There are exactly two weeks left until training camp oxygen enters the bloodstream of the college football internet, and SEC fans are handling the wait with their usual grace and restraint. Meaning: nobody is handling it at all.
Greg McElroy started his Thursday with a declaration that deserves a permanent place in the June Football Coping archive: Alabama, he says, will have the best pass defense in the SEC this fall. Not top five. Not in conversation. The best. McElroy noted that the Tide finished top 10 nationally in passing yards allowed last season and return all five starting defensive backs, calling the group "a really complete unit" with "multiple years of chemistry between players." He even preemptively hedged it against Notre Dame and Georgia's secondaries, which tells you he knows how this sounds. The advanced metrics politely disagree — Alabama finished 43rd in pass defense efficiency rating and 30th in EPA-per-pass allowed last season — but that's not the point. The point is that it is June 18, the man has a microphone, and he is going to use it in the service of Alabama content. Respect the commitment to the bit.
Meanwhile, the dumbest subplot of this SEC offseason continues to percolate. Colton Nussmeier — four-star quarterback, Georgia commit, son of Saints offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier, younger brother of newly-drafted Chiefs QB Garrett Nussmeier — was ruled ineligible for his entire senior high school season in Texas this week. His family says they moved from Flower Mound to Denton for family reasons. His former coach signed the PAPF form saying the transfer was for athletic purposes. The DEC vote tied 3-3, which kicked the decision back to the form, which said no dice. So the No. 17-ranked quarterback in the country now has no program to play for with two months until Week 1, while his UIL appeal works through bureaucratic purgatory. Texas high school football operates like a rogue sovereign entity with its own judicial branch, and the Nussmeier family is learning this the hard way. The family insists they signed a Denton lease in April and are actively selling their Flower Mound house. Maybe! But in UIL-land, intent is determined by a 3-3 committee vote and a form filled out by your old coach, and you're welcome to your appeal.
And the Lane Kiffin-Steve Sarkisian-Ole Miss industrial chaos complex refuses to mercifully die. The Kiffin Vanity Fair profile — in which an SEC coach sat for four hours with a magazine that typically covers fashion week, and casually explained that Black families had told him Oxford wasn't somewhere they wanted to send their sons — has spent weeks reverberating through the conference. Sarkisian piled on by telling USA Today that "all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree," then apologized, then clarified that his actual point was about academic transfer credit inequity. Both men have now offered some version of an apology to Oxford, Mississippi. Both apologies have done approximately nothing to reduce the energy building toward the Texas-Ole Miss matchup on October 24 in Austin, a game that is currently carrying about six months of emotional baggage that no football game should legally be required to hold. New coach Pete Golding over in Oxford is probably nailing a bulletin board together as you read this.
It's mid-June. Nobody has played a down. Everyone is completely cooked. The SEC wouldn't have it any other way.
