SEC Power Rankings, Week 2: Arkansas rises, Georgia survives
By John Buhler
The SEC went 12-2 in Week 2 of the 2016 college football season. Here the weekly power rankings of how strong each team looked on Saturday, September 10th.
Despite going 12-2 in Week 2, the SEC wasn’t exactly flexing its muscles as college football’s world beaters on Saturday. Yes, the only two losses came via Kentucky and South Carolina in conference play, but everybody beat who they should have in Week 2. That is what tends to happen in a week of college football where no two top-25 teams meet head-to-head.
Entering Week 3, only six teams in the SEC are undefeated at 2-0. Those programs would be the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Arkansas Razorbacks, the Florida Gators, the Georgia Bulldogs, the Tennessee Volunteers and the Texas A&M Aggies.
On the other side of the coin, the only SEC team yet to taste victory this season is Mark Stoops’ Kentucky Wildcats. The other seven SEC programs find themselves at 1-1 heading into the third week of September. Here are this week’s SEC power rankings based on Saturday’s domination or lack thereof.
Losses
The wheels have fallen completely off the Stoops bandwagon in Lexington, as his Wildcats enter Week 3 against the New Mexico State Aggies with an 0-2 record. Kentucky has now lost to SEC East rival Florida 30 straight times…30!
Until Kentucky got on the board late in the fourth quarter, the Wildcats had given up 79 straight unanswered points to first the Southern Miss Golden Eagles and then the Florida Gators. No offense and no defense to speak of whatsoever has Kentucky as one of the most pitiful programs in the Power 5 in mid-September.
Making a holiday season bowl now seems borderline insane for a Kentucky team that has been manhandled in the early part of the season. The Wildcats are going to have to go 3-5 in SEC play to make a bowl, as they probably aren’t beating in-state rival Lamar Jackson’s Louisville Cardinals at the end of the year. Things look incredibly bleak in Lexington.
We’ll call this a regression to the mean, as the South Carolina Gamecocks struggled to make any noise against an angry Mississippi State Bulldogs team in Week 2 down in Starkville. Will Muschamp’s Gamecocks came away with a solid first SEC victory over the Vanderbilt Commodores in Week 1, but Mississippi State took out its Week 1 frustrations on South Carolina in this one.
To win back-to-back SEC road games to start the year in Muschamp’s first year in Columbia would have been sensational. It just wasn’t meant to be, as Dan Mullen’s Bulldogs team treated this SEC matchup as a must-win for Mississippi State.
243 yards of total offense isn’t good enough to beat a bowl-caliber team like Mississippi State on the road. Muschamp was brought in to fix the Gamecocks defensively, but presumably, yearlong offensive struggles will keep South Carolina at home this holiday bowl season.
Next: No. 12-10