With the holiday season upon us, we need to discuss what every CFSL team wants for Christmas this season. We’ll work our way through the SEC teams, starting with the bottom and working our way to the top of the conference.
FLORIDA: RIDE THE WAVE
With last week’s win over Clemson, which was a major upset, the Gators would like to keep up with the top of the conference. In order to do that, they need to be riding the momentum they picked up last week. Quarterback Mathias St. John has been building a rhythm and finding success especially as a runner. With his success, halfback Avery Jordan can finally get rolling and hopefully further adding to this offense.
TEXAS: GET TO .500
As crazy as it sounds, that’s the next major hurdle for this Texas team. They’ve lost an in-conference game but managed to pop off Ohio State. So they got the win out of the way, now they need to figure out how to get to a .500 record. Doing that would make them 2-1 in-conference and give them a shot at returning to the playoffs. Quarterback Walker Mills has been on a roll, with a top five quarterback rating and is seventh in passing yards. He’s not the issue. The real struggle has been a defense that is one of the worst on third downs. That, and their struggles on generating turnovers. The defense needs to step up.
MIAMI: CONSISTENCY
Miami has seen their ups and downs on both sides of the ball. Offensively, they can’t seem to put up points with any form of regularity. They put up more than 20 just once this season and that was against USC. Defensively, they’ve held two different teams to seven points, but then gave up 30 to USC and 48 to Alabama. The Hurricanes have got to figure out how to get above 20 points with consistency and need to figure out how to keep the good offenses to around seven points. That would go a long ways towards Miami’s playoff push.
CLEMSON: WIN OUT
Opening up your conference schedule with a loss hurts, especially when you go 2-1 in non-conference play. Will Slay has been a dominant quarterback, both rushing and passing. Except he didn’t look great against Florida, the fact that he’s a freshman was showing. Defensive end Mike Miller has been a bit absent from the Clemson defense although linebacker Jack Tyler has been an absolute force. But Clemson always seems to drop a game or two they shouldn’t. Winning out would imply sweeping up the rest of the conference including matchups with Auburn, Alabama, and Texas.
AUBURN: WIN THE SEC
Auburn has been historically marked as a .500 team, so winning the SEC and getting a first round bye in the playoffs would be a major benefit to these Tigers. Junior signal-caller Griffin Jelkic is playing the best he’s ever looked. They’ll need to get tailback Robert Davis rolling to his full potential, which they’ve been doing recently. Then the defensive contributors like Ollie P. Peters and LaRoi Sanders can do their jobs, but they need safety Digger Graves to really start stepping up. He’ll have to for the Tigers to claim the conference.
ALABAMA: RESPECT
The Crimson Tide is the last undefeated team in the league, but for some reason we’re all discounting that because they haven’t faced any of the playoff teams from a season ago. Yet, their offense has been exceptionally explosive through the weeks, namely because of the backfield duo of quarterback Balion Siege and halfback Joe Pantoja. They’re the top scoring offense, so we better start respecting Alabama for handling their business in the style they have. Oh yeah, and while we talk about the offense, this Alabama defense hasn’t been bad either, especially with an impressive performance from linebacker Christopher Dodd a week ago. Start showing them some respect.
