Who won Week 7 in college football?
Alabama stumbles in Neyland against the spread, Mike Leach's run game goes quiet, and some young quarterbacks are making waves.
That was certainly an eventful weekend of college football.
We knew it had to be, there were multiple undefeateds facing off and some other high profile games like Alabama at Tennessee that necessarily had to end with a strong team with high expectations intact taking an important loss.
Strangely enough, Tennessee wasn’t one of the teams who needed to readjust their hopes for this season after confronting Alabama. We’re going to dive into the performance of the Tide defense against the Vol offense in a bit, but I do want to note something I’ve observed.
Generally if you ask people about Nick Saban’s coaching staff, folks will say that Bill O’Brien is a nincompoop who’s holding their program back while saying little about the defense. Yet none of their defenses since Pete Golding took over for Jeremy Pruitt (after the 2017 title) have been amazing and O’Brien is getting a lot out of the Bryce Young era which is what he was essentially hired to do. We’ll take a look to see what went wrong for the Tide in this game but certainly the offense had a solid day and the defense didn’t fare as well.
We’ll also talk a little about the Pirate’s disappearing run game, although there isn’t a whole lot to tell. Dillon Johnson and Jo’quavious Marks combined for seven carries for 30 yards at 4.3 ypc. Not bad really, but more to the point not really a factor. Why was that? Read the section below.
Finally, there’s a number of second year quarterbacks who are having a big impact on the season as it unfolds. Caleb Williams and USC tore up Utah’s defense (yet lost, as I was surprised to find when checking on the score after checking out of the game early), J.J. McCarthy and Michigan rolled on with a big win over Penn State, and Texas with Quinn Ewers escaped with a win over Iowa State. These three are super gifted physically and will make for an exciting 2023 class of draftable quarterbacks. Right now we’re only seeing it in flashes though, each of these three teams is run-heavy and will lean on their quarterback more next year than they do now.
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