COLUMN: No clear SEC favorite after first weekend

By By Austin Biship
EMG regional sports director
Mulling through many musings on a Monday morning while wondering whatever happened to John Fourcade …
If you were looking for the first weekend of the college football season to help clarify the favorites in the Southeastern Conference, then you are just plain out of luck unlike LSU, which rode it's own good luck and the bad luck of Oregon State place-kicker Alexis Serna to take a 22-21 win.
Serna missed three extra points, including one in overtime, to help stymie his Beavers' hopes of upsetting the defending National Champions.
While it was a win, the one-point victory was not enough to solidify LSU as the absolute favorite in the SEC West.
In fact, I'm not sure who in the heck can win the West. LSU is the most likely candidate, but nothing that happened on Saturday pushed anybody to the top of my list.
Alabama did have an impressive win over Utah State (that's not Utah, as in the team that beat USM in the Liberty Bowl and hammered Texas A&M to start the season), and Arkansas mashed a mud hole in New Mexico State to the tune of 63-13, while Auburn was blanking that Louisiana football powerhouse from Monroe 31-0.
State won it's opener over Tulane and Ole Miss lost to Memphis by seven to wrap up the efforts of the West division folks.
LSU was my preseason favorite to win the West, mostly because of what the Tigers did last year and the fact that nobody else in that division really throws a scare into me.
Georgia is everybody's favorite to win the East, including mine, but I wouldn't consider giving up 28 points to Georgia Southern in a 20-point win to be all that impressive.
The Bulldogs are good, but need to get better in a hurry especially defensively.
The SEC East will have a showdown in a hurry when Georgia and South Carolina hook up this week.
The Gamecocks were impressive in week one with a 31-6 win over Vanderbilt, a team many (including myself) thought might finish in the top three in the East.
Florida's opener was delayed by a little thing called a hurricane, while Tennessee opened Sunday night after this column was written
Kentucky probably wishes it didn't open on Sunday and the Wildcats most certainly hope nobody was watching as they got their behinds handed to them 28-0 by Louisville on national television.
To top it off Louisville, which called a time out to score late in last year's whipping of UK, took a knee inside the 5-yard line at the end of the game on fourth down to keep from scoring again.
Ouch! That had to hurt.
After watching that fiasco, it looks like the Mildcats will be at the bottom of the SEC East.
This may be the most wide open the SEC has been in years, and I'm not sure it's because the league is that much stronger, I just think it's harder to get a handle on how strong the teams are.
This week's SEC games have Mississippi State hosting Auburn in the Jefferson-Pilot TV game at 11:30 a.m., Ole Miss visiting Alabama at 8 p.m., LSU hosting Arkansas State, Arkansas hosting Texas, Georgia visiting South Carolina, Florida hosting Eastern Michigan and Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Kentucky all talking the week off.