We're now just under a week out from National Signing Day, so let's take a look at where all the teams are at present.

First up, here is how each school is doing in the overall rankings. The figures in parenthesis are the change from last week's update. As a reminder, Rivals only publishes its top 50 and ESPN only publishes its top 25.

Because the different sites have their different ways of calculating things, there are a lot of conflicting results. Georgia fell four spots in Rivals while remaining about even in the others. LSU jumped five spots in Scout's rankings while losing ground in Rivals and ESPN.

All of the services have Arkansas and Mississippi State moving up, while Auburn, Missouri, and Ole Miss slid in most or all the rankings. There aren't a lot of big moves as many of the players who are going to commit before signing day have done so, while most of the rest are going to wait until the big day to announce.

Here is the same table for average rank. Average rank is not available for ESPN's rankings.

There is a lot less movement in this one as we're dealing with averages instead of raw numbers. I don't understand how some of these results come about though. Scout has Missouri falling three spots in the overall rankings while rising four spots in the average rankings. The only change for them in the last week was them flipping a three-star safety away from Houston. Mississippi State is up across the board in all the rankings after only adding a single three-star linebacker. It just goes to show how jumbled up teams are in the middle of the rankings.

The only thing that all of the services seem to agree upon is that Alabama and Florida are among the very best in the country and Kentucky has the worst class in the conference. Even Scout, which is the only service not to have UK last among SEC teams in the overall rankings, has the Wildcats' class last in the league in average rank.

I still don't understand LSU's game plan from the national championship game. Alabama's defense was good, historically good even, but the Tigers did themselves no favors with the way they tried to move the ball in that game. There is no good reason why LSU should have finished that game with under 100 total yards.

At the Senior Bowl, former LSU TE DeAngelo Peterson shed some light on what went wrong:

"We felt like we had a good game plan that would work, that would help us do things... The game plan was to spread the ball out, get the ball to me, get the ball to Rueben (Randle), let Russell (Shepard) run the ball every now and then, give the ball to our running backs."

All right, I'm with DeAngelo so far. But what went wrong?

"The play-calling bothered the whole offense... I feel like the coaches didn't use the game plan. They were doing stuff that we never did all year... In that game, Russell played like two plays, Rueben had like one ball, I had one ball. I think they went away from the game plan. ... I feel like if they had went to the game plan and given the playmakers the ball, they would have done something with the ball."

According to Shepard himself via his Twitter account, he participated in three plays. Randle had three catches for 13 yards, and Peterson had one catch for seven yards.

Peterson's account lays the blame on the coaches, which is where most post-game blame went to. That Les Miles never subbed Jarrett Lee in for Jordan Jefferson will be one detail from the game that will never be forgotten. The coaches kept trying to stretch the field horizontally, something that was never going to work against a defense as fast as Alabama's.

And speaking of doing stuff they never did all year, the first time LSU ran its signature toss ISO running play was with about eight minutes left in the game. That's the Tigers' bread-and-butter play for the whole offense, much less the rushing game. When they had one bonus play to beat Tennessee in 2010 after the Vols had 13 men on the field, they ran that play and won. Why it took so long to run the play that they do best defies explanation. It's not a bad idea to try to mix in new things for a bowl game to surprise the opposing defense, but you never abandon the basics in doing so.

How much blame to lay on Miles and how much goes on Greg Studrawa and Steve Kragthorpe is still an open question. Everything ultimately goes through Miles, but he doesn't actually call all the offensive plays. I can remember seeing some comments after the game on Twitter from Louisville fans telling everyone that now we can understand what they went through for three years, so maybe that's a clue.

Regardless, LSU's offensive coaches lost the game for the team more than the players did. It's enough to make me think long and hard about LSU's presumptive place near the top of the polls for next year.

College football sources told @CBSSports there's "strong support" to increase bowl eligibility to 7 wins in 2014

— Brett McMurphy (@McMurphyCBS) January 25, 2012

Bowl games are, in concept, a good thing for the sport of college football. While I want to see some sort of playoff system put in place, I do not want to see bowls go away. More football between at least decent teams is a good thing in my book, and players get to load up on swag and visit places they might not otherwise go to. Win-win-win.

The problem is that the way the bowl system is set up is bad for college football. Bowls generate value, but a lot of that value is captured by the individual committees that put them on. Only creative accounting methods allow every bowl bound school to come out in the black.

Every year, some number of teams take heavy losses on bowls thanks not only to travel expenses but pricey ticket guarantees. Part of accepting a bowl bid is a school agreeing to be on the hook for thousands of tickets for the game. Inevitably, some schools can't sell out those ducats and have to take losses of $1 million or more. The only reason why this can go on is that bowl payouts go to conferences, who then divide them across all of their members. The higher-paying bowls and high-turnout fanbases basically subsidize the bowl trips taken by teams in low payout bowls and who have low fan turnout at the game.

By raising the bar for bowl eligibility to seven wins, about seven bowls will cease to exist as a result. I'm sure this will largely get spun as a way to ensure quality games and make bowl bids more of a reward than a gimme, but really it's probably not. It's likely that it's a way to cut off games where both schools who attend take a loss but where the bowl committee profits handsomely.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of a trend to cut bowl committees out of the postseason entirely. Step 1 is cutting out bowls that don't make any schools any money. Step 2 is schools and conferences putting on their own bowls.

When you think about it, there is no reason why college football bowls need to be put on by independent organizations. Look no further than the Fiesta Bowl scandal and Sugar Bowl scandal to see what some bowl committees are doing with the money they make. Bowls are profitable enough that ESPN got in on the game a few years back and now owns several of the smaller ones. Conferences are fully able to put on conference championship games at neutral sites, so a little haggling with each other over teams and sites shouldn't be too big of a stretch.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 have already made some noises about doing their own bowls, and it fits in with their existing strategies of making themselves more vertically integrated. I expect other leagues to consider it too. No other sport leaves money on the table by not running its own postseason. That college football does so makes absolutely no sense, and I expect that within a decade or so we'll see that the power brokers have done something about it.

The state of the SEC is strong.

The conference just won its sixth consecutive football national championship after becoming the first league to put both teams in the national championship game. It won two of the last six men's basketball championships, put four teams in the past six Final Fours, and put two teams in each of the past two Elite Eights. It has won back-to-back-to-back baseball national championships, including having both teams in the CWS final a year ago.

The conference is seen as the preeminent athletics conference in the country. It brings in more than enough money for its members. It takes a leadership role on the issues of the day. The conference is strong.

It is growing.

The additions of Texas A&M and Missouri expanded the conference's footprint while bringing in two strong programs with devoted fan bases. Their unique cultures will have an impact on that of the conference as a whole while they find themselves moving closer to the league's current norms.

Using the July 2011 estimates, the population within the conference's footprint increased by 53% from 59,618,758 to 91,304,127. That will lead to larger carriage of the SEC Network syndication package and, inevitably, a larger TV contract in the future.

It is fully reliant on ESPN.

The other two most powerful conferences, the Big Ten and Pac-12, are increasingly self-reliant. They have their own TV networks, have agreed to a scheduling agreement to provide inventory for those networks, and have kicked around the idea of starting up their own bowls.

The SEC has no network, with its equivalent programming being shown on ESPN's SEC Network syndication package and other ESPN properties. When the topic of additional bowls came up recently, SEC transition chair Larry Templeton indicated that it would go first to ESPN (who owns and runs some bowls). There hasn't been so much as a whisper out of Birmingham indicating that the league will start its own network like the Big Ten and Pac-12 have, making the conference fully reliant on ESPN for exposure and distribution beyond the CBS game of the week.

Its future is bright.

Expanding the conference has given it a larger platform on which to grow. It already brings in plenty of money for its schools, and that money will only continue to grow. It won't be able to maximize its profits without a middleman-killing private label TV network, but no programs are in danger of falling into fiscal crisis like Rutgers and Maryland have. Everyone will have more than enough.

The conference has the most devoted fans. The conference has the best collection of athletics programs. It has the best collection of coaches in the sport that matters most, football. There is no reason to think the SEC will not continue to experience great success into the future.