If the season ended today and you were the Sugar Bowl, who do you take? Let's say for the purposes of the question that Auburn is locked into the national title game and the eligible teams are Alabama, Arkansas and LSU. I think most people say that Alabama's ship has sailed. Arkansas is a team that's got a 21-point road annihilation of South Carolina but also ended up short against Alabama and lost the shootout with Auburn. LSU has a narrower loss to Auburn and the Alabama win.
Has the light bulb turned on for Chris Relf, or is Arkansas' pass defense that bad? Don't look now, but Relf actually had a pretty good game throwing the ball around Saturday, including a season high in several departments. He was 20-of-30 for 224 yards. He didn't exactly set the world on fire, but he was surprisingly competent looking in the passing game -- better than any game since Alcorn State back at the beginning of October. And if he's beginning to be good, could that be a warning sign for the SEC West about Mississippi State's potential next year?
Will Tennessee make a bowl? With the win against Vanderbilt this weekend, the Vols find themselves needing one more victory as they prepare to host Kentucky next week. (We're going to assume for now that there aren't any 5-7 teams making bowls.) Do they get it? The question essentially comes down to how good you think Kentucky is and whether you think the Vols can defeat the Wildcats.
Are you impressed by any of the confectionery wins this week? Alabama routed Georgia State 63-7, South Carolina blasted Troy 69-24 and Florida flatted Appalachian State 48-10. So -- did we really learn anything from any of that? Or would we have been better served if the teams' schedules were rearranged to avoid these late-season cupcakes? The extreme solution would be to go to the Big XII model, where you get all the nonconference games out of the way the first month and then dive into the conference slate. But that also would require moving traditional early-season contests like Georgia-South Carolina and Florida-Tennessee.
Which game next week are you most looking forward to? The bad news is that the end of the regular season is in sight; after next week's games, the only SEC contest left will be the Championship Game in Atlanta. So tell us your marquee showdown next week. Maybe it's the Iron Bowl with national title ramifications. Or the Egg Bowl. Or one of the battles with the ACC. Okay, so the latter probably shouldn't be a big deal to anyone but those teams, but you can choose them if you want.