Happy Monday from the void, where there are no games and yet somehow the SEC never shuts up.
Let's start with the most beautiful scheduling coincidence of the summer: today is the SEC Network's official Florida Takeover day, an annual tradition in which every SEC program gets a full-day marathon of its greatest 2025 hits. The Gators' day kicked off at midnight with their upset win over Texas — yes, that Texas, the one with Arch Manning and a war chest the size of a small nation — which, per the SEC Network itself, played 'a big role in knocking the Longhorns out of the College Football Playoff.' So if you're a Texas fan, you spent your Fourth of July weekend getting ready to watch your team roll to a playoff berth, and you woke up Monday to the entire SEC Network running a six-hour celebration of the worst moment of your 2025 season. The takeover concluded with Florida's win over Florida State in November, which sent interim head coach Billy Gonzalez off into the sunset with a W on his résumé. Bold of the SEC Network to program a eulogy, but here we are.
Meanwhile, Steve Sarkisian is still out here living in the aftermath of the 'basket weaving' saga, in which he told anyone who would listen that all you need to graduate from Ole Miss is to take one craft class and sign on the dotted line. Sark has since clarified — multiple times, at multiple podiums, to increasingly indifferent audiences — that he 'could have used macroeconomics,' that the class was 'irrelevant,' that his two best friends coach at Ole Miss, and that he basically loves Oxford. Florida's new head coach Jon Sumrall, a former Ole Miss assistant, dunked on him publicly from X within hours of the original quote, and Stephen A. Smith piled on nationally. All of this from a coach who missed the playoff. With Arch Manning. Sir, the basket weaving department is not your problem.
Over on the recruiting trail, Texas A&M entered July ranked No. 1 nationally with 25 commitments and a 68 percent blue-chip ratio, which is the kind of number that would make any other fanbase ecstatic and makes Aggie Twitter merely cautiously optimistic, because they have been promised the promised land before. Lane Kiffin's LSU, by contrast, just watched five-star edge rusher Jaiden Bryant — who was 'locked in' with the Tigers since January and said so out loud — visit Miami for a weekend and immediately flip his commitment to the Hurricanes. The kid had 29.5 sacks in two high school seasons and apparently all it took was one weekend with Mario Cristobal and Jason Taylor to undo six months of Kiffin charm. To Kiffin's credit, LSU turned around and landed five-star edge KJ Green off their official visit weekend, so the 2027 class isn't dead, it's just chaotic — which, frankly, is exactly the kind of recruiting environment you sign up for when you hire Lane Kiffin.
Ole Miss, for its part, picked up a commitment from a highly-recruited edge rusher of their own yesterday, continuing to recruit just fine despite being publicly roasted by Sarkisian, Kiffin, and Dabo Swinney in the span of about three months. At some point you have to respect the Rebels' ability to absorb national embarrassment and keep cashing portal checks. That's not basket weaving. That's actually kind of impressive.
