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Ole Miss and Missouri are home this bowl season, while Vanderbilt, South Carolina, Kentucky and Mississippi State are practicing for bowl games. Bowl hopes were at one time slim for the quartet — part of the SEC’s 12 bowl teams — but there were moments for each that paved the way to the postseason.
Vandy’s third quarter against Ole Miss: Vanderbilt had lost to South Carolina, Florida and Kentucky by single digits. Following back-to-back losses at Auburn and Missouri, also by single digits, bowl hopes were more than slim with games remaining against Ole Miss and Tennessee.
Beating Ole Miss 38-17, by far the Commodores’ largest SEC margin of victory for the season, jump-started what wound up a 45-34 win against Tennessee to get to six wins.
Two drives in the third quarter against Ole Miss set the bowl tone. Ralph Webb capped a 90-yard drive with an 11-yard touchdown for a 21-10 lead, then a 72-yard drive with a 1-yard touchdown run for a 31-10 lead entering the fourth quarter. It was a margin too big for Ole Miss true freshman quarterback Shea Patterson to overcome on Vandy’s road to the Independence Bowl against N.C. State.
3 minutes to bowl glory for South Carolina: Six weeks into the season, South Carolina had lost at Mississippi State, at Kentucky and at home to Texas A&M and Georgia. After a necessary win against UMass in the middle of a five-game homestand, the Gamecocks beat Tennessee 24-21 to get back in the bowl picture.
Two big plays defined the win.
South Carolina led 17-14 early in the fourth quarter. With Tennessee near midfield, Darius English recovered a Joshua Dobbs fumble. Four plays later, Jake Bentley found K.C. Crosby for a 35-yard touchdown.
In less than three minutes, South Carolina turned its season around. That was the only other win left on the schedule besides Western Carolina. South Carolina had to get it done to get to six and did. Now it gets South Florida in the Birmingham Bowl.
Good time for longest kick: Kentucky had its six wins before upsetting Louisville, which upgraded the Wildcats to the TaxSlayer Bowl against Georgia Tech. Long before that though, the Wildcats’ fourth win came against the odds.
Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen had been 7-0 against Kentucky. That changed on Oct. 23 when Austin MacGinnis lined up a 51-yard field goal, his longest of the season. As time expired, MacGinnis put it through to lift Kentucky to a 40-38 win over a team it hadn’t been able to beat since 2008.
A loss would have sent the Wildcats to 3-4 and led to more questions about the state of the program and the man leading it. The win renewed their bowl hopes.
Now, Kentucky is in the postseason for the first time since 2010, looking for its first bowl win since the 2009 Liberty Bowl.
5 wins and still bowling: Mississippi State isn’t apologizing to anyone for going to the St. Petersburg Bowl against Miami of Ohio with only five wins. The last two were huge.
The Bulldogs had lost to South Alabama, BYU and Kentucky. Then came the SEC’s biggest upset of the season — a 35-28 stunner against then-No. 4 Texas A&M.
But following two more losses, the Bulldogs delivered the knockout punch in the Egg Bowl against Ole Miss, a 55-20 shelling that saw sophomore quarterback Nick Fitzgerald rush for a school record 258 yards and two touchdowns.
Fitzgerald had become a light in a dark season and now gets one more game and has a slim chance to win the SEC rushing title. (He has 1,243 rushing yards, 83 behind leader Rawleigh Williams, who plays Virginia Tech in the Belk Bowl.) Fitzgerald’s performance was one of college football’s best of the season and made a lot of forgettable things forgotten after the Egg Bowl.
