Now that college basketball is pretty much over (for most major programs), it’s time to put all of our focus on college football. For SEC football fans, it’s time to start thinking about which team(s) is going to represent the conference in the playoff.
If you’re a fan of Alabama or Georgia, the first thought is, “It’s going to be us.”
If you’re a fan of programs like Tennessee, LSU, or even Texas A&M, you have some confidence (maybe less if you’re an Aggie fan) that this will be your year. Every single team listed above has a fighter’s chance, but you also can’t sleep on Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky, or Ole Miss.
There’s going to be an absolute dogfight for the SEC East as well as the SEC West title.
Usually the team that wins each division is led by the best head coach — usually. There are always exceptions, but the conference has several really good coaches. Heck, you could even argue that every single team has a good coach.
But some of these good coaches are far too overrated by the national media and even their own fanbase.
Which three SEC head coaches are the most overrated heading into the 2023 season?
Let me preface this one by saying that I think Josh Heupel is a very good coach, but the fact that everyone is already saying he’s the third or fourth-best in the SEC after just one good season is a little ridiculous.
Look, Heupel has brought excitement back to Rocky Top and the Volunteers are no longer pushovers. They’re no longer the laughingstock of the SEC. But let’s pump the brakes a little bit before we just crown him the third-best coach in the conference because he had one really good season following a 7-6 opening year.
Heupel is a good recruiter and has shown he can develop players at a high level (Hendon Hooker), but let’s see if he can do what he did in 2022 once again in 2023 with an unproven quarterback leading the way. And if he can’t repeat that success in 2023, let’s see if he can bounce back in 2024. If he can’t, we’ll look back on all of this hype and feel duped.
I think Heupel is going to hover around 9-10 wins this season and that should be the expectation for Tennessee, but I’m hesitant to place all the trust in a coach who got worse every year at UCF before taking the job in Knoxville.
I already know I’m going to get some hate for this one, but I just don’t know if I can jump on the “Mark Stoops is one of the top four coaches in the SEC” bandwagon until I see more consistency from him.
I get it, he’s coaching at a school that values the basketball program more and that’s where most of the resources go, but he has shown you can win football games in Lexington. But I can’t tell if the ceiling at Kentucky is 10 wins or if that’s just Stoops’ ceiling.
Stoops didn’t have a winning season until year four, but I can’t fault him for that because the Kentucky football program was in the gutter. He then won seven games in back-to-back seasons before notching his first 10-win campaign in 2018. The Wildcats went just 13-11 over the next two seasons before winning 10 games again in 2021. How did they follow that up? By winning just seven games in 2022.
Kentucky football is more respectable now under Stoops than it was before him, but I’m not sure that he’s worthy of the distinction of being right behind Nick Saban and Kirby Smart in everyone’s SEC football coach rankings every year despite mediocre finishes most of the time.
For the second straight year, Jimbo Fisher makes my list of most overrated SEC football coaches and it really shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point.
The only real question is: does anyone even rate Fisher anymore?
I would say that Fisher will always be somewhat overrated because of the national title that he won at Florida State and that’s fair. It’s not easy to win a national title and Fisher’s 2013 team was special but he hasn’t even sniffed that same type of success since. It’s been 10 years and it feels like he’s a completely different coach.
After an 83-23 tenure at Florida State, he took the Texas A&M job and has gone just 39-21 in five years. He’s never won more than nine games in a single season but he’s also only won fewer than eight games once (a bowl-less 2022 season).
That may not seem horrible, but for a coach who got the contract that Fisher did as well as the talent that he’s bringing in with every recruiting class, it’s far short of expectations.
Was Fisher just better suited for the ACC? That’s possible, but his time seems to be running out at Texas A&M. He could only skate by on his national title from a decade ago for so long.