SEC Preview: This SEC week is going to be a strugglebus….

First of all, there are five SEC teams getting in the College Football Play-Off as things stand. That’s Texas, Alabama, Ole Miss, Georgia and Tennessee. Texas A&M and possibly South Carolina are on the outside looking in. Of course Greg Sankey more in, but so does every conference. The street-fight is going to get boring, and we’ll going to give you the lowdown on tie-breakers next week. The second thing: This SEC week is a struggle to preview, because most of the games aren’t great – one of this blog’s endless bug-bears is that any of these games actually exist at this time of year. SO, GAMES WE ARE INTERESTED IN:  No.5 Indiana at No.2 Ohio State (-12.5): We’d love to

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Has the ‘Alabama mystique’ gone?

The news that safety sensation Caleb Downs and starting offensive lineman Kadyn Proctor put themselves into the transfer portal a few days after the retirement of Nick Saban and the rehiring of Kalen DeBoer has made a lot of people ask the question: ‘Has the Alabama mystique gone?” Saban had the mystique – in the same way as any long-tenured, high-winning head coach (see Mssrs Bryant, Paterno, Spurrier, Meyer, Hayes, Schembechler and Smart for details) – does. When a team wins and wins and wins and wins and wins in the way that Alabama did under Saban’s time, it gets the reputation as a development factory for the NFL. Saban dined out on this while recruiting (He used to say:

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