The Worst of SEC Football in Week 7

No fancy intro here. Just a quick look at five of the worst things that happened in Week 7 of the 2021 SEC football season.

By Steve Wright

5 – Vanderbilt vs. South Carolina
This just really wasn’t good football. Plenty of punting (admittedly with one going for 70 yards), fumbles when players are looking to break into the clear, failed fourth down red zone plays, and badly missed tackles leading to touchdowns. It led to some exciting stuff, but the overall feeling was one that these are two squads in serious rebuild mode that need breaks to stay in games.

4 – Kentucky screen blocking
There is a play in the Kentucky game at Georgia where the Wildcats are down 24-7 and have second and goal at the Georgia 10 yard line. The screen to Christ Rodriguez – a beast of a back – is perfectly set. Will Levis finds him with three blockers in front and one defender out there covering. The problem is that none of the blockers did much of anything as Nakobe Dean knifes through the wall to stop Rodriguez for a five-yard loss. If you want to argue it is an insane play by Dean I will listen, but the play should have been a touchdown.

3 – Ed Orgeron at LSU
This “parting of ways” would have been much easier to reconcile if Orgeron and LSU had just done the right thing – as far as the school’s administration is concerned – and lost to Florida in a blowout. Instead, LSU is removing from his position a coach with a 74% winning record who is 21 months removed from a National Title and the greatest single season in the history of the program. It is an awkward and messy split – one that neither side comes out of looking particularly good – and you can only imagine that behind closed doors is where this really fell to pieces.

2 – Kentucky’s fumble awareness
It might seem like I’m picking on Kentucky here but this was ridiculous. Playing to the whistle is something you are taught as a child, yet after a Stetson Bennett fumble no less than four Kentucky players watched the ball and allowed Georgia to recover. Sure, it looked at the time like it was a forward pass and not a fumble, but a video review showed the ball was out. The dominance of Georgia overall meant that this didn’t matter, but it was a bad look for a usually impeccably coached squad.

1 – Tennessee trash incident
It is never okay to react to a call like this. Sure, emotions were high – it is college football – and Vols fans have every right to boo whoever they want, but stopping a game being played for 20 minutes by littering the field with trash and other debris is not okay. The final call was one that could have gone either way after the Vols picked up either 23 or 24 yards on a 4th and 24 depending on where you think the ball was when Jacob Warren was tackled, but the Vols will be on the right side of calls like that plenty of times this season too.