Power ranking the SEC after week 8: A&M optimism increasing, but Georgia looms large after pretenders exposed
What a wild weekend of football in the SEC. Alabama-Tennessee was a barn-burner, and Georgia-Texas was... well, not a barn-burner. But it was fun to watch!
The pecking order in the conference is beginning to look a little more defined, though there are some teams with the potential to still migrate across some of those boundaries—both in a positive and negative direction.
Let's take a look at who lands where in this week's edition of the SEC power rankings.
Power ranking the SEC after week 8: #16 - Oklahoma
The welcome to the conference that the Sooners are experiencing is strongly reminiscent of what Missouri went through in their first year. For all the talk about one team or another not being SEC-ready, that’s what we saw for sure out of the Tigers—and now out of the Sooners.
Venables made the switch back to Jackson Arnold from Michael Hawkins this week after the latter was responsible for giving the South Carolina defense 14 points. But that change didn’t make any difference with regard to the OL’s poor pass protection—the Sooners allowed 9 sacks on Saturday, their most-ever.
That which seemed to be the strength of this Sooner team—the defense—now, all of a sudden, looks like it’s not all that. I had a high estimation of them after they held Tennessee to 25 points, but since then, Arkansas, Florida, and Alabama have all had better defensive performances. This is not to mention the fact that they allowed nearly 500 yards to Auburn, who just managed a mere 286 against Mizzou.
I’m wary of declaring the bottom to have fallen out for this squad, but I feel strongly that they’re about to get waxed by Ole Miss in Oxford. Four out of their final five are against ranked teams, with the lone outlier being a game against Maine on November 2. 5-7 is a real possibility.