he did wrong, which is that every coach this man had always had going back to 1950 or whatever was telling him, you got to run the ball there, son. And he was like, I think I'll call an RPO. Yeah, and I get it, like, we brought up the numbers before, you know, six rushing attempts for three yards in the fourth quarter. There clearly wasn't a lot of faith in that aspect for LSU, but at some point, you have to be willing to say, we need to go and get some yardage here, we need to be able to burn some o'clock and kind of manage this game and understand all the different dynamics that are going into it. I thought if you came into this one, believing that LSU was a 10 in two team, going to a playoff, you probably came away from it going, mmm, I'm not there. I don't really feel particularly good about that. Despite the fact that I thought, Nuss looked mostly good, it was a continuation of the bowl game where he needs in a weird way, he needs to start getting back to some of the gunslinger stuff, I thought, because not targeting Kyron lace and not, well, I shouldn't say not targeting Kyron lace in the second half. I don't know if he had a target in the second half, but it certainly didn't feel like it. He didn't have a catch. I know that seven for 94 where he looked unstoppable in the first half of that game. I actually came away feeling like, okay, you're still going to be able to do some things in the passing game. My heart was good, and I came away from it thinking the Blake Baker defense was mostly putting them in better spots. It was at least not as much of a liability. And of course, you're remembered by how you played down the stretch and they didn't get the stuff that they needed to and Miller Moss makes a really nice throw there and reads, what's that? Miller Moss. Why are we saying it like that? Remember the Coach O voice from Miller Moss? Come on, I have COVID. River, I was talking about Coach O saying Miller Moss's name made me laugh. Yeah. And I didn't get the coach of eyes because of COVID is again, COVID excuse. We're going to we're going to excuse that. But yeah, like I came away from it thinking you at least you should be better defensively. They kind of look like they have some guys are stepping up on the defensive line. I like what Ashton stamps was doing in the secondary kind of a couple of tough moments for him down the stretch. But for the most part, I think LSU is a still a solid team, but man, these opening game blunders. That's all you can call it at this point. It's dumb-founding. I think LSU is cursed in season openers and forget FCS schools. Start scheduling division two schools to make sure you get wins. Yeah, I believe they're opening at Clemson next year. So that's going to be a really unstoppable like what is it, a moveable object versus a stopable force like Davo or Brad Kelly have to win that game and like with a player from the transfer portal steps on, they have to like do a ritual or something. But yeah, no, I'm with you there. I mean, so that's why I was actually pretty, you know, pretty excited about this stuff because number one, the losses don't matter as much. I picked LSU to lose this game. Now I picked them to lose it in a shootout, okay? I feel amazing about LSU's defense compared to what I thought I was going to see, right? So I expected LSU to lose inexplicably. So we got that. That's fine. What I didn't expect. And you asked me like, okay, what would make you feel better about this team? Young defensive backs stepping up, old defensive backs figuring it out. We didn't see a ton of this, the latter. We saw a good amount of the former Ashton Stamps is going to be that guy, right? I'm excited about that. Allen played well. He's banged up. So that's the thing. Like I was specifically locked in on the DVs at the D line did fine. You know, I'm saying they weren't getting gashed the way they could have been considering that's all we heard all off season now. It did bite him in some big moments. I get that. But you know, at the end of the day, this was the worst defense in America last year. And one of the worst we've ever seen in our lives after just seeing the whole 2020 season. So yeah, I think that this defense has turned it around because here's what I didn't see. Guys not knowing the play. Yeah, I was not knowing their assignment. That's what I saw last year. So when you go from the defense being bad and no one knowing how to run the plays to guys communicating before plays, guys being in positions to make plays, this great offense only scoring 27 points and needing a miracle at the end and Brian Kelly poop in the bed. So yeah, I mean, every prediction had this in the thirties, at least. I did. I definitely did. 35 was going to be the final score. Both these defenses. I mean, dancing Lynn, like know the name now, USC defensive coordinator with chaos scenario number five, whatever that was, what if Lincoln Riley actually has a defense? That was pretty good. That was pretty good. All things considered yet you, you didn't get this experience because you were at the game. But for those of us who watched it at home, the second you saw Bob Diaco run his hands through his hair, great had a hair, by the way, Bob Diaco has. It was over. If that's who Brian Kelly is consulting on the sideline, some issues. Some big time issues, not a great sign. I embrace the civil conflict. I do. I am a civil conflict enthusiast. For those who really want to go down the college football rabbit hole, if you know, you know, but that was LSU was, was cooked the second that happened. So all in all, like, I don't think it was as troubling as it could have been, but still throw us, you not to get over the hump in these openers, man, it is baffling at this point. But everything's ahead of them. And like I said, if this fan base was going to be disappointed, if they thought this was going to be a championship year, I said that from the beginning, and I literally not to be like, oh, do, do, do, do, but like, I remember talking to like you and Marla about it, maybe in like, I, they're going to lose this game because there's just none of time. And I think we saw that. I mean, remember, you're replacing your OC with a co-OC situation, you're rebuilding your whole defense. The way that LSU could have gotten embarrassed in this game and how they actually got embarrassed, yes, this morning, because they got closer than they probably should have, to be honest, but they're going to get better from here. That's the thing. Everything other than John Emery's ACL, which goodness, everything else is very clearly fixable. The backs need to figure their crap out and the O line needs to just stop getting pushed around, but they have the talent, you know, definitely do three, yeah, four, three year starters on that offensive line with the acceptance center would think they get that figured out. Okay. Plain for today. Neil Blackman, he's going to join us in a bit, talk through everything going on with Florida. And yes, there are a lot of things already going on, of course. So we did gain to, to that whole situation, we're going to close with latter of the week. But first, well, week two, it is already here. We have seven games to be able to go through and then lock of the week as well. Let's start with the game at college game day is going to be at, let's start with number three, Texas, seven and a half point favor against number 10, Michigan. The over under I have for this one is one and a half Michigan quarterbacks played. E, Alex already didn't start for Michigan, which was weird, very, very weird. Davis Warren ends up starting for Michigan, came as a bit of a surprise for those of us who expected to run more to just kind of be operating this run heavy offense. And Michigan instead found itself in a six point game with six minutes left against Fresno State. Not great for the defending champs. Not full on 2020 LSU, but sorry. That was rude. Now, you know what? I, I, I take that. Could we, I need to believe that out. Let me talk about Florida. Come on. I got to talk about LSU. We should have switched us to anyway. Well, I'm sorry. Kick a man wise down. You got COVID. You just got back from Vegas. That was uncalled for. I'm calling myself out. That was unnecessary. Didn't mean to go there. But this is a very unsettled quarterback situation. It looks like in Ann Arbor, I don't think Michigan was just trying to keep it close to the best to throw Texas off the scent. So once again, stop me if you've heard this before, but Texas is traveling in week two to face a top 10 team that's still trying to see what they have a quarterback. Crazy. Right. Last time worked out. First off, you know, I would think that if your name is orgy, a committee approach is probably not a great move. Anyway. Well, that was our g3 for the top rope. The other side of it is that like, you part of us wants to be like, well, this is all just games. This is all just good. But Alabama sure as heck did start Tyler Buck during it. She was that last year. It kind of headed like like handcuffed middle row too. So well, after the Texas game though, after the Texas game, no, no, I know. I know. I'm just saying that like they were really, truly not sure who their quarterback was. Like it was not some weird daysmanship thing. So maybe that's the thing that does still happen because we did. We have seen it now too. It's just two big programs, the family friendly show, man. This is a dream scenario for this Texas defense. I really think it is. They're going to do everything in their power to confuse Michigan when it has to throw the football, a Michigan offense that averaged four and a half yards per pass attempt. What's going to be interesting for me is if these Texas receivers, the depth that Sark has been talking about in the off season, if we see that surface, because just mark it down. Will Johnson, number one player, college football 25, that guy's going to lock down somebody on the outside, probably going to be Isaiah Bond more times than not. Maybe it's gold. And sometimes Sark likes to be able to work those guys in at least a handful of snaps in the slot. So they'll move them around a little bit. It won't be somebody exclusively in the outside. But I would bet on Will Johnson winning that matchup. These young Texas receivers, John Tate Cook, Ryan Wingo, can they step up because you have to. These are the types of moments where you need those role players, those secondary options to be extremely good. And that's how you win tough games on the road. I don't think that you're going to want to run the ball against Mason Graham and that Michigan defensive line. All the questions we have about who Michigan is in this new era. I don't really question how good their defensive line is. I think it's tremendous. I think you'd rather trust Queen viewers in a big time spot to be able to make the right decisions, which he has shown he is capable of doing in these big time games. I thought it was interesting that you were through the ball 27 times in the opener. That was a lot for a guy that got an early shower in the third quarter, middle to third quarter, and they still through the ball 27 times. Maybe it kind of speaks to the fact that they don't want to run the football a ton in spots that they don't have to because of that running back depth. It's you know, try not to get those guys hurt and have an extra tread on, you know, take some of the tread off of those tires. But maybe it's because they realized they needed to get these young receivers on the same page as when you were trying to be able to do that in a setting like that against Colorado State. I think Texas gets a lead in the second half of this one and forces Michigan into some obvious passing situations that it's not ready for yet. And so I'm going to go with a little bit of a repeat of last year of what Texas did at Bama. I'm going to say that Texas wins this game by double digits, wins by 10, 27, 17. Texas holds on to that top three rank. Yeah, absolutely. I'm super big on Texas here. Of course, we went to the sports book and one of my actually really good on Saturday. Not so much on Sunday. It's really pretty come up low on it was or the shootout I was talking about. But the one one of the few actually did get wrong was the Michigan over. And I thought that, you know, Sean Moore was going to come out and really try to send a message that it wasn't all Jim Harbaugh, um, what was the, what was the over for, for that game? It was high man. I don't remember, but it was, it was like, it was one of those, okay, it wasn't super duper high to the point where I was like, oh, they can make it super high and make it one of these like 70 to nothing games. If he wants to do that, I guess he wants you and could not. But yeah, that's, that's the thing. It was like, I think the eyes of the world were on them with, you know, that kind of documentary thing that just come out about stallions and all that. So they were, they had every reason to come out and prove everyone wrong. And they couldn't do it against an inferior team. It might be, you know, the coaching thing. It might be whatever. But, you know, it's hard to tell and it gets Texas modern Texas at least this year. Texas is not, you know, where you want to figure that out. I got to be careful because every other year, pretty much, but last year was a great time to figure stuff out against Texas. But yeah, I actually think that Texas is a much more like just a unit is more together. You know, they have that continuity with their head coach, their quarterback, all that. So yeah, this was a game that I think we had circled in the early season. And already I'm starting to be worried about Michigan being exactly what, you know, the inter hater in me, the inter SEC home or being like, well, that was just cheating. There was nothing special about that Michigan team. This looks like the Michigan team that I thought Michigan was last year without kind of stuff. To me, I think this is, we're going to talk about a lot, probably this year about playoff elimination games. What does it mean to be part of this conversation? FSU, you are eliminated. FSU in Boston College. That was a playoff elimination game, because it took it to you. Boston College, you're still alive. I think this is a national championship contending elimination game because it's not so much that the loser of this game cannot win a national championship. To me, I think it will send a message that if you can't win this type of game, you're probably not going to be able to compete at that level. Okay. So you still might see both of these teams in the college while playoff, but I'm saying that if you're Texas and you can't take advantage of this type of an experience, yes, in a hostile atmosphere on the road, but you're a touchdown favorite for a reason. It's because you're the better football team. You're the more proven football team you're established. To me, if we see Texas's weaknesses, and if Michigan wins this football game as a touchdown underdog at home with all of this turnover, that's going to say Texas, you are not ready to compete at that level when it comes time for the college while playoff because Texas has the experience. They should be the team that's going out there and showing us what their identity is in this early going. It's not to say that they can't get better, but to me, this is really indicative of who Texas should be during this season because you know that Michigan can take things away. And what do you do in those moments? What do you do? Like are your receivers dropping passes left and right? You have a running back room where it's just like, ah, there's one guy who's kind of out there, but he can't really pass protect and, and yours is getting kind of beat up by that defensive line. Like this will be a game in which you can see Texas's weaknesses if they are there. And if they are weaknesses that can prevent you from winning a title, Michigan wins this football game. We're having a much different conversation about their trajectory and about their title defense season, what it's going to look like competing in the big 10. I will be unbelievably impressed if your own more wins against a Texas team that quite frankly is better. If they're playing on a neutral site, Texas is double digit favorite. They are. They absolutely are. And I do think that that Michigan is going to have some of these moments where maybe it's Smash Mouth football testing that Texas defensive line early in the post sweat Murphy era, but give me, give me the long horns, man. Give me the long horns to, to make kind of a statement in week two. Yeah, I think too, really quick on that, like this is kind of a nightmare coaching matchup, which is that Sarkisian, you know, has always been a pretty brash guy. And that's how we won Alabama last year. And that was whenever we did that preview, I was talking about, you know, whoever kind of, you know, has, has the most gumption, I'll say it that way, whoever, you know, shows that the most. And when you were just went in there and that offense went in there and pushed Alabama around, then that's what they had to do to win on the road. And it was really wild to see that, you know, and it made us think that Alabama, it showed Alabama's flaws and it showed up, you know, how, how long the road was ahead and ended up getting there who was even more impressive for it. But point being, you know, this is a nightmare coach to have to come to your house after all the stuff that's swirling around after not really looking, you know, great last week, because the game, remember that more was given credit for was that Penn State game where they handed the ball off 30 plus times. They're not going to do that to get tech. In fact, if you try that against Texas, you're going to lose expeditiously. You might as well not show up. Meanwhile, on the other side, we have Quinn Ears, who has gone through like, you know, three different extreme makeovers, he's got like his credit score, he's like figured out everything. And so like point being, you know, both of these guys know exactly who and what they are and what their goal is. And it feels like Michigan is a little bit scattered and like Michigan is, it's weird because Michigan is the defending national champion, but it's like Texas has that kind of like swagger right now. They have like, they will be more confident going into Ann Arbor, which is a crazy, crazy thing to see. Because that's the thing about a guy like Harbaugh. He's such a Colton personality figure. I hate to keep talking about my team because it's kind of how coach was, right, where he took all the shine off of the players because people were asking questions about him. They were like, oh, what do you do? And when you have a guy like that, he is the picture of confidence because he lives outside of society's norms. You watch him harbor over there just chugging a gal in the milk and you're like, this guy knows something, everybody else does it. So you can kind of believe in that guy because you're like, it seems like he's got something going on out of there, Boris just kind of feels like a regular nice dude. He's obviously too well adjusted to be a crazy football coach. I wanted to see this game last year and I'm kind of bummed that we didn't. I still think Michigan looking back on it with how Michigan rose to the challenge in the Rose Bowl and obviously the way that they asserted their dominance in the national championship against Washington, I still found myself wanting to see what it would have looked like of, of viewers as, as an underdog and he's not an underdog in this game, according to the osmakers or anything like that. But every time it's felt like, oh man, so much pressure on Quinn, you were in this spot. He's kind of been able to rise to the occasion now, Oklahoma fans are saying, Hey, what about the Red River, Red River rivalry, a game in which he didn't come out on the winning end last year, he did the year before, but for the most part, man, when it's spotlight time, that's when I think yours is particularly good. I mean, last year in the big 12 championship was a good example that I'll be it against an Oklahoma State defense that's struggled a lot. So I do think Texas wins this game on the road and they make their first statements as an SEC team, not necessarily an SEC play. All right, well, speaking of Oklahoma State, Oklahoma State, seven and a half point favorite speaking of seven and a half points, Brad's number 16 Cowboys hosting Arkansas. The overunder I have for this one, four and a half yards per carry for Ali Gordon second. That's what he had in the opener. Slow start for Oklahoma State in that one, predictably, slow start, I think they're always just kind of prone to that for whatever reason, but it was an 11 point game midway through the third quarter against a South Dakota state team, which look, I don't know, drink if you've heard this before, but don't schedule good FCS teams in your season opener. It's not a particularly fun experience, trust me, the efficiency is everything when it comes to defending Ali Gordon the second. It's much easier said than done, but you're not going to take him out of a game like Texas was able to do in that big 12 championship. I don't think that's necessarily a realistic expectation for Arkansas because the volume is just, you know, is going to be there. That's just the way that they build their offense. But I think in three of four, yeah, there's three of four losses that Oklahoma State suffered last year. Gordon did not hit four and a half yards per carry. The only time that they lost and he exceeded that was the Iowa state game, which was the first game where he was given the opportunity to be the feature back and it was still very new because Gundy decided for whatever reason, you know what, let's have Alan Bowman throw all the ball 48 times while Oklahoma State runs the ball 24 times didn't exactly follow that plan moving forward and they were obviously better for it. That won't be happening on Saturday against Arkansas or just got fed the rock 28 times against an FCS team and while it wasn't the 50 that Gundy promised us for Gordon's DUI punishment, it was still 28 carries against an FCS team. They are going to run him. If they run him 30 to 35 times against Arkansas, it will not surprise me. You do not arm tackle him and he will lean on you. This offense blind will lean on you. That is what they do. Well, if you're going to try and contain him, not stopping, but contain him, you load the box. When football you do all those cliche things that defensive minded coaches talk about and you say, you know what, we're going to make this 15th year quarterback Alan Bowman try and beat us. That's the formula. If there ever is one, plenty of teams have said it. Very few have been able to execute it. The good news, Arkansas currently leading the nation and yards per carry allowed. That's good. The bad news, holding Arkansas pine bluff to seven yards on 23 carries, probably, and by probably, I mean, definitely a different task than containing the best running back in college football. Just a little bit, tiny bit different, huge, huge game, not just for Sam Pittman, but really for the emerging Travis Williams, who's a name to kind of keep in mind in coaching circles. I also really think in this one, it's going to be too much Ollie Gordon. I think Taylor Greene has some moments in this one. He's going to be able to make some plays against that Oklahoma State secondary, which is their biggest weakness. But I don't think the hogs hang for four quarters, so I'm going to take Oklahoma State to win big 45-24. Man, I was going to say how to take you that long to get to a more Taylor and Greene, man, he was balling week one. He looked great. And I love the idea of Taylor and Greene being worth the price of admission when KJ was not last year. I'm the biggest KJ fan that I think that there is outside of his genetic DNA, maybe outside of Gus, for saying that he has similar physical traits to Cam Newton. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Taylor and Greene was so fun in that opener. And if you just tell me that's what he's going to do against inferior competition, watch Arkansas play and love yourself some Taylor and Greene. I don't know how inferior this competition will be though. Yeah. I'm so, so fascinated by this. I was like one of the things I had talked to one of my boys in Vegas about is like, is there anything that you're like, you know, bullish on from like a gambling perspective or whatever? Since you got the SEC, I was like, on the suit man, Arkansas's offense. And I know, again, it's an inferior opponent, but dude, Arkansas is going to be talent wise and inferior opponent to most of the teams on their schedule, honestly kind of including Oklahoma State. And so. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's guys one ICC plays good, really, really good at like, difficult ego. I don't know that there's going to be a ton of those matchups where, you know, that's what I'm saying. I said Arkansas is going to be the less talented team. Oh, what? Okay. Okay. Okay. That's including Oklahoma State. Like, I miss her. Has a better roster than Arkansas. So my thing there is that like, look, watching him physically play. And I know it's like a little bit different watching Boise and like, I got to see the guy in a jersey to like see what I think about him, which is the most boomer thing. But like, man, the way that guy moves, like the way that you felt seeing Yama Liava the first time, he's six, six man, and like, watching glides like, that's why I don't like comparing players. Sometimes other players, because when have we seen this exact thing, it's, I've seen some six, six guys. I've seen some Philly. I've seen some six, six guys that can move like that outside of a basketball court, which is why I always, you know, I want to keep bringing up the conversation you had with him. I went, Oh my gosh, this is a basketball athlete. This is very rare. We've seen basketball athletes play tight end like quarterback or play a receiver, not really quarterback. And the fluidity he moves with, the amount of confidence in Boise has, I'm very, very interested by him. I definitely, I think Arkansas was going to at least cover the spread. I think it's probably going to be about a three point win vertical in the state, but I could see Arkansas pulling this one off just based on that, right? Because the quarterback we match up right now, where's the sounds? I would kind of rather have to in green, because I know he can do at least one thing right to run and be tall. So can we sneaks all day? Yeah, look, I don't know that he's running away from defenses the way that he did in that game where he took a deep drop back and was on the right side of the field against Arkansas Pine Bluff, scattered to the right sideline and decided I need to cut this all the way left and was able to turn the corner and get into the end zone zero and I'm including Vandy zero teams in the SEC, maybe even at the core four level are probably letting him do that. And if they do, I will mention it because it was ridiculous what he did in that sequence when he like he's like gliding, okay? So I'm not trying to try to minimize that because it was it was noteworthy was awesome. But I'm curious what it's going to look like if he runs into a team that is able to contain that mobility on the outside. And if he's got to put that trust in these receivers, which he's got some big body dudes. And that could be the game plan moving forward for a lot of teams, not just against Oklahoma State is, look, you're going to have to be able to trust these guys on the outside trust them to go up and make a play for you. They've kind of built the roster that way. And against the Oklahoma State secondary, that just got punched in the mouth last year. They were not good. That was their biggest weakness. I am curious if that's going to be the game plan for a certain Robert Patrick Petrino who needs to be wearing sunglasses every game day or night as he was wearing in the opener. That was a positive development with him on the sideline. But I'm worried about what this is going to look like for the Arkansas defense against a guy that you're going to look up and like, Oh my God, I like Gordon's got 120 yards. I really think he did that much, but he just quietly just kind of eats and eats and eats at you. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely the other part of it too. And one thing to your point about Bobby Petrino, that is a man on a mission. He is either going to flame out again, but that's the crazy thing about him. He's already flamed out so many times. It kind of doesn't matter. He's now fully sending it, and that's what's so beautiful about the relationship. Like he, like I said, he's a man on a mission. He's looking for revenge. I think that the way that green is and he's so chill actually is like the best quarterback fit for him maybe ever because he's not going to take any of that stuff personally. And I am truly fascinated by how this offense is going to play because again, I don't even know really usually Arkansas has a couple of receivers like their tight ends pretty good this year. Haase is their tight end rate has a mispronounced it on the on the broadcast front of the program Lucas. Everybody it just pretend that the Z doesn't exist. It just has. Yeah. So like he's, he's good towards knows you right, but like point being like they don't have a ton of targets to your point, but I'm just fascinated by how Bobby Petrino is. It's like he knows he wants to get here of I want to score 50 points a game and he knows he has these pieces and I'm so fascinated to see how he's going to get there counterpoint. The late Ryan Mallet and Bobby Petrino kind of infamously hated each other. Yeah, they did. And they beat sweet magic together. So I don't know that you need the best of lives all the time. I don't know if Bobby Petrino has a whole lot of best friends in his life. It's kind of just who does he hate the most. It worked down. So if he didn't tell in greener boys, then you know, that's that's all the better. But who knows? Maybe they'll have some good moments in this one. Cal and Auburn, Auburn's a 13 point favorite. How about that? Auburn, nearly a two touchdown favorite at home. The overunder I have is nine Peyton Thorne past completions. That sounds low because it is. And it's what he had in this game last year. Yeah. Hugh Freeze's least favorite game of the year wasn't even getting kicked in the teeth by New Mexico State at home. It was traveling all the way to Berkeley to win a football game. Like if he if you gave him truth here, he would say that. I know he would say that. Well, Virginia Tech also does that feeling now too. So at least he has an ally that they also just got. Very true. Very true. Yeah. But he was on the winning end of that game as was Peyton Thorne, who last year had four games with nine completions or less, which is stunning for starting quarterback in the year of our Lord 2023, it was the other three games that that happened. They were losses. They weren't particularly good. This game was won in Berkeley because of the play of Eugene Asante. It was an all-American type performance from him that Cal offense pretty much lost its identity once Jay not went down in the second half of this game. Speaking of Jay not a guy that we knew was back this season and we didn't forget that in the middle of the offseason when we were randomly talking about like better running backs and like some of the best running backs in college football. He is banged up for this one dealing with an ankle injury that he suffered in the opener, and is expected to be able to play. He's cows only hope he is, but I think it's really telling that Auburn's a two touchdown favorite in this one. Cal couldn't block UC Davis. All right. Well, Jay not great player. Fourteen carries did not have a run longer than seven yards against an FCS team. You can tell me you're keeping it basic. It's very vanilla packages, whatever. I don't think that's particularly good. I think that this Auburn experience in the middle of the defense is going to be a key factor in being able to shut down this cow offense. I also really like the possibility of Thorne looking a lot different than he did in this game last year and I don't necessarily think that it ends up being a game in which the Auburn receivers, the new Auburn receivers I should say, have a combined six touchdown catches like they did in the opener. That would be insane if they repeated that type of performance. They'll hear a lot from them and it's going to be very evident. If you didn't necessarily want to believe that this was going to be a different Auburn passing game because it happened against FCS competition, totally get it. Watch him in this game and watch him against a defensive mind and Justin Wilcox who is respected in this sport. I think that Auburn wins this game going away. I think this is a blowout. I think it's 35 to seven Tigers roll. Yeah. I think that so with Thorne, I feel like we've all been waiting for this kind of like breakout party game. I don't personally think it's happened yet and it's kind of crazy that it hasn't just because of how good an offensive mind he freezes. I just, I mean beating up on Alabama and I'm just not going to do it for me. But I think that cow could be that exact thing. Talking about being a Jordan hair, that I don't feel it always matters. I exactly see your point. That game is going to happen eventually. I think it just has to for recruiting basically, you know, because it's fine to say we trusted a guy. He broke out. And then even if he struggled later on, go to a different guy, I figured something out, but you have to show the proof of concept of what made you stick with this guy for as long as you did. It's better to have a good game and then bench a guy two games later, a la Caje Costello, than, you know, oh, well, we're just going to keep trying, keep trying because that means you never figured it out and you were wrong and you don't want to sell that to recruits. And so I think at this point, they're going to have to do everything they can to really just, you know, hang it on cow New Mexico state. And then if you start to struggle, talking about maybe you're on the Oklahoma game or the Georgia game, then you got that bi-week and you can maybe even look at it and I'm maybe even saying that's a possibility. I'm not saying like, let's bench paint and thorn. I'm just saying that in the progress of like how as you see quarterbacks go, we are in purgatory here on like, garden tonneau levels almost where it's like, what's going on? Like, who is this guy? What is he good at? He's going to get in these next couple of games and that's going to set the ceiling. And then that's what we're going to always be going back to remember the X game, like this game here, the Cal game. So yeah, I think Auburn is going to come out and probably cover that look really confident, you know, as they did in week one and hopefully probably beat New Mexico and then the follow week. And then they're going to be like, it's going, we're going to be singing Hugh Freeze's praises going into the Razorback's game, Arkansas game September 21st. South Carolina is a 10 point underdog at Kentucky, Kentucky 10 point favorite in this one. The over under I have will is two Holy crap moments from Dylan Stewart as disappointing as South Carolina looked on the offensive side of the ball and the season opener. Dylan Stewart was equally jaw dropping, I think rushing off the edge for the game Cox. If you haven't seen these clips, what he did against old Dominion, you need to go on social media and watch it because watching this, it almost doesn't do it justice when you're watching it in real time to see the bend and see just how freakish the 18 year old already looks, the former five star recruit, he did this thing will, and I don't know if you if you saw this, our friend of the program, Mike Renner tweeted out this, this like 20 second clip. And this is the first thing, but I was watching this as it was happening. And my eyes were like, did I witness this because it was so weird. So he has this don't sort of had this rush against old Dominion, where he's coming off of, I guess, the the left sides like right at like the quarterback's face. And he is at the quarterback so quickly with this bend that he and the quarterback both don't know what to do. They're like staring at each other for a split second. I've never seen that before. And it was like, what just happened? Did we both just black out and now we're just here? Did we travel through time and now we're just here in this moment? And they were it was it's stunning to see like it's it's weird to see how unaware the quarterback was and almost how unaware Dylan Stewart was that that move was so effective to get to the quarterback. But it was it was wild didn't end up being a sack, but ended up being I think it's credit for pressure, whatever it was, he ends up forcing the fumble late in that game pretty much by just pushing the old Dominion quarterback because he tried to step up and run for it. And he didn't see him again somehow. Take PFF grades for what they are. Stewart had the highest single game grade for any power five edge rusher since 2020 insane. Absolutely insane. Again, go watch this clip of this guy as an 18 year old, what he did in his debut, very, very special things that if we saw this against air, we would be like, whoa, that guy is is awesome. So the question is first SEC game, does that translate? Do we see this against Kentucky's offensive line and against Brock Vandegrift? Pretty important game for former Tennessee and Florida transfer Gerald Lindsay who I would guess they're going to try and put Stewart on him a bunch and not as much on Cox. I would think that that's going to be more so the game plan, but it's also a pretty important game for Brock Vandegrift. SEC debut, of course, are we going to see him sped up with that decision making process or is that mobility that we've been talking about really for the last four years, dating back to when he was a five star group. Are we going to see that pay dividends in a game like this? I don't know. I don't necessarily think that it's a blistering offensive day for Kentucky where they just light it up. But I do think that the biggest mismatch of this game is going to be Kentucky's defense against Lenore Sellers. I mean, how could that not be? On the road, first career start for your boy. The rec specs man himself was not looking particularly confident in that opener. Those South Carolina receivers weren't looking good. As I mentioned on the pod Sunday, I thought that was the most concerning SEC unit of the opening weekend. Maybe it's a little bit of extra prep for stoops knowing that the South Carolina game is week two, and I'm not saying he didn't spend all of his time on Southern Miss, but clearly they were at a significant advantage in that one. Maybe that hatred that Mark Stoops very clearly has for South Carolina. Maybe you see that kind of play out. If you ever did the sunglasses, the last time that he was in Lexington, don't know that he'll be doing that again. I think it's pretty interesting to see that line of double digits though. Kentucky's a 10 point favorite against a team that it lost to each of the last two years. This game always feels close though. It always feels close. Decided by 10 or less each of the last three seasons, I'm going to take Kentucky to win South Carolina cover. So I'll go Kentucky 21 to 14, two with a five touchdown scored in this game, non offensive touchdowns, and that's combined for both teams. Expect that to be something that we see play out in this one. How do you see this playing out? Yeah. So we've been talking for a while about Kentucky's offense. And I just think Dow logins, isn't it? Like I just have not. You mean South Carolina's offense? Yes. Sorry. Kentucky's offense. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, sorry. South Carolina. There we go. So anyway, we've been talking about that college offense for a minute. I just think Dow logins, isn't it? And a lot of my reason for that was if you look at this team last year, yeah, the offensive line wasn't that good, obviously. But at the same time, there was a pretty good amount of talent on the offensive side of the ball. Yeah. You know, Juice Wells got hurt. We get it. You know what he did, Spencer Radler, who has looked nothing short of an awesome outside of that system. And I've granted there was a good in the system last year, though. Like he looked good within the development process, not so much the schematic elements of it. But that's kind of it though, right? He was the adult in the room, right? And now you're going from him to a quarterback who has not played before to your point and sellers. And in my mind, I'm like, well, okay, if you have a guy, you can kind of get it himself. He can exist outside of this offensive up to where you won't have to really run the plays called kind of like Millro did. So I think this is going to be rough as far as the offensive side for South Carolina. Because if you look at the leadership last year on the offensive side of the ball, none of those guys were there, right? And there were guys who were really bought into this program who were all bowling the same way. And I think that, you know, that's an element that I may have even underrated when it comes to my projection of this team, my happiness of sellers is that sellers doesn't need to just be a good starting quarterback. He needs to be the adult in the room in this offense in the way that Spencer Adler was to make this offense serviceable. And that's kind of what I've thought forever to your point about the receivers. I mean, yeah, we could go, you know, blame all kinds of stuff. But at the end of the day, if something is always someone's fault, it feels like it just becomes a coach's fault at a point where the O lines bad, the receivers are bad. Dal Luggins is a background for tight ends. Are there tight ends? Awesome. Josh Simon had a big, had a couple of nice moments in that game. So far, are you talking like the whole beamer era? Because I've said right now, like, do you trust their tight ends right now? I would trust them more than the receivers right now because the receivers didn't spend spring ball with them. The Nick Arbor thing, that opener with zero touches for him wasn't particularly inspiring. Looks like somebody that's still obviously figuring out the position. Yeah, I trust their tight ends more than the receivers. But see, that's, that's what I'm saying right, right there. Getting Nick Arbor, no touches has nothing to do with his progression as a football player. Harold Perkins was out here just being Bobby Boucher as a freshman. Why do we need Nick Arbor to learn how to play football for him to get on the field on this team? The issue with this team is they have nobody to think we're going to, we're going to mold this kid into a nice young man until he gets his reps. Brother. He's on the field. He's on the field. He's not like the separation issues are, are becoming evident with him. The separate. Yes. Yes. Because if you play 10 yards off of a guy and you're just saying we, we're going to give you like, we'll give you everything underneath. He still has not mastered that. And I agree with you. He needs to get football. Like you just, you have to find a way. So if you're 10 yards off of a guy who's very fast, you just throw him a bubble screen. Like that's just, that's just not, that's what I'm saying. That's not a separation issue. That is, if you're giving a guy 10 yards, don't throw a deep to him. If all you know how to do is two things, then yeah, every position group looks like they're in disarray. But like, I just keep going back to this about South Carolina's offense where I'm like, I don't know, like, yeah, last year, like I said, what I realized, how much talent they had last year, I went, uh oh, because now I'm going, if you get like, look at the Luther burden thing where we were all like, oh my gosh, they got to get an offensive coordinator. Look at how they got him involved. And we said that that was kind of, you shouldn't be doing that. Right now, South Carolina needs to do that with Nick Harper because they're not even at the level that drink was at whenever he was hiring an offensive coordinator because they have a guy who is maybe the best athlete in college football. And I'm hearing they can't get him the ball because the DBs are playing off. Like that's the easiest coverage of the world to beat, just throw him the ball immediately. Yeah, I mean, like, no, I agree with you. Like, I think there are certain elements to that that are a bit beyond just as simple as he's fast. Get him the football. Otherwise, I've attracted our replay football. I do think that there are ways in which they can manufacture touches that they have not yet, that they need to, you simply will not have any offensive identity, anybody on that offense that scares you. South Carolina right now has nobody that scares them outside of Nick Harper's 100 meter dash. That's it. Well, this is not just a hundred meter judge. This guy's not trending hell out of it. He's not five, six. He's a tech. So like, that's the other part of it is he's not just a fast guy. You could play this guy running back if you wanted to, assuming you can get him to not fumble. You can play this guy tied in if you wanted to just get him in there somewhere. So like, that's my thing. If they had this great, like if they were Oklahoma or something and they had this great offense, I mean, with like Lincoln Riley, it's like, oh, we just can't find a place for this guy on the field. It's like, well, that makes sense. Teach him to be a great young man. He'll be a starter as a junior and he'll get drafted in the first round. Awesome. And now I'm kind of a place where it's like, well, bro, people are coming to South Carolina to get looks. Like at the end of the day, Radler came here because he knew that it would be okay. I can figure my stuff out here. I'm not going to be fighting a five star. This is going to be my situation. If you're going to be recruiting five stars, we're talking about this with Auburn to be fair. We're talking about this with Auburn with a great offensive line and we're saying he's got to get these receivers of all or nobody's going to come commit to you. If you found a way to land this Loch Ness monster and you cannot get him the ball at this stage when you've already proven nobody else can catch the ball, okay, he will drop the ball. And so everyone else. Yeah, it's a problem. Major problem. By the way, we got storms in the background. If you hear that, that's not sandstorm, that's actual storms outside of my window right now in beautiful Orlando. You're right. They have to. I think that's that knows that they have to. They're playing him. He's getting snaps. Last year, he was getting snaps. He talked about the the variation of touches for Nick Arbor. Everything was coming back to the football, everything because everybody and their mother when they see him knows if you could beat by Nick Harbor, just fires. If you could beat deep by that guy, fire yourself as an offensive coordinator, you did not do what you were supposed to do to be able to contain him. And so it's like he might as well have this massive target on himself whenever he steps on the field, which is, I'm not saying that that means that it defends South Carolina's inability to get him to football. It means for a guy figuring out the position, it is making it that much tougher when he did not have those spring reps because he's running track. And that's the problem. And being talked about that, they basically, I think we're without like their top three receivers in spring ball. And that's been a major issue with Lenore Sellers is like getting on the same page with these guys, they just don't have the reps that they should. And that is going to hold this team back. I don't know that it necessarily means that they're just going to have no success whatsoever in the passing game. Maybe they can have some in this matchup, but on the road, I don't really have a whole lot of confidence. I think this is going to have to be a big time one, two punch rocket sellers, Lenora Sellers game if they're going to have any sort of chance offensively. Yeah. I fully agree with you. That was my way to come around. Kentucky, as kind of tough as Kentucky has been to predict in some moments, if you look at their schedule, it feels like they're just giving Kentucky this Georgia game earlier and earlier in the year just to kind of like make them take their medicine like a cat. And now they got Georgia in week three. So like, Stupes, this is the warm up game for Georgia. So I'm like looking around and I'm like, well, if they struggle in this game, I mean, maybe he does want to struggle with purpose, Stupes is that kind of guy to get that young town out of him for the Georgia game, but no, I think at this point in his career, he's kind of over that. I think he's kind of over the gamesmanship. He wants to smack these guys and move on and be preparing for Georgia at halftime. And I think that if you're Kentucky and you can bring in the transfer quarterback, which you know, it's great. You could kind of say, okay, here we are, you know, we don't have to worry about breaking in a new guy in the same way. Now, granted, yeah, Ventergriff has not been a starter, but he has been around in those rooms. He's been around the SEC. He's been around the transfer quarterback, he's a little bit more of a known commodity, as far as you, we already kind of know where the strengths of weaknesses are. And so point being, you know, I think that the Kentucky team, like you don't want to play Kentucky when you're disorganized. I suppose you like that. You do not want to play Kentucky when you're disorganized. They will smell blood and just start throwing guys at you that came out of Wyoming or something and that you're like, what is this character? And so that's that's the key. So like, Seth, I always talk about their swamp lobsters on defense. They found that guy, which is a really big deal. That's awesome. You know, chaos, but at the same time, there's chaos on both sides of the ball and they're creating both of them. Don't sewer might need to have a 2022 Harold Perkins Arkansas day for South Carolina added to be able to pull this one out. All right. Well, Houston on the road, number 15, Oklahoma, Oklahoma is a 30 point favorite in this one. The over-under I have is one third down conversion for Oklahoma's first team offense. Just one. That's it. The first team offense had zero third down conversions in the opener. The first and only Oklahoma third down conversion, all game for those first teamers. That was on the well, actually that didn't come for Oklahoma as a whole. It was the final offensive play of the day. It was an eight yard touchdown run. That is a weird stat for the team that won 51 to three that they could not convert these third downs. It's not a good stat and it's definitely something that needs to get cleaned up before the meat of that Oklahoma schedule hits because if you don't have an identity on third down to be able to turn to against really good competition, you don't need me to tell you that. Venables actually looked like he sent out the first team offense for one extra series and what I was expecting to basically try and iron out some of those issues on third down, but instead the sooner's end up going three and out in that spot. I watched that whole game because I'm a sicko, so I'll provide a little bit of context on this. I'm not making excuses for it, but I do think context is important. Injury's played a pretty significant role, I thought, in that stat in particular because their most experienced offensive lineman Troy Everett was out. Venable said he's close to returning. Oklahoma starting center, Branson Hickman went down ten snaps into the game, not ideal for a quarterback in his second career start to suddenly have a new center, which we know centers are important with being able to call out blitzes, identify the mic, all those different things. Football was really the last year at Alabama. Very important underrated thing is simply snapping it successfully. Hickman's been practicing, he's apparently good to go for week two, so that's good news for Oklahoma. Oklahoma receiver Andrew Anthony, the guy who was leading the team in receiving before he went down last year, he was playing his first game back. He is still very much working his way back from injury. He only played eight snaps in this one. All being the drum team member Nick Anderson, not the Orlando Magic one, the one without the K in his name. He was banged up in camp, so he was held out of that opener as kind of a precaution. They need him for the long haul. And then Julia Faroogh, he breaks his foot in the opener and he's out for six to eight weeks. So a strength of this team, something I talked about a lot in the offseason is these Oklahoma pass catchers and how I feel like that's going to ease their transition into the SEC. That was a major issue in the opener. And it felt like the only guy that Jackson Arnold could really trust was Dion Burks. And Burks was awesome, looks as advertised, three touchdowns in that opener. That guy's going to make plays all over the place, but Oklahoma needs to stay healthy, period. Like they just have to stay healthy because otherwise I'm not sure that Jackson Arnold has a true deep threat in that passing game. And that offensive line that's been in question, they can't really afford to lack that continuity. They desperately need continuity with all those moving pieces. So having said that, Jackson Arnold goes on five bomb and he says Oklahoma was opening up the playbook against Houston. Ah, didn't have the full arsenal on there, you know, to be able to roll out there and some of those spots. So who knows? Maybe that's going to make a difference. By the way, Houston just got smoked by Barry Odom led UNLV smoked, okay, lost by three touchdowns. Not great. So if you're wondering why is Oklahoma 30 point favorite against the Houston team that's actually in the big 12 now, Willie Fritz, we all like Willie Fritz. That's why. That's it, because their turnover is very, very significant. I think Oklahoma pitches a shutout. I think Oklahoma wins this 35 to nothing. Some good vibes returned to that passing game and Oklahoma hits the over on one third down conversion. That's, I'm sorry, the brain gymnastics I just did with COVID were just so electric. I was like, Oh, Houston's bad. That's crazy. Cause I feel like they've gotten up and scared some teams. I was like, yeah, last year they like really hung in there with Texas. And I was like, actually, I'd like their head coaching higher. This is after you just told me that Barry Odom had just smooshed them and you're like, Oh, it's really. Did you hear that? That one. Did you hear that? You're actually in a school by right now. I am. That was horrifying. If you're on the YouTube audience and you just heard that, I, I like thought my house was about to just go without power. Basically. You're internet. That's crazy. How is the internet still on? That's unbelievable. Oh my God. Back to Barry Odom expert difficulty unlocks. So basically I was telling these guys, like, or as I was talking about in my, these guys are my internal voices. I was thinking to myself, okay, uh, you know, I really liked them. That's interesting. And then of course they just got smooshed because the stuff that you, we think will work for coaching hires, never works the way we think it will, because Houston has always been kind of like that team that's, Oh, they got, yeah, they got Holger's sin. They're kind of a tough out. They're kind of whatever. Not. So yeah, it's your point. Every season's kind of a vacuum. I love the, uh, we didn't open up the playbook quote. It's like the old, like, I'm going to run some stuff I'm less familiar with. It'll be more turnovers. So watch out. But at the same time, at the same time, this does not be about it. Apparently I was really excited to see this, but it was not keeping up with the Houston UNLV game. But apparently. Yeah. No, you weren't dialed into that one. If I know Barry Odom was in town, Rose and Vegas, I might have paid a visit to his office to see how he gets down. But outside of that now, can't say I was yeah, not, not great. Uh, very Houston, a team that could struggle very much with that 30 day window, uh, looks like it's going to be a rough early start for them. But Oklahoma's defense looked awesome in the opener and that's kind of the thing that's going to have to be really, really good for them to be able to kind of beat some of those better teams in the SEC with that schedule that is very well documented, how difficult it is. Houston will not look like one of those better teams. Okay. Oklahoma should win this one very, very convincing. All right. Mississippi States against Arizona State. Arizona State's a six and a half point favorite. The over under I have for this one is one, one picture of Blake Chapin in a baseball. Well, here's how I should phrase this. One picture of Blake Chapin playing baseball and football in an Arizona State uniform. Mm hmm. We follow that doing the Bo Jackson thing. That's it. That'll be the image. People forget he committed to ASU to be a two sport athlete, wanted to play baseball, wanted to play football, decommitted December before his signing day, just as a certain true freshman, Jane Daniels emerged at Arizona State. We got a holy cow. This storm is, you gotta start taking Garth pretty soon, man. Oh my God. Oh, I felt that one, my gosh. But yeah, Blake Chapin playing against the team that he was once committed to ultimately he ends up flipping a Baylor, by the way, in the recruiting process for those who have followed his career and no kind of the story. I actually think that's probably something that we need to. I don't want to say, I don't want to say we should rule it impossible, but I think it is so unbelievably unlikely to see these guys that play quarterback at the core four level also trying to play another sport. I don't know that you can do it anymore. I understand people are going to be like, Oh, like Kyla Murray, like he was able to do it. He was able to pull it off. Probably also helps that he's got Lincoln Riley in his ear and he's a former five star recruit who's insanely talented. But as for pretty much everybody else, like even John Rice Plumbly, John Rice Plumbly did it at a very high level for what he was trying to do. Did John Rice Plumbly have the baseball career that he thought he was going to? Probably not. Did he end up developing as a passer in the way that he probably hoped he would probably play for Gus. So his hopes shouldn't have been too high. That's just this is true, but it's managing expectations, brother. You thought you were going to turn into Cam Newton knowledge. You know why you won't. I will not. I will not tolerate any John Rice Plumbly slander on this show. I will not, even though I was the one that kind of threw that out there, but still, I just think it's really hard to do that. And I don't know. Maybe I don't want to say that we should just kind of laugh off kids attempting to do that because chase your dreams, do all that stuff. But at some point Blake shape and realize, I can't do that. Maybe he's going to be one of those guys that goes back and plays baseball like six years from now or four years from now or something like that, football doesn't being a bathroom. But yeah, the little wrinkle that you'll see probably early on in this game will be interesting a bit like, Oh, like shape and you were super athletic coming out of just a kid out of Shreveport as one does, you know, certain Jacob Hester was one to two sports star, I believe. Hester played another sport, I think, right? Maybe. I don't know. Oh, assessor about that. I will say, Hey, don't forget about the dreadlocks. I do. Ted Jones, LSU legend, two time national champion in football and baseball. So there's, there's the guy, right? It's different now, though, like there's just so, there's, there's so much that's expected. Like, I think it's the roster turnover with how quickly you have to like get, you have new receivers coming in and out and stuff like that. There's more turnover. No, yeah. Yeah. It's just tougher. And I mean, if you are like, because he played defense, that's the other thing. If you were like, I have to play defense, which is like, it's, it's not to say it's easier than playing quarterback, but it's just more athletically, like tuned where you either kind of got it or you don't, if you play as easy to be quarterback, by the way, that's just like, yeah, like, like, James is another good example of a guy. So we're, we're always going here as we said this during media days, which is, Hey, a little recruits. I don't know where you're listening to me. But if you're listening to this podcast, if a coach tells you that you were going to play both offense and defense, if a coach tells you that you were going to play two different sports to get you on campus, they're lying to you, brother, I'm just letting you know that right now, every single time we hear about a guy, you might get some carries of running back. Oh, I don't know. He used to play defense in high school. Oh, he's got a hell of an arm. He could play baseball. He could play on their baseball. He could play on their basketball team too. Outside of the guys that like ended up as NFL tight ends, like a Julius Peppers, that's not going to happen for you, brother. So if you're committing somewhere based on what the basketball team is going to do and you're a football recruit or the baseball team, don't do that. I'm just letting you know that right now, because the guys, if, unless you think you're a show. Hey, Otani, and you're one of the top two athletic people in the world, or Jack, uh, Jack, what's his name from Florida? If you can't do that, don't try to play two sports. Look, I'm just saying, you know, we caggly owners who you're going to go with. There we go. Um, and that's, I mean, two positions. So it's the show. Hey, Thame, not as much the two sport thing, but yeah, look, we're going to get to somebody in latter of the week. That is, uh, I guess showing that he can do multiple things in obviously historic ways. But I think for, for shaping really important game for what he's trying to do this year, and it's going to be a good indication of how he's going to handle SEC defenses. Big test for him, big test for this Mississippi State defense. As Bussura is Arizona State was last year, it's still one of the better offensive minds in the sport. And Kenny Dillingham, at least one of the more respected up and coming offensive minds, tons and tons of new pieces on that Mississippi State defense who are going to be tested. They're going to have some spots where they're just going to be put on islands. That's probably why they're a touchdown underdog in this game. In fact, Arizona State has never beat an SEC team ever. I don't know that they faced that many, but I saw the, the stat out there, like Kenny Dillingham was talking about that in his presser, like trying to get, you know, students to be able to show up to this one. It's going to be 10 30 start on the East coast. We got more, we got more thought and we got more lighting. Goodness gracious. Uh, other fun facts will, I had a one year stretch in middle school, where I was dead set out of attending Arizona State, not as a two sport athlete. Like, oh my God, you have immeasurable. Oh, I couldn't think of a place that is less Connor O'Gara than temperes or not. Uh, tempe, tempe, is that what it was? Tempe? Tempe? We're doing Arizona pronunciations with the COVID grade. Okay, my man. My man. You're right. You're right. I think eighth grade Connor or seventh grade Connor realized that because I very quickly was like, ah, you know what, Connor, this vacation that you went on in sixth grade was great. And you love Tempe. It was fun. It was beautiful. Cool region of the country. I don't think I would have bared particularly well. Our friend Matt Barry, he's been able to do just fine. Come go into Arizona State and everything worked that well for him. I think my path would have been a little bit different, but anyways, um, other last fun facts for you. This line opened, I think an Arizona State is a two and a half point favorite and it's ballooned to Arizona State minus six and a half. I'm, I'm going to do the dumb thing. Okay. I'm admitting this is dumb. So ears perk up. But blame me if you follow me and do that dumb thing with me, do the opposite of what I'm doing. Fade me hard right now. I'm going to say that shape and continues the deep ball prowess. He had two 50 yard completions in the opener, which match Mississippi States entire 2023 total. Pretty crazy to think about that. I'm going to pick Mississippi State to win outright. I think they go on the road. I think they have a little bit something in that passing game, little bit of juice for the Bulldogs on the road and it doesn't quite give us full Pac-12 after dark vibes. And this isn't Pac-12 because Arizona States and the big 12 now, but we get at least some of those and we trick ourselves into thinking, this is the only thing that we have now for Pac-12 after dark. This is fun. This is back and forth. These teams kind of make dumb plays and don't really make a whole lot of sense. They're both kind of figuring out who they are. And that's what we need to be able to see very, very late nights each and every Saturday night. You know, these are two football teams that have been kind of, you know, influx for the last couple of years. I wish we could have seen the versions of these teams that employed her med words and Mike Leach, just so I could see the pre-game press conferences and the quotes back and forth. They wouldn't have. But this is actually a closer second than I think people are realizing, you made a great point about Kenny Dillingham, great offensive mind. And we see the exact same thing on the other sideline with Jeff Levy, right? So these are two teams that kind of went for the established voice. Actually Mike Lee's tragically passed away in a different situation and just didn't work out for her med words. But these two teams have gone, they found similar path forward, which is we're going to take the young kind of, you know, butt off of this great coaching tree, be it Oregon, you know, Dillingham, he's had a longer history than that, Levy too, the link given thing, summarizing here, of course. And so this really could be, you know, a coming out party for one of these teams, not for the national stage, not, oh my God, everybody watch out for Mississippi State. But if these things work, if Arizona State's current version works, Mississippi State works. This could very easily be the game you look at and go, oh, wait, we can actually do this because both of these teams have a little bit of roster attrition, both of them are not known to be great defenses. So if you get one of these offenses humming in a way, the other one isn't quite, this game could be easily run away when. And I think that this is going to be super duper fascinating because to your point, you know, there's not a lot of history here, Arizona State, like you said, has never been an SEC team. Now, I would hope they are rushing to schedule Brian Kelly week one because that could be our point. But point B couldn't be UCLA until a couple years ago. Anyway, so let's coach up anyway. So point being, you know, both of these coaches are super duper smart coaches that just kind of happened to be in these places for lack of a better term, like no super strong ties. You know what I'm saying? Either way. So I think that it is very interesting to see kind of the story of this game. And you know what? I lied there. Can you tell him isn't a lumb of Arizona State? I definitely he was. He started there. Strong tie. So he's an alum. He's now coming back for the first time since 2014. So the point being, like, these are both young minds who are going to kind of shape these teams in their images. And this could be the beginning of some type of a DVD. Not saying it's going to be a championship, conference championship, anything like that. But respectable era of football that both of these pretty proud sandbases have craved. Yeah, I think it's this could be something. I think it's I don't know that it's so much the DVD. I don't think you make a full DVD for seasons like this, but it's the nobody believes in us hype video that gets the five minutes. These are like feature films. Now, what are we doing with these? Like get them condensed. They don't need to be five minutes. But it's an Arizona State team that was, I believe, picked to finish dead last in the big 12. And this to be state team that was picked to finish second to last in the big 12, you'll be playing this game at night against a core four opponent and telling yourself, see, this is why you should have believed in us. So it's big for the future hype videos. Exactly. And remember wins this game, like just count the amount of times you see a clip from this night in those, you know, future hype videos that come out on the road. Yeah, that's a that's that's a good point. Do people still make championship DVDs? Is that still a thing? I know they make coffee table books for things less than championships. So I feel like, you know, 10 wins with Mississippi State, nine wins, you probably get a coffee table book. I think that would be a good thing to look forward to be. I think video teams are having a great time. I actually didn't pick this game. I do think this is going to be how I don't know man. Like if there's a state to six that point favorite, it cruised week one. I actually think I'm going to take Arizona to barely your Arizona state to barely cover this. That makes me feel better that we hedged on this. That was that was smart. Good thinking on you. All right. Well, let's close with this one. Number 14, Tennessee eight point favorite against number 24 NC State. This game in Sharlow. The overunder I have is 240 Tennessee rushing yards. Why 240? That sounds random Connor. It's never random ever. Sometimes it's random, mostly never random NC State led up 120 rushing yards in the opener to Western Carolina. Not great. I doubled that because Tennessee is at least twice as good at running the football as an FCS team, I would think. Even one who was within three points of NC State in the middle of the fourth quarter. Not a great showing, not a great showing from the top 25 team in their first game without last year's butt kiss award winner, Peyton Wilson, who totally didn't rob Adrian Cooper of that award. But I digress. If I'm Josh Eiffel, I'm listening to all this talk about Nico for Heisman, Peter Burns saying it. He got boogers saying that he was the best quarterback of anybody in college football week one. A lot of love for our man, Nico Yamileo, okay. I'm listening to all that and I'm going, buddy, we're going to do what we do best. And that is run the football. We're going to put teams on their, on their heels. We're going to spread them out and we're going to run the football until they tap out. That's what we're going to do. We're going to get defensive linemen with hands on their hips. We're going to make them gassed and we're going to treat this like a track meet. That is what they will do. But a track meet with the ground and pound approach. That's been the Josh Eipelamo in a game like this. I think you have to be able to speed up what that's going to look like for an NC State defense that is just trying to show we're better than just losing somebody like Peyton Wilson. I think that's going to be an obvious game plan for Tennessee and I think it's going to be a successful one. Have Nico hit a few of those shot plays. But if he ends up throwing the ball less than 25 times, it's not going to surprise me. I think this is a huge, huge still in Samsung game, like real, real big. He's going to get going in the passing game too. He was awesome in the opener on the other side of the ball. You saw NC State in that season opener, Grace McCall, one of the most experienced quarterbacks in all of the college football. I feel like he's been playing college football since like the Bush administration. He was a coastal. He's been trying to escape coastal Carolina since like COVID. Poor guy man. It's like four times Sunbelt player of the year, Grace McCall. He has like a Harold and Kumar style movie series if I'm trying to escape from coastal Carolina and then just keep bringing him back. It's like, it's not that bad. It's fun here. Remember the mullets? We enjoyed this. We had some good times. But Grace McCall, I think you saw in that opener, he's still figuring out what this, what this is going to look like in this, in this system and transitioning to NC State. This, this, this speed that he's, I think he's been able to play out before. He's been really good as a decision maker. Like he's had no shortage of defensive ends that he has had to read playing the type of offense that they played at coastal. So I'm not necessarily saying that that's anything new to him or anything like that. I'm not sure there's a lot to read with James Pierce Jr. Besides, is that guy in my grill or is he not? More times than not. He's in your grill. He got me. He's just there. But he just, just react, just go, just go. So I, I wonder about that matchup and what that looks like for him as they're, they're facing a Tennessee team that I would imagine they're going to want to try and speed him up a bit. In the playoff era, well, here are NC State's wins against AP top 15 teams, AP top 15 at the time of the matchup, 2017 they beat number 14 or number 12 Florida State who, as we know, went on to crumble that year last year, the Jimbo Fisher and Tallahassee, not particularly good. 2021 beat number nine Clemson who was a nine in three team despite DJ Uyungalay being DJ Uyungalay. I am not picking NC State to win this game. Those are their only two wins against AP top 15 teams in the playoff era. That's not great. Ten year sample size. That's, that's enough to me. And NC State's built itself into a really solid program and one that has seemingly been like that fringe top 25 team kind of on a yearly basis, at least it's felt like that. I will predict however, NC State to cover because I think Kevin Concepcion, I think he kind of gets some, some of those chunk plays behind that Tennessee secondary that I have a lot of questions about. So I do think he has like a two or three touchdown game in which Tennessee is like still trying to struggle, still struggling to find those answers for him in the fourth quarter. But I'm going to go with Tennessee to win this one 34 to 28. So it's an NC State cover of that spread. This game is so, so, so fascinating. So it's being played not at NC State Stadium, but at the Carolina Panthers Stadium. Charlotte. What's up? I always say Charlotte instead of Charlotte because I think it just sounds better. Yeah, that's fair. That's probably how it was intended. Um, yeah. So like point being, um, that does matter in terms of, you know, you seeing a red crowd or you're seeing kind of an orange and red crowd. And that was a, you know, this game being in North Carolina would be kind of one of the bigger benefits for NC State because it feels like outside like, we, a lot of the Joe Milton hype was this guy can win pretty much any quarterback. He's one with an old Dominion quarterback, whatever he's one with anybody. That just happened to be the one quarterback he kind of couldn't figure out. Whatever. Emily, it feels like he's exactly the quarterback that Josh Hypo wants. And I feel like when you juxtapose that, um, with NC State, we're like, David Warren's a great coach. And he definitely like punches people in the face and that's how he wins. And like that punch you in the face style should be what takes apart a team like Tennessee also should have happened with Iowa, to be honest. I mean, I know Grayson McCall is a great college quarterback. I know he can make a lot of the throws and it was really confident brash. A lot of the things that we like about Texas, you could say the same thing there, but this is an NC State team that I just don't think offensively. They have that same innovation that Josh Hypo does. And I think that the defense and to be clear, their defense has been awesome, awesome, like that's been the staple of their last, um, their DC has been their six seasons. And like it's, they've been a pretty solid at least defense every year. And it's really, in the wins, the defense is really shown and I understand that. And I also understand that Josh Hypo has struggled when he gets off his play script, which welcome back to that bit because with a Amelie Ava, I think he's going to fix that. I think that the, the, uh, the scripted play Josh Hypo, like completely turning the dust with Joe Milton is not going to happen anymore because it didn't happen as much within an end hooker. We keyed on it before the, the great season, but when an end hooker grew up and was able to make plays with his legs, that's when it really started to equal out a little bit more. And I think that Amelie Ava in game one showed that he could do that, so that he could keep plays alive with his legs, do that type of stuff. So I think that, you know, this offense will be able to stay on the field because of that. And I think that because of their kind of boldness, I'm not as worried about them. And like it's kind of one of those things with Josh Hypo where it's like, if he can't win with Amelie Ava and kind of like this cast of guys with peers, I, I feel like we're starting to get toward a little bit of the ceiling where it's like, okay, cause that, that team to beat out of him was special, special, special. I'm not taking anything away from that. He assembled a lot of that team. It was pretty early in his, his coaching career, but for this, it's like, you know, we need to start seeing that. We need to start seeing them being a wagon coming to town, scaring people, not making it into like a tight, like a clench fest in the third and fourth quarters as the other team kind of figures out the offense. So I think this could be a coming up party for Amelie Ava on the national stage, not like the Mississippi State one, where this could be the beginning of some type of championship DVD or the, the Amelie Ava kind of legend in the SEC. I don't think that's a NC State has the talent to actually stop that from happening. We're going to see how it happens in the SEC, but, but I, I do find myself trusting Josh Hypo in these moments now too. And I think you've had a lot of time to game plan for this one as well, despite what coaches say. It wasn't just Chattanooga that you were prepping for. You've had plenty of time to be able to do your scouting on what the sensey state defense is going to throw at you. NC State seems confident that they're going to be able to handle the tempo. We'll see. We'll see what that looks like. Maybe they have moments where they do maybe, maybe Niko's going to have moments in which you kind of are reminded. Yes, this is still as promising as this looks, this is still going to be a guy in his third career start. And there could be a growing pain moment or two or where maybe telegraphs a pick or something like that or he tries to pick up extra yardage that's just not there. And he fumbles or stuff like that is still going to be a part of this. Okay. It can still be incredibly good and feel like it's special, even if those moments happen. That's just natural. That's, that's going to happen. But I do think that we're reminded Tennessee is a very clear offensive identity. And that is something that so many teams are striving to obtain. They can talk culture, they can talk, we're going to beat you in the trenches, we're going to do this, that and the other. Tennessee has something that it can truly fall back on and they know that the other team is going to have to adjust to what they are doing and not vice versa. In a game like this that I expect to be competitive is so beneficial and I think Tennessee truly leans on that more ways than one. And I think that ends up being the difference. This is these are the moments where as much as you appreciate having your superstar next paint man, Nico, Yamalayaba is you are so beautifully pronouncing. I just love it. Well, you're doing it with just, I love it. You're going to appreciate the fact that you have this ground game and that you can scheme that well with that type of tempo and have this entrenched of an identity. So I think Tennessee wins this football game and gets a little bit of that early season momentum going that I think they need they got to have that swagger going into this SEC schedule because it is a difficult one that they will face. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's to be about 10 point win for Tennessee. I'm going to say like high twenties to high thirties. That's called 2038. 2038. 3828. Yeah, there we go. All right, let's do some luck of the week want to know, baby want to know. Never a doubt. Thank you to Iowa for that 40 to nothing win. Brian Farron sitting at home probably not actually I think he was at the Maryland game because he is an offensive analyst Kirk Farron sitting at home. I believe watching on his TV like those my guys out there. What are they doing? I didn't tell him to score of dare they that's that's rude. First half beginning the day off in Maryland too. Did he was Oh, it didn't matter what was crushed. You got right, but do do we give Brian Farron's credit for any of those tests? No, it's what I'm saying. Yeah, he said yeah was it wasn't it wasn't on the clock for Saturday. The fact that I had to sweat out a 6 0 first half and had to tweet out an apology for my lock of the week. Look, it's week one. I'm not mid season form yet. I apologize way too early. I take that back should never have apologized. Iowa offense they didn't just give me three offensive touchdowns like I promised they gave me five. So we're feeling very, very good. Let's stay hot here Colorado plus seven and a half my lock of the week with the hook. I understand always makes a little bit nervous. This is more of a bet against Nebraska than it is a bet for Colorado. It is. I'll just be honest. Last five seasons Nebraska only has three home wins of at least two scores against power five competition. Let me repeat that because that's stunningly bad. Nebraska in the last five seasons only has three home wins of at least two scores against power five competition. Nebraska got 27 votes in the AP poll after beating you tap. Good God. You times eight and 16 over the last two years. Seven consecutive seasons without a bowl birth seven consecutive seasons without a win against AP top 25 team. I'm not saying Colorado's top 25 team. This is a bet against Nebraska not for Colorado. A lot of weaknesses, a lot of strengths that Colorado has by a lot I mean like two and you know who they are. Here's the thing that frustrates me. If I have to deal with another week of Dylan Royola Pat Mahomes comps, this is most annoying quarterback match up in the history of football. That's like a that far there's come on there's there's got to be there's stuff. There's guys who have like done stuff that that you're like I didn't say they were terrible people. I can call anybody Dave's wearing a watch on the sideline and say what time is it is annoying. I love it. Doesn't make you a bad person to knowing. All right. I'm going to throw it into consideration. You're right. I'm also going quarterback match that we've had in recent memory. I look I just can't do I can't do the Dylan Royola Pat Mahomes thing. Like Dylan Royola can get to a Super Bowl and I probably would still be like let's not compare him to Pat Mahomes. Let's not do that. But what are we doing here? Oh, they look alike. Did you know that they look alike and they kind of Pat Mahomes when Pat Mahomes tweeted like at Dylan Royola, I was like, Oh God, he just gave this thing another year another two years worth of legs that we don't need and it's just because it's an 18 year old kid. I don't need that for an 18 year old kid yet who has not done anything yet and I hope he has great success. I really do. But just very much annoying me. I love the move to cosplay as Pat Mahomes and then be like, why are you guys comparing me to Pat Mahomes? Very self to Luke McCown or something, man. That's all these these fake news media people. I never say that brother. You literally are you have a Taylor Swift tattoo. What are you talking about? Really? I'm just kidding. Okay. Okay. I was gonna say that's that's reaching a little bit. Yeah, as I mentioned with the Jackson Dart thing that I talked about with I had moments where I wondered if Jackson Dart was just doing a Mac corral imitation while trying to play quarterbacks. Just just be yourself. Just be yourself. I need to like him. Yeah. Come on, man. Just do your thing. Don't try to be Pat Mahomes. You're not Pat Mahomes. Okay. You're not because nobody is. But I'm gonna take Colorado to cover seven and a half and I don't feel great about it. But I don't also feel great about the idea of Nebraska beating somebody at home by double digit. So that's my thinking. Very basic. Yeah. I think I think that is a lot of frost numbers but at the same time I don't think they're quite there yet. But I am interested. They're like all frost numbers. Well, of course they are. Mark, me is interested. This is one of our longtime conversations where I was like, well, we'll see if a coach can fix this. If I'm gonna put the stake in that if rule can't do it, it might not be able to be done because he's feels like he's that's what they said about frost. Just not me, buddy. Not you, but they they own very much. For sure. All right. Colorado seven and a half. Let's kick it to Neil. Always enjoy catching up with him. He's extremely well connected at Florida. Great insights into a developing situation. Yeah, I think we can call what's going on a developing situation. So here's Neil. Now excited to be joined by a very special guest. It is our own Neil Blackman. Neil, golly, there's no world in which I pictured Saturday in the swamp playing out the way that it did. And I got to say, you probably have heard all about the Miami hype this off season. And even the biggest Miami believer probably didn't envision that exact scenario playing out. What was the initial reaction from everyone involved with seeing how unprepared Florida looked? Yeah, I think it was a combination of a fan base that I think despondent is probably the best word. I think it wasn't embarrassing. It was nauseating to a lot of people. It was something beyond embarrassing, just an absolutely nauseating performance. And honestly, to the people that cover Florida as a program daily, which myself now included in that group, I felt bad for the people that read me because you have to do your best and you know this super well, right? You do your best to filter out what coaches tell you and look at the reality that's on the ground. But the reality here was this Forteroster slightly better than Miami's in the 24/7 composite. Probably not as much star power going in. We thought that, right? But more depth. We were sold that this was the best team that Napier had, that he felt that it was definitely the best, that it was definitely the deepest, that they had certain position rooms that were really, really good, that they didn't feel like they ever had a position room other than running back. That was really, really good. He said, we have three or four groups, so it's, and a lot of us said that to our readers in our writing and podcasts and you're watching this and you're like, I feel horrible for what I've told these people. Because obviously none of this was true and it isn't just that it was the second straight opening week face plan. I think this one, there's just no shame, no matter how it happened, there was no shame in losing at Utah, a place where a lot of people lose to an established coach like Kyle would again, an established program. This was a chance to sort of host a mirror image program of yours, third year, not so great their first two years under a new coach, but uptick in talent, they felt good about the quarterback position floor, they felt good about the quarterback position and there were just so many similarities, both programs starved for winning again, both programs without a title in 15 plus years and I mean they just came in and just absolutely, you know when the game was over, like the second play of the game, Damian Martinez rushed up the middle and moved the pile seven yards and I looked at the journalist sitting next to me and just said, that's not good and Florida was not competitive from that play forward, they weren't competitive at any point in the game, Montrell Johnson goes 71 yards for a touchdown and Florida doesn't come back, the Florida got into that formation again by the time that they got into that formation and it was 31-10. What are you doing and you know, and look I think Billy is a high character guy, he's wonderful to talk to, he's a great person, I think he's the kind of guy who would coach high school football just because he likes working with young people, like if he weren't, you know, it's not a guy that was ever going to be in the NFL or anything like that, that's not his goal but you know when he sort of, he took accountability as I wrote at our site, but he also said like we've made progress and you kind of look around the room and you're like what progress, you know and if you think you've made progress then what kind of progress are you trying to make because, and that gets to what Florida's largest problem is, which is I don't know what they want to be, I don't know what they're good at and not only do I not know what they're really good at, I know Montrell Johnson's really good, I know except for this game, Graham Merx has been very good, like I know Shamar James is a good linebacker, but I don't know what Florida wants to be, I don't know what they want to be on defense when they run blitzes that look like they're coming from Jacksonville and they take about that law and develop, I don't know what they want to be on offense, so it's not just that they're stop proof of concept, it's that I don't even know what the concept they want to pursue is. You know, you heard Prince William Montmeal and talk about this when he gets told this and I've brought it up a million times and I'll probably have to bring it up a million times again especially if things don't change from Florida defensively with the fact that Prince William Montmeal and Florida's only all SEC defensive player the last three years is saying the things you've just said, that's a terrible sign for your defensive culture and I thought it was an awful move by Billy to go, you know what, I'm going to hire the guy that worked out at Louisiana, I'm going to ignore the fact that he's been fired by his last two jobs, that Dave Miranda and Hugh Free said, nope, you're not it, we need to move on, we need to push, we need to find somebody else to be better than you and to me like the defensive side of the ball is very well documented, it's almost like you can't even worry about that yet with all the problems that Florida has because obviously you need to be able to score points, you need to find that whatever your offensive identity is to have a chance in this league and they certainly don't have that but everybody's shifted to DJ Lagway and shifting to a guy that we expected to see this season, we talked about this but not under these circumstances, what do you expect from Saturday, and we're recording this Wednesday afternoon, so we don't know officially if Graham Mertz is going to be playing or not, but playing or not, I would think Billy's going to have some sort of a plan for Lagway and is there a possibility that he could actually turn to Lagway even if Mertz is maybe, you know, close to getting back? Well, I think that it will be DJ Saturday, even if Graham is close, now the reasons for that might not please Florida fans, it would just be we don't need to run Graham Mertz out there because we need him for Texas A&M and I think a lot of Florida fans respect Graham, he's a great guy, if you met him at us, he'd be curious, you know what a nice kitty is. Very nice, yeah. And I mean objectively had a terrific season last year, but I think Florida needs some joy, they need a spark, and DJ Lagway gives them a little something different, also the right side of the, I've never seen an offensive tackle grade out at 0.0 in past blocking, so that was new to me, that was Kamweight's PFF grade at right tackle, was 0.0, I've never seen that. So clearly one side of this offensive line is just not competitive against quality opponents, Graham Mertz is not the type of runner to DJ this, DJ certainly not, you know, a guy who was touted as someone who's gonna run for a thousand yards a season or anything, but like Cam Ward, certainly a guy who can make plays and it's thin plays with his legs, he even saw it on his touchdown drive against Miami, where he has a 16 yard run where he was flushed and it sets up first and goal converts on a third and long, so I think, I think just the combination of needing something to give the fan base just one fun Saturday afternoon, because there's a decent chance they're underdogs in their final 10 games, which is an incredible thing to say. But, you know, and then, yeah, I mean, hopefully, then you get enough from him moving forward where he's a part of whatever Florida's plan is, because, because maybe you're just gonna go back to Graham Mertz, and people might not like want to hear that, but that's what's gonna happen. I would be stunned if you just set up, turning it over to DJ. I was also, but I was also stunned that they didn't have a package for lackwood, and what was weird about that was, that was something consistently around the program that we were told was gonna happen. Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna have something to integrate him, and then probably 10 days, I'm trying to remember if it was 10 or 11, but either way, it was a week and a half, they had just started Miami Game Prep, and we hear, well, we're really comfortable with Graham Mertz at number one, and we're gonna develop DJ, but he's the backup, and they stop talking about the package, and it was like, oh, no, you know, what are they doing here? So hopefully, Lagway is, is incorporated into, to what they, what they do moving forward, they're gonna need him, because that, the right side of that offensive line is, is disaster. Tyler Barron was just feasting. Yeah, I mean, a guy they blocked comfortably a season ago. Yeah, that's what they had. And then, again, that gets back to this whole bill of goods. Oh, we feel confident we're deeper up front. Well, Florida rotated nine guys, and you talked offensive line coaches, and they'll say it's good to have depth. It's not good to play nine players, right? Like you play your best five, you want to have depth. But yeah, Florida's rotations were weird. They go and get Brendan Crenshaw Dixon, they feel like that's, you know, a nice pickup in the portal. He was terrible. Everybody saw the Damian George clip on the interception return, where he just didn't even appear interested in pursuing the play. And like I said, they start came way to transfer from Louisiana, who's coming off in Achilles heel tear. He grades out at zero zero. I mean, none of this is good. And that that right side is just so poor. You know, I think a lot of people lack context when they look back on why a coach was fired, or, you know, the clip that Matt Barry, or not the clip, but the tweet that he had the other day, and I like Matt, I mentioned this on the recap on the other day, where he's talking about like, you know, all that Mullen did and Mullen gets, gets fired and look at what's happening right now at Florida. It's like, and I, and I know that that those guys are, they're tight and it's very easy to go one plus one equals four and forget about all of the context that went into it with Mullen. And, and that, that to me is like the part that kind of makes me sick is like people that, that do that and just try and connect these dots and say, see, Florida fans were ridiculous. It's like, all right, well, you weren't protesting when Mullen was fired. Just forgot about like everything that was going on. Oh, we got, we got a pack, we're good, we're powered through. As, as Billy says, you got to block out the noise. Sorry. Best job of that. No, you're good. You're good, man. So that's, that's, I think, important because the context of this game is significant for those people that make those decisions. And they looked out at their stadium and saw Miami taking over and saw fans emptying out in the middle of their season opener with eight months of buildup for that game. Does that type of game prompt decision makers to huddle up and say, guys, what do we got to do? Is there are those conversations? Do you think happening at this point? They are, they are happening. They've happened Sunday, they happened yesterday. And I know that because I've talked to the people, but at least at least three of the people in those conversations. So they are happening. I don't know, Matt, I like his work. I mean, I think Matt's great. I saw Dan's retweet. And like, I think the best thing for Florida to do is just to focus on, like, especially Florida fans, that they want to defend the Mullen decision. And I think it's easily defensible, the dismissal of Mullen. You know, all you really have to do is, is look at the roster that Delaney appeared inherited at Florida and begin to understand it. So my point is the best thing for Florida to do is to focus on now and not worry about, you know, what 10 Mullen is retweeting. You know, so I think that's what these people are doing in those conversations. And they are I think that they're trying to figure out, hey, Billy Napier, and let's be clear about something that that I think is important and not yet really perceived by the outside. Though maybe it should be, Napier's gotten everything that he wanted from the administration at Florida. Everything. Florida has maybe the nicest new football facility in the SEC, if not the country. It is just as nice as Clemson's, Lazy River and all. It is astonishingly good. Florida has new weight room. I mean, from everything, they have a new nutritional staff. I liked your joke about how I guess the new sports signs of nutrition is not not paying off. But all that stuff that they were way behind in. They went from 14th and recruiting budget to 2nd. You know, this is not, this is not an infrastructure issue in Florida any longer. And, and, and let's point out, there's that NIL perception and the Jaden Rashad of stuff doesn't help, of course, but the reality is Florida Victoria's just signed the most NIL deals of any collective in the country last year for its athletes. So they have rebuilt their collective to where it is an asset, not a liability or a problem. And whether you, you know, smart person that knows a little more might say, well, that's for other sports and also it is. But the point is that collective is humming. And they're humming with corporate money behind them, which is really the future of NIL. If you talk to NIL lawyers, I am one. That's, if the model isn't sustainable with just big boosters, you have to have corporate money. So Florida's got all of that in place. And I think these people are meeting and saying, look, we're going to need to return our, our investment. And the, the idea at Florida this year was always that if we go seven and five or we go six and six, then that actually might be progress given this schedule. But we need to see, we need to see that progress and we probably need to see something from DJ Lagway to where the fan see that progress and they're still bought in. You cannot go out against your archrival who, like I said, not archrival, but a bitter rival who's similarly situated to you like Miami is and, and have that happen. So the conversations now are, all right, we have two games coming up at home against Texas A&M in Kentucky. Let's see what happens in those games. And, you know, if, if those games don't go our direction, you know, it's never too early to get your hat in coaching circle ring. So I would say Napiers, obviously his seat is flaming. And I think I'm sure Scott Strickland's name comes up in, in those conversations. No one I've spoken to directly has said anything about Scott in terms of his future. But, you know, history says you don't get to hire three football coaches as an athletic director. That's exactly right. And there is, I don't know how this started, but somehow one of the things is, well, Florida is an intern president and they can't fire the athletic record. That's not true. The board of governors entrust the intern president with full authority to do all that. So if Florida needs to make changes, I would expect Napier and Strickland to be on the chopping block. And Scott, with Scott, the shame in many ways, because he's a wonderful at fundraising. He's a great person. And he's gotten quite a few hires correct. And, and it's said to Kevin O'Sullivan, the best baseball coach in the country. So, you know, some of that is a shame. But that's just the way that these people think. Now I'll say this, a couple of these guys, if Florida goes and upsets Tennessee and Knoxville, you know, these guys love the university. They're fans too. So all of a sudden they'll be like, I told you that Napier was fine. I told you things were, but we all saw what we saw Saturday. That's the tough part is that those optics were unbelievably bad. There's no spin zone whatsoever. And I target that Kentucky game. If they lose that Kentucky game, I think that's curtains. I think that's curtains on the Napier era. That would be the biggest gut punch ever to not be able to break, to not beat Kentucky once for Billy, two of those games at home. I would view that as the target day. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, the A&M game, I don't think will break people in the way the Kentucky, the Kentucky one will, but if they lost to A&M in Kentucky at home, it's worth noting that that would make Napier five and seven in power conference games in the swamp. See, Spurrier lost five games in the swamp ever. Yeah. So when I think I wrote last week, Florida was almost invincible in that building for 12 years because they were almost invincible in that building. Yeah, I mean, you lose seven home games in a three year period. That's one more than Ron Zuck lost and two more than Ron Zuck lost in a three year period. Zuck is kind of considered the bottom of the barrel in terms of all the coaches that have come since Spurrier and Napier obviously would then move to some, assuming he went Saturday would be 12 and 17 or 12 and 18, depending on what happens against Miss State and Starkville. It's tough to survive 12 and 18 at anywhere, but especially Florida. I think it's going to be fascinating to watch these next few weeks because there will be a lot of tense moments that await. And because these conversations are happening, I feel okay to be able to ask this question. And I've already done this mentally. After a while, I did that probably, gosh, when did I do this? Somewhere in between like the third or fourth Cam War touchdown, the probably third Cam War touchdown? I was like, buddy, we need, we need a list of candidates that I came up with. So let me, let me throw these at you, just kind of see your, your reaction, which one of these is, is most intriguing for you. I think Glenn Schumann, as much as Florida fans don't want to admit going into the Kirby tree would be like kind of a tale between the likes moment would be fascinating. I think you watch what Danton Lane did for USC's defense against LSU, you're seeing that already play against SEC competition, where that's an overnight thing that it could be with somebody that likes Schumann is 34 years old is very much an up-and-comer in this business. Alex Golsch is going to be a guy that's going to surface a lot with experience in the state of Florida already built up a group of five program and in USF TBD and kind of how this year plays out for him. But you could go through and have the obvious names of a Lane Kiffin, of course, like that, that, that is always going to surface and that's always going to be popular, but which, which one of those or maybe, maybe there's one off the board that, that kind of intrigues you. Yeah, so Alex is one that intrigues me because I think that's a hard job. And I don't think we typically think of Florida jobs, jobs in the state of Florida is being hard. But I think that one's pretty tough just because it's not like Miami where there's the rich story to history. So they're still trying to figure out, you know, they're, I guess they're getting, they're going to have a stadium, which is great, but, you know, recruiting to come play in Raven chains where we share revenue and nobody's there. All of that is our facilities are way behind. I just think it's a very difficult place and been super impressed with what they've done. Everybody knows how they played against Alabama last year, for example, the level of preparedness when you watch South Florida play is, is impressive to me. And I think, you know, obviously anything would be an upgrade in Florida after what we saw last Saturday in terms of, of preparedness. I, I will say this and, and I am of liberty to say that people that I've had these conversations with, of course, they've thought about, oh, I wonder, wonder if this person would be interested. And they, they did seem universally to suggest that, that taking a swing at a big name and breaking away from a little bit of the University of Florida's mold, which is always, let's go find a young up and comer. We hit on Urban Meyer, we hit on Billy Donovan, we hit on Kevin O'Sullivan. They like to do that. They haven't traditionally gone for, you know, a splash higher. But I think Florida would make a run at Lane Kiffin. I do. I think Lane, the only job he wants more than the Florida job, I think, is the Alabama job. So I think Lane would listen. Florida would win a bidding war with Ole Miss. There's my first piss off the listeners to the podcast, Jake, but it's just the reality, Florida has more money. And it's a better job. So they would win that contest if that's who they wanted to hire. The drawbacks to Lane are obvious. He has one championship, one conference title, and what, 15 years of coaching now, which he wanted FAU. So, you know, how great is Lane? What would Lane, would Lane be a more user-friendly version of Dan Mullen perhaps? There's a take. Would he be a more, you know, I saw some Florida fans enjoying him trolling Florida State this week. And I thought, yeah, how much will they love that when he's 10 and 2 every year and loses in the first round of the playoff? Florida, some people might be thrilled. But, you know, is there a championship ceiling with Kiffin? That's an interesting discussion, I think. You know, I think Florida would probably call Dan Lanning and lose. There's a battle they would not win. But I do think that would be one. And then the other name I've mentioned, you didn't mention is, is Jed Fish, who, it's hard to win 10 games at Arizona. I know Jacksonville Jaguars fans that are also Gators fans would probably have some PTSD. But there's Pete Carroll's the best example of a failed NFL experience, maybe Nick Saban, depending on if you think he failed. But Jed Fish certainly wasn't a great offensive coordinator in the NFL. But one 10 games at Arizona, which is a very hard thing to do. They did that in a good Pac-12, by the way, last year. When he took that job, they were coming off a two and 10 year and he played for Spurrier. So he's an alum with the university with ties to Florida. I think certainly would be somebody that they would contact and at least vet. What about Lance Leipold or the wild card that I'm going to throw in there until I hear someone say something negative about him at Florida, but Brian Johnson, the former OC under Mullen, who, look, I don't think that would be the first choice or anything like that. So it would be a very interesting wild card if he has that type of year at all of a sudden warrant, that scotch. I don't know how tight his people are behind closed doors, but it's someone that had a really high approval rating. Yeah, no, his approval rating was obviously extremely high. And even though, I mean, Jalen Hertz likes him, despite everything that happened, there, I mean, Jalen would never say a bad thing about Brian Johnson. I think he'd be somebody they'd consider. I don't think, you know, I haven't heard Lance Leipold. I, you know, I don't know. I honestly couldn't say on that front, but I think, you know, you've mentioned a couple of the names. I think dipping into the Kirby tree is an interesting thought process. I think Florida's frightened. I think what would frighten Florida there is that they've gone saving tree three times and failed all three times. And so I think the closest that they came to success was myer tree. And so maybe Brian Johnson kind of checks that box. Another name is Urban Meyer, which I think Dale. What are we doing? Come on. Another name is Urban Meyer. Oh, that is a name. It is it is funny to hear like all the people that the the conspiracy theories there run deep with him just sitting in his house in Sarasota and doing every Florida talk show that he can possibly find his way on to. But the reason for that is that he wants on the ring of honor very bad. Yeah. Yeah. It's not because he wants to be the head coach again. Let's get sprayer calm place for him. How about that? Is that a good combination? Yeah, the season for your intern coach is is my favorite one. Yeah, let's oh, you know what? I think SIBO has got like a COVID year that he could use or something like that. Could we get SIBO back play quarterback? Is that the trio? Let's do it. Neil, great conversation. Like I tell people all the time, Neil is very, very well connected at Florida. So trust me, like the very plugged in, you should follow all of his work. That's great stuff for us started on south.com coming to the ACC as well as you wrap the UNC sweatshirt, the Air Jordan sweatshirt. I love it. Neil, great stuff, man. We'll talk again real soon. Thanks, Connor. Appreciate you. All right. Well, let's send everybody off into week two with some out of the week. I'll start us off here. I realize this happened about a week ago. It's kind of more of like an early week one thing. But Travis, Hunter, man, that's look, I don't care if you dislike Dion, if you dislike Shadoor, really, if you dislike everything about Colorado, I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong or that you can't have that opinion, whatever. But if you can't appreciate Travis, Hunter, I think that means you can't appreciate football because what this guy is doing is so ridiculous. And I know we talked about it when we did our draft of non Heisman quarterbacks, yeah, non quarterback Heisman, that's what it means to say. But the snap count, let me read this first. This man played 129 snaps this season opener outside wide receiver, 52 snaps, wide cornerback, 49 snaps, slot cornerback, 11 snaps, box 11 snaps, slot wide receiver, five snaps, free safety, one snap. That alone, if you just told me a guy was out there, and he had two catches and a past deflection or something like that as a corner, if you just told me that he did that and made a tackle or two in space, I would probably still have him as last week. But the fact that this guy is out here doing this at such a high level, and does it look like he's breaking a sweat, like he gets to the SVP interview, I watched that afterwards. And he doesn't look like he's just played an entire football game looks like he just went through a warm up. You're like, you're not breathing heavy, you're not just sitting there getting hooked up to IVs. How are we need to study him? We need to study Travis Hunter to figure out how this human being exists because it is so remarkable, his conditioning. And I don't know what's what's going to happen in the NFL or all these other things. But just for what he's doing at the college level, this the stat is incredible from the ringer's Austin Gail. Travis Hunter has now played 40 plus snaps on both sides of the ball seven times. No other player at the college level has done that even once in the last decade. And this man's done it seven times. It's incredible. The catch that he made in the end zone where he looked like he was falling down, he had to go kind of behind the DB who's hand fighting with him. I mean, seven catches 132 yards, three touchdowns in an opener. I hope we get a full season of Travis Hunter healthy. It's kind of weird to think we've only had nine games of him at the FBS level. It feels like more, but because he got hurt last year, we just haven't had that much Travis Hunter. He's he's unbelievable. And look, he could probably win this award every single week, but he was a blast to be able to watch. I was like trying to watch as much of that game as possible. And like every two seconds, he would just do something and football unicorn in every way. Yeah, it's it's absolutely not. I mean, to the point I was talking about playing two sports, I think this is a little bit different. Go to the top of Steve at same or same sport. But like it's yeah, it's never been done before to your point. And like we talked about kind of that Heisman preview, he has no reason to do this. Like he just wants the team to win. He loves playing football. So that's like the apex football guy. I mean, I'm not kidding when I say this. We see that the difference in talent between North Dakota State and Colorado is literally just Travis Hunter. And the plays he was able to make rather than win that game. And if he couldn't make those plays, they lose that game. It's very simple because he was playing the entire time. Do you see the last play? They couldn't even stop the Hail Mary. And they could North Dakota State completes this Hail Mary and they're still like 10 yards short of the goal line. And Travis Hunter is so pissed. And he's like, just knock it down. Just not. Travis Hunter is like having to coach his teammates on basic football 101 things while he's on the last play of 100. That's his 129th snap. And he's having to coach up the team on the field. Get Travis Hunter some help, man. This guy deserves it. Yeah. 100%. Hey, Dalagan's couldn't even get him involved. So there you go. Oh, God, there, there we go. Dalagan's, I will not defend Dalagan as a skimmer. I would have felt I will defend him as a quarterback developer, not as a skimmer. Okay, we'll take that. But yeah, that's super duper cool. I cannot wait to watch Travis Hunter for the rest of the year. I think that alone is going to make this game. But if you just watch the Travis Hunter show on defense, that's going to be the best entertainment because don't watch any other part of the defense. I'll do my kind of quickly. This one. I mean, when it was the last time we were this excited about a vanity player, maybe you could argue great Davis, but the way the Diego Pavia burst onto the scene for SEC fans who were not, you know, New Mexico state stands and the way you had that dialed in. I mean, these guys we were making jokes about and shout out to John, who inexplicably picked Vandy in this game when we were in Vegas. And it was just writing that out. It was so fun. Did you go Vandy Moneyline or Vandy spread with like the 13, whatever. I was like, are you serious? He's like, yeah, dude. I don't know. They're an SEC team. I was like, buddy, maybe they are today. I got heard same thing. It was like plus four or 50 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I mean, hey, good for them. And also it wasn't a fake win. Like it wasn't that V.T. came out kind of like sluggish or whatever. Like they came back and Vandy beat them at their kind of their comeback, like while they were hot too. So that's really impressive. Yeah. I think Diego Pavia is the exact kind of crazy that I respect and the kind of crazy that I actually think that I am, which is a guy that would pretty much bite his ankle off to to win. And he's just got that literal dog in him. And I, you know, it's it's they kind of go into this and we just like shut down forecast about getting like steal their reporting or whatever. His family is super interesting. He's just a very interesting guy. And so yeah, I think that the this definitely changes the trajectory of the Vanderbilt football team because this is a team that we're looking at. I mean, they're already not one again, you know what I'm saying? Like that's on the table for them. So looking at last year and how was such a big step back from, you know, the year they beat Florida, neither will the two as easy ones. And it's like, where are they going to go from here? We said this feels like such an unwinnable job. Well, you need a guy who's just that level of insane. He reminds me of Peyton a little bit too, where it's like, no one's ever going to tell you you can't win this game. They're not you're not going to listen to them. The way that he puts his body online, the way that he has these like crazy option concepts, who's extending these handoffs, I think it's so sick. I mean, it just makes Vandy into a fun team to watch this pride in the logo, which has been, gosh, since I mean, at least at least the Mason era. We're gonna try and get him on the show. We'll try and get him on next week. We'll see. I'm sure he's had a lot of requests coming in. But we will try and try and make that happen because that look sometimes when you when you know you're not going to be competing for these things, you just want to be fun. Jacob Harvey is going to be fun. As long as he'd stay healthy, stay just stay in one piece. Don't think they want to be running him as much as they did. But to win a game like that, obviously, that meant so much to that program. I'll say really quick to one thing about Vandy that we've always said is just don't roll over and die. Like show some show some pride. Vandy has been such an easy out, you know, outside of the one here with Kentucky and Florida, but whatever. So like they've been such an easy out for most of these games ago. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, no, this guy doesn't matter if you're down 28 points against Alabama. He's going to take the field and try to win that game. And that's what Vandy has lacked for so long. Just saying to an owner's last two against SEC competition. Oh, wait, no, that's not that's not true. Two and oh, and his last two against core four power five competition. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. You get it. All right. Week two is going to be awesome. Very much looking forward to this weekend. If you have not, leave us a five star review, subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch every single episode of the started on solid podcast, follow us on Twitter at the STS pod at sat down south at to your girl at go so hard. Thanks guys. Talk soon.
Week 2 is here! In addition to recapping Will/LSU's trip to Vegas (0:30), the guys have a full SEC preview (15:00). Connor and Will have picks and previews for all 7 SEC-Core 4 matchups, including Texas-Michigan, Arkansas-Oklahoma State, Cal-Auburn, South Carolina-Kentucky, Houston-Oklahoma, Mississippi State-Arizona State and Tennessee-NC State. SDS' Neil Blackmon joined the show to discuss Billy Napier's future, DJ Lagway and potential Florida candidates (1:30:00). The guys close with Lad of the Week (1:57:00)!
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