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Last Week's Record: 4-3 (57.1%)Season Record: 49-15 (76.6%)
The Predictions Dept. accepts the lack of faith in Tennessee and South Carolina to pull upsets, but...
Whether it's breathless, first-game Heisman hype for Auburn QB Bo Nix, or how a large chunk of national pundits got behind the idea of Texas A&M-as-championship-contender, it doesn't take more than just a reasonably astute college football fan to be able to spot a red herring when one swims by. In the case of Nix, part of the reason for identifying him as an early Heisman contender was the abject panic many writers feel when faced with trying to identify someone – anyone – besides Tua Tagovailoa who is deserving of the award.
Auburn fell hard into a trap game in Week 6 and took the Predictions Dept. with it. While the Gators had looked almost dysfunctionally cute so far this season, they put it all together long enough to knock off an Auburn team that suddenly has all kind of problems on offense. This week, Florida again gets the conference's marquee game, going on the road to face LSU in Baton Rogue.
The Predictions Dept. continues to make progress, scoring a perfect performance in Week 5. Now comes Week 6, the smallest slate of games so far and the first without Alabama playing in one of them. There's only one game of note, Auburn at Florida, and the other two games being talked about (UT-UGA, VU-Ole Miss) are being done so out of morbid curiosity.
Through four games of the 2019 season, the things many observers foretold for Ole Miss this year are coming true. The Rebels are 2-2, with halfhearted wins over a bad Arkansas team and an FCS school, Southeastern Louisiana, and two losses in its other two non-conference games, to decided non-powers Memphis and Cal.
If you were a child of the 1980s and 1990s, Southern Miss was as much a regular part of Alabama's schedule as was Tennessee or Auburn. Things have changed somewhat in the 21st Century, and the Golden Eagles now make infrequent trips to Tuscaloosa, just frequent enough to bring out the nostalgia of names like Curley Hallman and Brett Favre and Reggie Collier.
The Predictions Dept. finally broke out with a solid effort in Week 3, missing only the MSU-Kansas State game. This week, there's one intraconference (Auburn-Texas A&M) and one interconference (Georgia vs. independent Notre Dame) leading the list, with a lot of fluff behind it. Ole Miss trying to survive against a wobbly Cal team is probably the third-best offering.
TideFans got off to a rocky start to the 2019 season, thanks largely to Tennessee and Missouri wetting their respective pants all over national television. Misses in close games like Auburn-Oregon and South Carolina-North Carolina are to be expected, but watching SEC teams lose to Wyoming and Georgia State is just ridiculous.
As word broke Tuesday that Alabama would basically be without its running back group for the first half of Saturday's game against the Duke Blue Devils, there was concern that David Cutcliffe's band of upset specialists might be able to do the impossible against the best team in college football.
We got a head start on our Week 1 previews for 2019 thanks to the Florida Gators, who came very close to our predicted score of 27-23 over Miami, eventually winning 24-20 in a sloppy game. What follows is the rest of the SEC's first week, which is mostly a snoozefest compared to some recent seasons.
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