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Week 4 SEC Primer: Oklahoma’s SEC debut is here. Tennessee is bringing the reality check
By Matt Hinton
Published:
Everything you need to know about the Week 4 SEC slate, all in one place.
All lines via FanDuel Sportsbook.
Game of the Week: Tennessee (-7.5) at Oklahoma
The stakes
Welcome to the show, Oklahoma. Hope you’re ready to hit the ground running.
It might be true in the era of the 12-team Playoff that there is no such thing anymore as a “must-win” game in September, but good luck telling the difference on Saturday night. Vols-Sooners has all the makings of a scene. College GameDay is in town to set the tone for a primetime kick. The home crowd will be amped for Oklahoma’s first game in SEC play, more than 3 years in the making. (Yes, it really has been that long.)
On the sideline, there’s the personal history between former Oklahoma quarterback slash current Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel and his alma mater, where he won a national title as a player — his OU counterpart, Brent Venables, was an assistant coach on that team — and later flamed out as the Sooners’ offensive coordinator.
On the field, there’s the inevitable comparison between a couple of gifted young quarterbacks, Oklahoma’s Jackson Arnold and Tennessee’s Nico Iamaleava, both of whom are still introducing themselves to rest of the country after arriving with 5-star hype in 2023. And, yes, for a couple teams projected to be on the Playoff bubble, the first checkpoint on the conference slate is still a crucial one for keeping a viable path to the CFP open.
That’s especially true for Oklahoma, which already faces the steepest climb of any of the league’s plausible contenders. The Sooners drew the short straw in Year 1, schedule-wise, with 5 of their 8 conference games coming against teams currently ranked in the top 10, plus road trips to Auburn and LSU. The only break they caught was missing Georgia; otherwise, they’re in for the full gauntlet. Already, the path to 3-0 has been rockier than expected, with relatively close calls the past 2 weeks against Houston (16-12) and Tulane (34-19). As little margin for error as the Sooners figure to have over the rest of the year, starting out behind the 8-ball in the SEC is one scenario they cannot afford.
The stat: 84.8%
That’s the percentage of all available yards that Tennessee’s offense has accounted for through its first three games, best in the nation per efficiency guru Brian Fremeau. His “available yards” metric measures exactly what it says: Total yards gained as a share of the total yards available to be gained based on field position. (Including penalties, excluding garbage time.) For example, a touchdown drive covers 100% of available yards; a drive that begins on the offense’s own 20-yard line and ends at the opposing 40-yard line covers 50%, etc. Historically, 84.8% is an astounding number, reflecting the Volunteers’ thorough dominance to date.
The caveat, obviously, is that 2 of those games were against a couple of willing lambs to the slaughter, Chattanooga and Kent State. Against Chattanooga, the offense scored on its first 7 possessions, putting up 45 points and 490 yards of total offense before halftime; against Kent State, the Vols scored touchdowns on their first 9 possessions — aided, ruthlessly, by a surprise onside kick with a 30-0 lead — generating 65 points on 541 yards … again, before halftime. But they were also efficient against their one real opponent, NC State, scoring on 8 of their 12 full possessions en route to a 51-10 blowout over the Wolfpack.
The defense played a role in that courtesy of a pick-6 and a couple of 4th-down stops that set up short-field touchdown drives in the second half, but even 3 of the 4 Tennessee possessions that didn’t result in points ended in State territory. Punter Jackson Ross has made just 2 appearances on the season.
Speaking of the defense: Tennessee also ranks No. 1 nationally in available yards allowed, having held opposing offenses to just 13.8% of their potential output and out of the end zone entirely. The next adversity this team faces on either side of the ball will be the first.
The big question: Is Jackson Arnold ready for primetime?
Arnold, on the other hand, has faced a little too much adversity in the early going. The Heisman-or-bust curve for Oklahoma quarterbacks set during the Lincoln Riley years departed with Riley, but by just about any standard Arnold’s first few weeks as the face of the program have been underwhelming. Out of 16 SEC starters with at least 50 drop-backs, he ranks 14th in yards per attempt, 12th in efficiency, and 11th in Total QBR, and that’s against the welterweight phase of the schedule. He’s just 2-for-13 on throws of 20+ air yards (the lowest downfield completion percentage in the conference, per Pro Football Focus); he’s taken nine sacks; and he’s fueled lingering concerns about his ball security by serving up interceptions under duress each of the past 2 weeks, including a pick-6 that gave Tulane life in the fourth quarter of a game the defense had well in hand in Week 3.
TYLER GRUBBS SAID I'LL TAKE THAT!!!! #AmericanWay x @GreenWaveFB pic.twitter.com/yvBgxF8WSL
— The American (@American_Conf) September 14, 2024
Let’s not lose perspective: Recruiting hype notwithstanding, we’re talking a true sophomore signal-caller less than a month into his tenure as a starter. Besides his youth, the silver lining against Tulane was Arnold’s mobility: He finished with a team-high 104 yards (excluding sacks) and 2 touchdowns rushing, and set up another TD on a 47-yard run in the first half. PFF credited him with 6 missed tackles forced and 55 yards after contact in the process. For an attack that hasn’t gotten much so far from its running backs, an athletic QB who doubles as a viable runner is an asset.
More good news: The return of WR Nic Anderson, who is set to make his first appearance of the season after missing the first 3 games with a nagging injury. In 2023, Anderson’s 38 catches on the year yielded 33 first downs, 10 touchdowns and an average gain of 21.0 yards, 4th-best nationally among wideouts with 30+ receptions. Even at Oklahoma, 6-4, 220-pound specimens with that kind of big-play pop don’t grow on trees, and with fellow starter Jalil Farooq still on the shelf the Sooners need all of the juice from Anderson and Purdue transfer Deion Burks they can get.
The key matchup: Nico Iamaleava vs. Brent Venables’ Blitz Packages
Iamaleava’s star has risen so quickly that it’s easy to forget that he, too, is only a true sophomore less than a month into his tenure as a starter, and despite Tennessee’s runaway success on the scoreboard he hasn’t been immune to some youthful hiccups of his own. He threw 2 interceptions in the win over NC State, including a pick-6 on a play where his arm was hit as he released the ball, causing it to flutter. Otherwise, he’s been well-protected against defenses with far less capacity to turn up the heat than Oklahoma’s. Iamaleava’s first true road test in a hostile environment is daunting enough; the fact that it’s coming against a decorated defensive mind with a long track record of scheming up creative ways to get after quarterbacks makes it something like a graduate-level exam.
Oklahoma’s defense doesn’t compare to Venables’ best units at Clemson, by a long shot, but the Sooners do have a similar nose for the ball. They led the Big 12 and tied for 7th nationally with 26 takeaways in 2023 — including 20 interceptions, most in the Power 5 — and they’re tied for the national lead this year with 10 takeaways in 3 games. That number’s skewed a bit by 4 fumble recoveries in the opener against Temple, but it’s consistent with the broader trend: OU has forced multiple turnovers in 11 of 16 games over the past 2 seasons, and that starts with speeding up the quarterback’s process. Iamaleava is almost certainly going to see some things Saturday night he hasn’t before, and probably going to hear some things he’s never heard before from what promises to be a feral crowd. How he handles it will tell us a lot about how far along the growth curve he really is.
The verdict …
The point spread in Tennessee’s favor largely comes down to the perception gap between the quarterbacks. Both the eye test and the stat sheet clearly favor Iamaleava. Is it possible that the level of competition has made that gap look larger than it really is? Sure. Is it possible that exposure to a legit defense and hostile surroundings will take some of the wind out of Iamaleava’s soaring stock? There’s always a chance. Is it possible the Vols landed the real supernova talent of the ’23 quarterback class? We’ll see.
But based on what we’ve seen so far, my money says that Saturday night will be the last time the answer to that last question is TBD.
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• Tennessee 31 | Oklahoma 20
UCLA at LSU (-24.5)
LSU has its own problems, but as the point spread here suggests early indications are that UCLA under first-year coach DeShaun Foster might be straight-up bad. Big Ten media types suspected as much, picking the Bruins to finish 15th out of 18 teams in their preseason poll, and so far they’ve lived down to the expectations. Their first game under Foster, a Week Zero trip to Hawai’i, was a come-from-behind, 16-13 win decided on a last-minute field goal against one of the scrubbier outfits in the FBS. Their second game, against Indiana, was a 42-13 thumping in the Rose Bowl at the hands of 1 of the 3 teams picked to finish below UCLA in the conference. IU quarterback Kurtis Rourke threw for 4 touchdowns and finished with a sky-high 95.5 QBR at the Bruins’ expense. This is a chance for Garrett Nussmeier to look really good on national TV against a recognizable opponent, which frankly he could stand to take advantage of before returning to the thick of SEC play.
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• LSU 44 | UCLA 17
Arkansas at Auburn (-2.5)
Have Auburn fans seen the last of Payton Thorne? Never say never, but there is cautious optimism following redshirt freshman Hank Brown‘s 4-touchdown debut against New Mexico that the Tigers have found a keeper — emphasis on cautious. The degree of difficulty goes way up against Arkansas, an outfit whose role in the conference pecking order this season is to generate chaos behind its own gifted-but-volatile QB, Taylen Green. Both sides in this game remain blank slates after dropping their biggest non-conference tests against Cal and Oklahoma State, respectively, in disappointing fashion. Pending a revelation, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make a really confident prediction involving either one of them the rest of the year.
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• Auburn 31 | Arkansas 27
Florida (-6.5) at Mississippi State
With 4 losses between them already, the Gators and Bulldogs are desperate for a win, but there is desperate and there is desperate. On one side, first-year Mississippi State coach Jeff Lebby is staring down the very real possibility of a winless season in SEC play, and the moribund Gators present arguably his best chance to avoid that fate. But he is not in danger of waking up on Sunday morning to the news he’s been fired if the Bulldogs lose on Saturday.
Billy Napier, by all appearances a dead man walking in Gainesville, cannot say the same.
He can delay the inevitable at least another week by reassuring Florida fans that their team is not literally the worst in the conference. If they can’t even say that much, the team deserves to go ahead and get it over with.
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• Florida 33 | Mississippi State 24
Vanderbilt at Missouri (-20.5)
Vandy’s annual mission to notch an SEC win begins in earnest in Columbia, in a game that looked a lot more interesting before the Commodores’ Week 3 loss at Georgia State. If nothing else, the addition of QB Diego Pavia from New Mexico State has at least made it harder to keep the ‘Dores on the mat. In their Week 1 upset over Virginia Tech, Pavia rallied the offense from a 27-20 deficit in the fourth quarter to a game-tying touchdown at the end of regulation, then scored the go-ahead/game-winning TD in overtime himself. Trailing late against Georgia State, he led 3 4th-quarter touchdown drives, the last of which put Vanderbilt up 32-29 with a little over a minute to go; the defense subsequently gave up the decisive TD on the other end in the dying seconds. Mizzou hopes Saturday’s match is settled well before then, but the longer the ‘Dores manage to hang around the less likely it is they’re going down without a fight.
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Missouri 34 | • Vanderbilt 19
UL-Monroe at Texas (-44.5)
It’s officially Arch o’clock in Austin after Texas confirmed Arch Manning will make his first career start in place of an injured Quinn Ewers. I’m strongly resisting the temptation to play up the idea that a touted understudy filling in for an entrenched QB1 amounts to a “controversy” — make no mistake, Ewers is the starting quarterback — but when a player as hyped as Manning looks as good as he looked last week in his first meaningful action against UT-San Antonio, well, the temptation is real.
I had to stop myself from adding until further notice to the assurance that the job will be waiting for Ewers when he returns from a strained oblique, which could be as soon as next week at Mississippi State or as late as in 3 weeks against Oklahoma, on the other side of an open date. It’s hard to imagine what Manning could do between now and then against middling competition to supplant a Heisman frontrunner whose last full start saw him shred the defending national champs in their building. But then, based on what little we’ve seen of Arch so far, we have to leave open the possibility that he’s the kind of talent capable of expanding the imagination. Let’s watch what happens next, and reassess the gap on the depth chart (or lack thereof) when the time comes.
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Texas 48 | • UL-Monroe 9
Georgia Southern at Ole Miss (-35.5)
Here’s a question I never expected to be asking during the Lane Kiffin administration: Can the Rebels complete the nonconference slate without giving up a touchdown? Ole Miss’ defense is 1 of 4 nationally that has yet to allow an opposing offense to reach the end zone, along with Georgia, Ohio State and Tennessee. (The lone touchdown scored against the Vols came via pick-6.) For its part, Georgia Southern has been perfectly cromulent on offense, including a 45-point effort in the season opener, a shootout loss at Boise State. But adjusting for the talent gap, the way Ole Miss is playing, merely cracking double digits in Oxford seems ambitious.
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• Ole Miss 52 | Georgia Southern 10
Bowling Green at Texas A&M (-22.5)
QB intrigue in the state of Texas is not limited to Austin. Mike Elko has kept his cards close to his vest this week concerning Texas A&M’s quarterback situation, declining to name a starter for Saturday and suggesting he’s not in any hurry to tip his hand. (On Thursday he told reporters the starter will “likely be a game-time decision for the rest of the season.”) The dark horse in the race, redshirt freshman Marcel Reed, made his move in Week 3, accounting for 261 yards and 3 touchdowns in a convincing road win at Florida while starter Conner Weigman nursed a sore shoulder. Taken with Weigman’s Week 1 meltdown against Notre Dame, it’s a real race that no one saw coming prior to the season, and the first big decision of Elko’s tenure — whenever he gets around to making it.
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• Texas A&M 41 | Bowling Green 16
Akron at South Carolina (-27.5)
Poor Akron. Since the start of the 2019 season the Zips are a depressing 4-50 against FBS opponents, the worst winning percentage in the country in that span. At least they’ve been (slightly) more competitive under former Mississippi State coach Joe Moorhead, with 10 of their 22 losses in Moorhead’s tenure coming by single digits, including a 4-overtime heartbreaker at Indiana in 2023. Those Hoosiers, not coincidentally, went on to finish in last place in the Big Ten and fired their coach. Meanwhile, in Akron’s first 2 FBS games this year it was outscored by a combined 78 points by Ohio State and Rutgers. If Saturday’s tilt is still competitive after halftime, something has gone badly wrong for the Gamecocks.
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• South Carolina 45 | Akron 10
Ohio at Kentucky (-19.5)
MAC Week comes at exactly the right time for Kentucky, which failed to reach the end zone in either of its back-to-back home losses against South Carolina and Georgia. However much of the blame for that falls on QB Brock Vandagriff, the UK offensive line owns at least an equal share. Vandagriff faced pressure on 27 of his 51 drop-backs the past 2 weeks, per PFF, including 6 sacks. Ohio U. doesn’t have anywhere near the kind of athletes along the front line as the dudes who gave Kentucky so much trouble against Carolina and Georgia, but the Bobcats do boast a productive threat off the edge in senior Bradley Weaver, who’s generated an FBS-best 18 QB pressures through 3 weeks. If the tackles continue to struggle against a third-team All-MAC type, it’s red-alert time.
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Kentucky 30 | • Ohio 13
Scoreboard
Week 3 record: 11-2 straight-up | 8-5 vs. spread
Season record: 38-6 straight-up | 28-13 vs. spread
Matt Hinton, author of 'Monday Down South' and our resident QB guru, has previously written for Dr. Saturday, CBS and Grantland.
