Forde-Yard Dash: A Reshaped SEC Is Ready for Action

The annual SEC yard sale led to some quite interesting intraleague acquisitions.

Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football (rules manuals sold separately in Tulsa, after the Golden Hurricane committed 15 penalties Saturday): 

MORE DASH: Nebraska Needs a Hug | Top Former Players Coaching | Transfer Check-In

SECOND QUARTER: THE ANNUAL SEC YARD SALE RESHAPES THE LEAGUE

The nation’s premier football conference finally gets going this Saturday, which will enliven the proceedings. After a couple of weeks of watching the Big 12 muddle through weak competition and a few Atlantic Coast Conference games, it’s time to turn up the juice.

It does, after all, Just Mean More in the Southeastern Conference—more championships and more COVID-19 cases. The campus virus counts at Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and other SEC locales were sky high in recent weeks. Then there is LSU football, where coach Ed Oregon (11) almost bragged that “most” of his team has tested positive. Public health officials in Louisiana were undoubtedly thrilled to hear that news.

But here’s the thing about the SEC: While the traditions and passion don’t change, everything else does. There are four new head coaches, more than a dozen new coordinators and at least six transfer quarterbacks who will either start or be in the mix. Notably, many of the new arrivals actually aren’t new—they’re swiped from somewhere else in the league, or from someone else’s discard pile.

Basically, think of the SEC as a neighborhood with 14 concurrent yard sales, and everyone is circulating and buying each other’s stuff to repurpose as their own. One family’s junk (Orgeron at Mississippi) can become another family’s treasure (2019 national champion at LSU). Also: Everyone loves shopping at Nick Saban’s yard sale—five of the league’s head coaches are former Saban assistants.

This year’s most interesting intraleague acquisitions:

Arkansas (12) was the SEC’s biggest yard sale shopper, grabbing a head coach from Georgia (Sam Pittman), a quarterback from Florida (Feleipe Franks) and a defensive coordinator from Missouri (fired head coach Barry Odom). The Razorbacks haven’t beaten an SEC opponent since October 2017, so trying to upgrade from within the league seems like a prudent idea.

Meanwhile, Arkansas’s fired head coach is now the offensive coordinator at Auburn (13). That’s Chad Morris, who will take over play-calling duties from head coach Gus Malzahn. One of Malzahn’s protégés going back to the high school days in Arkansas, Eli Drinkwitz, is the new head coach at Missouri.

Georgia (14) grabbed strength coach/Saban right-hand man Scott Cochran from Alabama. Kirby Smart, himself a former Saban assistant, made Cochran an on-field assistant, naming him special teams coordinator. It remains to be seen whether Cochran will indeed coordinate special teams, or whether he will simply continue the unofficial Culture Guy role that made him so valuable to Saban. Smart also picked up Matt Luke on the rebound from Ole Miss, hiring the fired head coach of the Rebels to replace Pittman as his new offensive line coach.

South Carolina (15) brought back an SEC staple in offensive coordinator Mike Bobo. He was the head coach for five uninspiring seasons at Colorado State, but before that he’d spent most of his adult life at Georgia as a player or assistant. (If you walk through Athens you can actually still feel the echoing angst from Bulldogs fans over Bobo’s years as Mark Richt’s play-caller.) Of course, the head coach of the Gamecocks might be the ultimate SEC yard-sale prize: Will Muschamp has played or worked at five of the league’s 14 schools.

Mississippi (16) brought back a famed SEC pot stirrer in head coach Lane Kiffin. The former head coach at Tennessee and offensive coordinator at Alabama, with both of those stints ending with acrimonious partings. If Ole Miss hadn’t hired Kiffin, Arkansas would have. Kiffin, in turn, hired a staff with deep SEC ties.

LSU (17) dialed back into its own past for a new defensive coordinator, hiring Bo Pelini. The DC for the Tigers’ 2007 national championship team spent 2008–19 as a head coach, first at Nebraska and then at FCS Youngstown State. After failing to turn the latter job into another head-coaching shot at the Power 5 level, Pelini decided to try the rock-star SEC coordinator path back. We’ll see if it works.

And although Mississippi State (18) brought in a coach who spent the last two decades working in the Pac-12 and Big 12, Mike Leach’s first Division I job was as the offensive coordinator for Hal Mumme at Kentucky in the late 1990s.

But aside from Franks moving from Florida to Arkansas, the SEC’s most prominent transfer quarterbacks (19) are all from outside the league. Specifically, the conference went West for what could be three new starters:

Georgia has not named a starter, but USC transfer J.T. Daniels would seem the likely choice. Smart brought in both Daniels and Wake Forest transfer Jamie Newman, only to have Newman unexpectedly opt out earlier this month. That left a competition between Daniels and redshirt freshman D’Wan Mathis. Daniels threw for nearly 2,900 yards in 12 games at USC before his sophomore season was cut short by a knee injury.

In Starkville, Leach brought aboard Stanford transfer K.J. Costello, who passed for more than 6,000 yards in three seasons on the Farm. If anything can accelerate the extreme makeover from Joe Moorhead’s offense to Leach’s, having an NFL-caliber QB might do the trick. Leach also hasn’t named his No. 1 QB, but he moved State’s top returnee, Garrett Shrader, to receiver. That should indicate where things are headed when the Bulldogs open at LSU Saturday.

At South Carolina, Bobo brought grad transfer Collin Hill with him from Colorado State, and Hill won the job over returning starter Ryan Hilinski. Hill has never played a full season as the unquestioned No. 1 QB; that uncertain status may well continue in Columbia.

The other transfer QB starter figures to be Shawn Robinson at Missouri, although Drinkwitz hasn’t made an announcement. Robinson, who started for half a season at TCU in 2018, is a dual-threat talent with two years of eligibility remaining.

Despite all the churn around the league, there is one unusual island of calm in the center: Alabama (20) has the same offensive and defensive coordinators for the first time since 2014–15, when Kiffin called the offense and Smart called the defense. Take a bow, Steve Sarkisian and Pete Golding, for a second consecutive season in Tuscaloosa. (Sark nearly left; he was wooed by Colorado and Mississippi State before accepting a whopper raise to $2.5 million during the winter.) For what it's worth, the last time Saban has the same OC and DC, the Crimson Tide won the 2015 national title.

MORE DASH: Nebraska Needs a Hug | Top Former Players Coaching | Transfer Check-In