It's the first full week of summer chaos season, and the SEC is delivering on schedule. Let's begin with the horror show in Oxford, Mississippi, where Pete Golding's program watched four-star commit Ben'Jarvis Shumaker announce he was "shutting down his recruitment" with Ole Miss — and then, not even 24 hours later, flip to Colorado. Colorado. Deion Sanders' Colorado. The same program that went 3-9 last season and still shows up to NIL negotiations like they just cut the nets down. Rebels fans woke up Tuesday thinking they had their guy locked in and went to bed watching him wave goodbye from Boulder. This is now the sixth decommit out of Ole Miss's 2027 class, a slow-motion implosion that started the moment Lane Kiffin bolted for Baton Rouge and Pete Golding inherited the wreckage. Great timing, sir. The pieces are skipping conference lines to play for Coach Prime.
Speaking of Lane Kiffin, let's check in on his situation at LSU, where the first-year Tiger head coach is working with a skeletal four-commit, 2027 class — down a five-star EDGE and down in the 247Sports team rankings after a high-profile flip earlier this summer. The good news for LSU fans is that Kiffin landed the top transfer portal class in the country for 2026, which means your immediate future is stacked. The bad news is that your long-term future keeps taking official visits to other zip codes and posting cryptic Instagram stories about it afterward.
Meanwhile, in Austin, Steve Sarkisian continues his quiet campaign to turn the Longhorns into an SEC program before they've had to survive a full season of one. Texas flipped four-star defensive tackle Tyler Alexander on Tuesday — a kid who, by all accounts, had Georgia as the clear leader in his recruitment as recently as last week. As recently as last week. Kirby Smart's staff watched this one walk out the door for Austin and now has to explain it to a fanbase that was already in collective therapy from watching Texas steal multiple Georgia natives in this cycle. At some point, Georgia fans are going to set up a perimeter around their state, hand out "Georgia Only" lanyards at the county line, and personally escort any recruit away from Sarkisian's handshake radius. For now, though, Texas just keeps waltzing into the Peach State and helping itself.
All of this is unfolding against the perpetual backdrop of the Big Ten and SEC's increasingly exhausting playoff expansion feud. The 12-team format lives another year after the two biggest conferences couldn't get past their fundamental disagreement: Sankey wants 16 teams with maximum at-large spots — which, shockingly, would benefit the SEC — and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti won't budge below 24. So here we are, two powerful men standing in a hallway arguing about a door size while the sport burns around them. Texas head coach Sarkisian, for his part, floated the absolutely unhinged suggestion of going back to a four-team playoff, which tells you everything you need to know about how Austin feels about the current selection committee after getting bounced last year with a 9-3 record.
And in Tuscaloosa, because Alabama cannot simply let a Tuesday pass without reminding everyone they exist, Kalen DeBoer's staff quietly hired Louisville graduate assistant Noah Fisher as an assistant tight ends coach. Fisher comes over from Jeff Brohm's Cardinals staff and will reunite with tight ends coach Richard Owens, who made the same trip from Louisville earlier this spring. The Tide are two months from playing football and are still vacuuming up ACC staffers for depth. Just normal stuff. Nothing to see here. Roll Tide.
