Here's your weekly look into what I've been thinking about. We'll start with football thoughts, and that will probably stay the case for at least another week or two with signing day and the portal opening. At some point it will switch to basketball thoughts first.
Football Thoughts
1. Let's look back on the regular season.
I've been known to be a reflective man, especially at the end of a sports season. Part of covering sports is there's always an ending and a new beginning coming in the next month or two. Seasons end, careers end and new ones begin immediately. There's not a lot of time to sit and think about what you just experienced.
Unless you make time.
So here's me making time and I plan to do some stories looking back at specifics other the next couple of weeks. We'll see how my writing schedule changes with less football to worry about week to week.
The Tigers entered this season with expectations higher than the program has had in a decade. The expansion of the playoff to 12 games, Eli Drinkwitz and the athletic department getting state laws changed to benefit the school's NIL plans, returning most of the offense that was one of the best units in the country. It was a recipe for the Tigers' first real chance at a national championship in a long time.
The first two games were what they were, nothing to learn there, though the team did what it needed to do. It dominated. Thats what good teams do against Murray State and Buffalo. Which, congratulations to the Bulls who went 8-4. That's one of eight bowl-eligible teams on the Tigers' schedule this year.
I forgot to mention, the Tigers entered the season looking at the schedule as one of the weakest in the conference, which it was, as another reason for high expectations. Again, one of the easiest schedules in the conference. There's only so easy an SEC schedule can get, I'm not interested in the discussion about how much harder SEC schedules are than Big 10 or Big 12 schedules at this point.
The SEC isn't as good this year as it has been, which is fine and just means more teams have the opportunities to be good because Nick Saban isn't soaking up all the wins. It's fine, and I guess a 3-loss SEC team is still going to make the 12-team playoff, I'm not sure I love the precedent there, but whatever.
I started typing this out doing a game-by-game retrospective and made it to Texas A&M before I realized I didn't want to do that.
So let's hit some key points. Boston College showed the first major flaws in the defense with the deep passes, but also it was the first time we saw the resiliency that would come to define the Tigers this season.
Vanderbilt felt bad at the time, but we got a Brady Cook to Luther Burden deep pass to win in overtime, the first effective pass of more than 20 yards this season after a real struggle to connect on deep shots early on.
Expectations were high at the bye week, including mine as I took over as Senior Editor of the site. Then, Texas A&M brought the expectations down as the Tigers just flat out didn't show up.
UMass was a reminder of the talent-level difference between the top and near bottom of Division I. That's all I got from there.
Then the hospital game. Cook returns after being driven through tailgates in a truck over to the hospital and leads the Homecoming comeback to cement his legacy as a warrior, if not the most talented quarterback.
Alabama, another disappointing road game as Cook wasn't able to return from a new injury.
Then the Drew Pyne game in the comeback against Oklahoma. Cementing Theo Wease this time as an incredible, and petty in a very fun way, receiver.
South Carolina, the defensive issues came back again in key moments, then you can zoom through the final two games because the playoff dreams were done. Easy win against Mississippi State and another fourth-quarter comeback against Arkansas because how else would the team finish the season and its first undefeated home slate since 2010?
I guess I did still do a game-by-game retrospective a little. Dang.
It's going to be hard for this season to not be special to me looking back just because of the job change. But along with that, what I think I'll remember about this year is Brady Cook the warrior, the 3 minutes of madness against Oklahoma and that this year's team was one of the most resilient groups I've ever watched.
The next two thoughts will be a bit of season retrospective, too.
2. How did the offense do this season vs. last year?
There will be a deeper dive here, but for now let's hit some basics.
A big reason this year's team had such high expectations is because of how good last year's offense was. Kirby Moore's first season was a revelation, leading to a career year for Cook, the best of Luther Burden's three seasons, the perfect use of Wease as the second option that made the most of the talent Oklahoma wasted when he was on roster.
This year's offense ran for 2,049 total yards, good for No. 57 in college football at 170.8 yards per game. The Tigers passed for 2,639 yards (219.92) per game, No. 77 in the country.
Last season, the Tigers ran for 2,246 yards (172.8 per game) for No. 46 in the country, while passing for 3,410 total yards (262.3 per game) for No. 38 in the country.
The run game really wasn't much worse falling off from Cody Schrader to Nate Noel and Marcus Carroll. I think if Noel hadn't missed time and played hurt in a couple of games, the Tigers might have been looking at an even better rushing attack this year than last year.
A loss of 800 passing yards is the pretty clear difference then, though with another game to play, that will be smaller after the bowl. As we talked about all year, Cook wasn't playing quite as well as he did last year especially because the deep ball was missing for most of the season when it had become such a key part of the 2023 season.
It's not as easy as saying Cook missed most of three games. Cook had five games of more than 300 yards passing last year, he had none this season. His best game this year was 268 against Mississippi State.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know here, the offense was worse than it was last year largely because the passing game wasn't as effective. Burden's season was disappointing stat wise when he was coming into the year talked about as the best receiver in the country. He's still got that talent, but the production just didn't match that this season.
Cook just wasn't able to repeat what he was posting last season either, there's a number of factors there, but the point now is it just didn't happen the way fans were hoping for.
3. What about the defense?
Last year's defense lost five players to the NFL and another couple to graduation. It lost its defensive coordinator, so obviously this year's group was worse right?
Fans talked all year about firing Corey Batoon, that means this year's defense was significantly worse than last year's, right?
The 2023 Tiger defense allowed 335.9 yards per game overall (4,367 total yards) for No. 34 in the country. It allowed 2,772 passing yards (213.2 per game) for No. 47 in the country. It allowed 1,595 rushing yards (122.7 per game) for No. 32 in the country.
The way this year's defense was talked about, I'd expect them to be at least in the 70s nationally in every category.
This year's Tiger defense allowed 3,831 total yards for 319.2 per game (you might notice that's 16 fewer yards per game). The total is in 12 games instead of 13, but unless the Tigers give up 500 yards in the bowl, they're going to be better in total defense. This year's Tigers were No. 23 in the country.
The issue was mostly the pass coverage right? The corners all need to be replaced as I've been told through the season.
Except the Tigers allowed 2,226 passing yards this year for 185.5 per game (28 fewer yards per game than last year) placing them No. 26 in the country. I don't expect the Tigers to allow 550 passing yards in the bowl, so this year's passing defense will be better than last year's at the end of the season.
Here's where the defense actually was worse, the Tigers allowed 1,605 rushing yards (133.8 per game) for No. 41 in the country. That did get worse, but not by all that much.
This year's defense wasn't just not nearly as bad as people talked about every week, through the season it was good. There were definitely bad games, the unit didn't finish the year strong. South Carolina was a huge problem game throughout, as was Texas A&M. Alabama was what it was, a great performance from the defense until Cook exited and three interceptions put the defense in position to fail.
The defense through the season was good. In fact, it was better than last year's in passing yards and total yards allowed. It's as simple as that.
4. Here are our final bowl projections before the conference championships.
We've talked about bowls the past couple of weeks and we've got one more week before we find out where the Tigers are headed for their post-Christmas matchup.
More chaos the past week has helped the Tigers this time. They now sit ahead of Texas A&M in the standings and have looked a lot better than LSU in the final six games of the year.
It's also not impossible that Alabama is back in the playoff with Clemson's loss to South Carolina. Or that South Carolina maybe worked its way in. Either way, four SEC teams in the CFP is more likely this week than it was last week.
Let's look at some SEC bowl projections.
ESPN's Kyle Bonagura has Oklahoma in the Gasparilla Bowl, Vanderbilt in the GameAbove Sports Bowl (what?), Arkansas in the Birmingham Bowl, Florida in the Liberty Bowl, Mizzou vs. USC in the Vegas Bowl, South Carolina in the Music City Bowl, Ole Miss in the ReliaQuest Bowl, Alabama in the Citrus Bowl, Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl and LSU in the Gator Bowl.
ESPN's Mark Schlabach has Vanderbilt in the Gasparilla Bowl, Arkansas in the Birmingham Bowl, Oklahoma in the Liberty Bowl, Texas A&M in the Vegas Bowl, Ole Miss in the Music City Bowl, Mizzou vs. Iowa in the ReliaQuest Bowl, South Carolina in the Citrus Bowl, LSU in the Texas Bowl and Florida in the Gator Bowl.
USA Today's Erick Smith has Vanderbilt in the Gasparilla Bowl, Florida in the Birmingham Bowl, Oklahoma in the Liberty Bowl, Texas A&M in the Vegas Bowl, LSU in the Music City Bowl, Ole Miss in the ReliaQuest Bowl, South Carolina in the Citrus Bowl, Arkansas in the Texas Bowl and Mizzou vs. Louisville in the Gator Bowl.
At least from those projections, it looks like Nashville is out, which is disappointing for me. I'll be in St. Charles for Christmas and that would be a pretty easy trip for me and my girlfriend to celebrate New Years.
The Vegas Bowl would be Dec. 27 (I'm still very open to a Vegas trip for New Years), ReliaQuest would be Dec. 31 in Tampa, Florida (meh, Tampa isn't great from my experience) and the Gator would be Jan. 2 in Jacksonville, Florida (again, meh. Don't really want to go to Jacksonville after New Years).
So I guess I'm rooting for fully for Vegas at this point, though a darkhorse trip to Nashville is still my preference. Out of the matchups, USC provides a marquee brand opponent, though the Trojans haven't been great for a while, Iowa is boring and Louisville is fine, but nothing major. So doubly in on that Vegas prediction from Schlabach.
Non-football thoughts
1. The first big games (other than Memphis) of the year are here.
We've been watching Mizzou play pretty terrible opponents for a few weeks now with not that much to learn from the actual competition. We talked last week about how there were other things to learn, but the Tigers haven't faced a tough situation in weeks now.
They will starting Tuesday against California.
Cal isn't great, the Golden Bears' lone loss was to Vanderbilt and they've beaten USC (which just lost to St. Mary's 71-36, holy crap USC how far the mighty have fallen).
Cal is No. 116 in the KenPom rankings, which isn't great. This is about the easiest of Missouri's tough opponents left on the schedule, but showing that the Tigers are fully past the second-half falloffs from the season's first few games will be important.
Plus showing the Tigers are able to play without Caleb Grill shooting 70 percent from 3 will be important, too. I don't have an update of Grill for now, but I would expect the Tigers to take it incredibly slowly as he works back toward playing again.
Then comes Kansas. This will be the last of these before the biggest game of the year.
I'm going to be straight up with you guys, the Tigers probably aren't beating Kansas. They're not up to the level of competing with the top teams in the country right now.
You can Old Takes Exposed me if they end up winning, I'll be happy to write that story and that I was wrong. But it's going to take some massive Kansas problems in the game and Mizzou is going to have to shoot the lights out.
Going on about playing without Grill for a while was going to be my next separate thought, but I'm going to lump it in here.
Again, I do not have an update past the one that came out Friday that he has a neck injury, but no spinal cord problems, and was released from the hospital. I'm hoping to get more info today at Dennis Gates' press conference.
But Grill has been powering the offense through the easy portion of the schedule, he was never going to shoot that well throughout the year against better competition, but he had proved he was a key to the offense.
So the Tigers have to show they can do it without him. I'd expect that to mean more Marques Warrick. From what I've seen, he's the next best shooter from 3 and runs the offense incredibly well when he's in charge. I want to see more Warrick and I think that's the team's best option to playing without Grill for a while.
2. Let's look back at the volleyball season a little.
After the 2022 season, Dawn Sullivan took over a volleyball team that went 9-19 and only won two conference games.
The team immediately rebounded in her first year, winning 18 games and going 9-9 in conference play.
Then they improved again to reach 20-8 overall and 11-5 in conference play. The first time the Tigers reached 20 total wins and 10 in conference since 2019.
Four Tigers made the All-SEC team and two, Mychael Vernon (SEC Newcomer of the Year) and Maya Sands (SEC Libero of the Year) won conference awards.
The Tigers won nine consecutive matches at won point and seven consecutive matches at another point. They went on the road and beat a top-10 Texas team for the first time since 2006.
Sullivan orchestrated an incredibly fast turnaround of a program that has had a lot of success in the past and seems on the road to a lot more.
The Tigers are a No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament starting Thursday, they will play Texas State in Dallas.
Question
I told you guys what I'm rooting for Bowl wise. What are your favorite bowl options and why?
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Football Thoughts
1. Let's look back on the regular season.
I've been known to be a reflective man, especially at the end of a sports season. Part of covering sports is there's always an ending and a new beginning coming in the next month or two. Seasons end, careers end and new ones begin immediately. There's not a lot of time to sit and think about what you just experienced.
Unless you make time.
So here's me making time and I plan to do some stories looking back at specifics other the next couple of weeks. We'll see how my writing schedule changes with less football to worry about week to week.
The Tigers entered this season with expectations higher than the program has had in a decade. The expansion of the playoff to 12 games, Eli Drinkwitz and the athletic department getting state laws changed to benefit the school's NIL plans, returning most of the offense that was one of the best units in the country. It was a recipe for the Tigers' first real chance at a national championship in a long time.
The first two games were what they were, nothing to learn there, though the team did what it needed to do. It dominated. Thats what good teams do against Murray State and Buffalo. Which, congratulations to the Bulls who went 8-4. That's one of eight bowl-eligible teams on the Tigers' schedule this year.
I forgot to mention, the Tigers entered the season looking at the schedule as one of the weakest in the conference, which it was, as another reason for high expectations. Again, one of the easiest schedules in the conference. There's only so easy an SEC schedule can get, I'm not interested in the discussion about how much harder SEC schedules are than Big 10 or Big 12 schedules at this point.
The SEC isn't as good this year as it has been, which is fine and just means more teams have the opportunities to be good because Nick Saban isn't soaking up all the wins. It's fine, and I guess a 3-loss SEC team is still going to make the 12-team playoff, I'm not sure I love the precedent there, but whatever.
I started typing this out doing a game-by-game retrospective and made it to Texas A&M before I realized I didn't want to do that.
So let's hit some key points. Boston College showed the first major flaws in the defense with the deep passes, but also it was the first time we saw the resiliency that would come to define the Tigers this season.
Vanderbilt felt bad at the time, but we got a Brady Cook to Luther Burden deep pass to win in overtime, the first effective pass of more than 20 yards this season after a real struggle to connect on deep shots early on.
Expectations were high at the bye week, including mine as I took over as Senior Editor of the site. Then, Texas A&M brought the expectations down as the Tigers just flat out didn't show up.
UMass was a reminder of the talent-level difference between the top and near bottom of Division I. That's all I got from there.
Then the hospital game. Cook returns after being driven through tailgates in a truck over to the hospital and leads the Homecoming comeback to cement his legacy as a warrior, if not the most talented quarterback.
Alabama, another disappointing road game as Cook wasn't able to return from a new injury.
Then the Drew Pyne game in the comeback against Oklahoma. Cementing Theo Wease this time as an incredible, and petty in a very fun way, receiver.
South Carolina, the defensive issues came back again in key moments, then you can zoom through the final two games because the playoff dreams were done. Easy win against Mississippi State and another fourth-quarter comeback against Arkansas because how else would the team finish the season and its first undefeated home slate since 2010?
I guess I did still do a game-by-game retrospective a little. Dang.
It's going to be hard for this season to not be special to me looking back just because of the job change. But along with that, what I think I'll remember about this year is Brady Cook the warrior, the 3 minutes of madness against Oklahoma and that this year's team was one of the most resilient groups I've ever watched.
The next two thoughts will be a bit of season retrospective, too.
2. How did the offense do this season vs. last year?
There will be a deeper dive here, but for now let's hit some basics.
A big reason this year's team had such high expectations is because of how good last year's offense was. Kirby Moore's first season was a revelation, leading to a career year for Cook, the best of Luther Burden's three seasons, the perfect use of Wease as the second option that made the most of the talent Oklahoma wasted when he was on roster.
This year's offense ran for 2,049 total yards, good for No. 57 in college football at 170.8 yards per game. The Tigers passed for 2,639 yards (219.92) per game, No. 77 in the country.
Last season, the Tigers ran for 2,246 yards (172.8 per game) for No. 46 in the country, while passing for 3,410 total yards (262.3 per game) for No. 38 in the country.
The run game really wasn't much worse falling off from Cody Schrader to Nate Noel and Marcus Carroll. I think if Noel hadn't missed time and played hurt in a couple of games, the Tigers might have been looking at an even better rushing attack this year than last year.
A loss of 800 passing yards is the pretty clear difference then, though with another game to play, that will be smaller after the bowl. As we talked about all year, Cook wasn't playing quite as well as he did last year especially because the deep ball was missing for most of the season when it had become such a key part of the 2023 season.
It's not as easy as saying Cook missed most of three games. Cook had five games of more than 300 yards passing last year, he had none this season. His best game this year was 268 against Mississippi State.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know here, the offense was worse than it was last year largely because the passing game wasn't as effective. Burden's season was disappointing stat wise when he was coming into the year talked about as the best receiver in the country. He's still got that talent, but the production just didn't match that this season.
Cook just wasn't able to repeat what he was posting last season either, there's a number of factors there, but the point now is it just didn't happen the way fans were hoping for.
3. What about the defense?
Last year's defense lost five players to the NFL and another couple to graduation. It lost its defensive coordinator, so obviously this year's group was worse right?
Fans talked all year about firing Corey Batoon, that means this year's defense was significantly worse than last year's, right?
The 2023 Tiger defense allowed 335.9 yards per game overall (4,367 total yards) for No. 34 in the country. It allowed 2,772 passing yards (213.2 per game) for No. 47 in the country. It allowed 1,595 rushing yards (122.7 per game) for No. 32 in the country.
The way this year's defense was talked about, I'd expect them to be at least in the 70s nationally in every category.
This year's Tiger defense allowed 3,831 total yards for 319.2 per game (you might notice that's 16 fewer yards per game). The total is in 12 games instead of 13, but unless the Tigers give up 500 yards in the bowl, they're going to be better in total defense. This year's Tigers were No. 23 in the country.
The issue was mostly the pass coverage right? The corners all need to be replaced as I've been told through the season.
Except the Tigers allowed 2,226 passing yards this year for 185.5 per game (28 fewer yards per game than last year) placing them No. 26 in the country. I don't expect the Tigers to allow 550 passing yards in the bowl, so this year's passing defense will be better than last year's at the end of the season.
Here's where the defense actually was worse, the Tigers allowed 1,605 rushing yards (133.8 per game) for No. 41 in the country. That did get worse, but not by all that much.
This year's defense wasn't just not nearly as bad as people talked about every week, through the season it was good. There were definitely bad games, the unit didn't finish the year strong. South Carolina was a huge problem game throughout, as was Texas A&M. Alabama was what it was, a great performance from the defense until Cook exited and three interceptions put the defense in position to fail.
The defense through the season was good. In fact, it was better than last year's in passing yards and total yards allowed. It's as simple as that.
4. Here are our final bowl projections before the conference championships.
We've talked about bowls the past couple of weeks and we've got one more week before we find out where the Tigers are headed for their post-Christmas matchup.
More chaos the past week has helped the Tigers this time. They now sit ahead of Texas A&M in the standings and have looked a lot better than LSU in the final six games of the year.
It's also not impossible that Alabama is back in the playoff with Clemson's loss to South Carolina. Or that South Carolina maybe worked its way in. Either way, four SEC teams in the CFP is more likely this week than it was last week.
Let's look at some SEC bowl projections.
ESPN's Kyle Bonagura has Oklahoma in the Gasparilla Bowl, Vanderbilt in the GameAbove Sports Bowl (what?), Arkansas in the Birmingham Bowl, Florida in the Liberty Bowl, Mizzou vs. USC in the Vegas Bowl, South Carolina in the Music City Bowl, Ole Miss in the ReliaQuest Bowl, Alabama in the Citrus Bowl, Texas A&M in the Texas Bowl and LSU in the Gator Bowl.
ESPN's Mark Schlabach has Vanderbilt in the Gasparilla Bowl, Arkansas in the Birmingham Bowl, Oklahoma in the Liberty Bowl, Texas A&M in the Vegas Bowl, Ole Miss in the Music City Bowl, Mizzou vs. Iowa in the ReliaQuest Bowl, South Carolina in the Citrus Bowl, LSU in the Texas Bowl and Florida in the Gator Bowl.
USA Today's Erick Smith has Vanderbilt in the Gasparilla Bowl, Florida in the Birmingham Bowl, Oklahoma in the Liberty Bowl, Texas A&M in the Vegas Bowl, LSU in the Music City Bowl, Ole Miss in the ReliaQuest Bowl, South Carolina in the Citrus Bowl, Arkansas in the Texas Bowl and Mizzou vs. Louisville in the Gator Bowl.
At least from those projections, it looks like Nashville is out, which is disappointing for me. I'll be in St. Charles for Christmas and that would be a pretty easy trip for me and my girlfriend to celebrate New Years.
The Vegas Bowl would be Dec. 27 (I'm still very open to a Vegas trip for New Years), ReliaQuest would be Dec. 31 in Tampa, Florida (meh, Tampa isn't great from my experience) and the Gator would be Jan. 2 in Jacksonville, Florida (again, meh. Don't really want to go to Jacksonville after New Years).
So I guess I'm rooting for fully for Vegas at this point, though a darkhorse trip to Nashville is still my preference. Out of the matchups, USC provides a marquee brand opponent, though the Trojans haven't been great for a while, Iowa is boring and Louisville is fine, but nothing major. So doubly in on that Vegas prediction from Schlabach.
Non-football thoughts
1. The first big games (other than Memphis) of the year are here.
We've been watching Mizzou play pretty terrible opponents for a few weeks now with not that much to learn from the actual competition. We talked last week about how there were other things to learn, but the Tigers haven't faced a tough situation in weeks now.
They will starting Tuesday against California.
Cal isn't great, the Golden Bears' lone loss was to Vanderbilt and they've beaten USC (which just lost to St. Mary's 71-36, holy crap USC how far the mighty have fallen).
Cal is No. 116 in the KenPom rankings, which isn't great. This is about the easiest of Missouri's tough opponents left on the schedule, but showing that the Tigers are fully past the second-half falloffs from the season's first few games will be important.
Plus showing the Tigers are able to play without Caleb Grill shooting 70 percent from 3 will be important, too. I don't have an update of Grill for now, but I would expect the Tigers to take it incredibly slowly as he works back toward playing again.
Then comes Kansas. This will be the last of these before the biggest game of the year.
I'm going to be straight up with you guys, the Tigers probably aren't beating Kansas. They're not up to the level of competing with the top teams in the country right now.
You can Old Takes Exposed me if they end up winning, I'll be happy to write that story and that I was wrong. But it's going to take some massive Kansas problems in the game and Mizzou is going to have to shoot the lights out.
Going on about playing without Grill for a while was going to be my next separate thought, but I'm going to lump it in here.
Again, I do not have an update past the one that came out Friday that he has a neck injury, but no spinal cord problems, and was released from the hospital. I'm hoping to get more info today at Dennis Gates' press conference.
But Grill has been powering the offense through the easy portion of the schedule, he was never going to shoot that well throughout the year against better competition, but he had proved he was a key to the offense.
So the Tigers have to show they can do it without him. I'd expect that to mean more Marques Warrick. From what I've seen, he's the next best shooter from 3 and runs the offense incredibly well when he's in charge. I want to see more Warrick and I think that's the team's best option to playing without Grill for a while.
2. Let's look back at the volleyball season a little.
After the 2022 season, Dawn Sullivan took over a volleyball team that went 9-19 and only won two conference games.
The team immediately rebounded in her first year, winning 18 games and going 9-9 in conference play.
Then they improved again to reach 20-8 overall and 11-5 in conference play. The first time the Tigers reached 20 total wins and 10 in conference since 2019.
Four Tigers made the All-SEC team and two, Mychael Vernon (SEC Newcomer of the Year) and Maya Sands (SEC Libero of the Year) won conference awards.
The Tigers won nine consecutive matches at won point and seven consecutive matches at another point. They went on the road and beat a top-10 Texas team for the first time since 2006.
Sullivan orchestrated an incredibly fast turnaround of a program that has had a lot of success in the past and seems on the road to a lot more.
The Tigers are a No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament starting Thursday, they will play Texas State in Dallas.
Question
I told you guys what I'm rooting for Bowl wise. What are your favorite bowl options and why?
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