Week 7 Picks

We are now starting the second half of the college football season. As noted other places, we wait all year for this and then it goes by in a flash. The second half of the season will be much more interesting than the first half for most of the teams in the SEC especially Auburn. We will really find out what Auburn and most of the rest of the SEC is really made of. I went
I went 4-1 last week in games against BCS opponents and am 21-7 for the season in games against BCS opponents. Let's get the second half started...

Kentucky at Auburn
The Wildcats limp into Auburn without their starting QB Mike Hartline and several key defensive players. They are 0-3 in the SEC after having to start with Bama and Florida and then losing a close one to South Carolina last week. Coach Rich Brooks has proven over the last few years that he has a little left in the tank and made Kentucky a more solid program. However he is sort of starting all over with this year's team and it will be interesting to see if he can build them up again. Of course it is hard to tell exactly how good Kentucky is when they start against Bama and Florida. Everyone looks bad against those guys. However I still think this Kentucky team is more of a rebuilding one.

Meanwhile Auburn is glad to be back home playing at night after last weekend's lunch time debacle at Arkansas. Auburn's talent and depth usually looks really thin against most SEC opponents but not against Kentucky and all their injuries. Auburn is the better on both sides of the ball although the edge is slight on defense. Most Auburn fans are really wanting the defense to be more aggressive. Gene Chizik made some curious comments this week about not being able to blitz as much and be as aggressive because of Auburn's depth problems. I don't really understand his point. It seems to me that if you are really aggressive you are going to stop them or they are going to score quickly. Auburn needs some quick stops and they are already letting opponents score quickly playing so vanilla. I just don't understand it. A defense has to be aggressive. To me, taking that away puts you behind from the start.

With that said I expect the Auburn offense to return to form against UK's depleted defense but I also expect UK's offense to have their best outing of the season. I expect a 40-something to 20-something game here with...
AUBURN OVER KENTUCKY

Arkansas at Florida
Arkansas showed again last week that Bobby Petrino knows what he is doing on offense. QB Ryan Mallett showed his promise although he missed a lot of easy passes. Arkansas enters the last third of their grueling six game stretch. They lost the first two against Georgia and Bama and then won the last two against Texas A&M and Auburn. They now look to at least split against Florida and Ole Miss. While they looked much better last week I think they will have to look to that Ole Miss game for their next win. I do not expect their defense to play as well as they did last week and I expect Mallett to struggle some on the road against a really good defense like he did against Bama.

Florida won a big one last week against LSU and as I noted in my last post, Coach Urban Meyer went away from his long standing strategy of trying to get as many plays as possible on offense. He went more traditional running the ball and shortened the game relying on his defense. I look for more of the same this week although you will definitely see Tebow hit a few long passes against the less-than-stellar Arkansas defense. It will be close early like last year but Florida will pull away late...
FLORIDA OVER ARKANSAS

South Carolina at Bama
Unfortunately like every week, the team Bama opposes doesn't seem to match up with them too well. The problem is when you have a defense as good as Bama and then they have several stellar playmakers on offense they are just going to be hard to beat. South Carolina DC Ellis Johnson has proven he is one of the better coordinators in the SEC over the last few years. He should slow down the Bama offense some however once again the South Carolina offense looks a little short on playmakers. QB Stephen Garcia has improved and is playing much better but overall the offense is in the bottom half of the SEC.

Add to that the fact that South Carolina has imploded down the stretch just about every year but Spurrier's first year there. They will not start this second half good either...
BAMA OVER SOUTH CAROLINA

Elsewhere...
GEORGIA OVER VANDY
OLE MISS OVER UAB
MISS ST OVER MTSU

LSU AND TENNESSEE ARE OFF THIS WEEK