Key SEC clashes highlight weekend NCAA slate on TSN

A pair of meaningful SEC clashes highlight TSN's NCAA football offerings on Saturday with Alabama visiting Kentucky and Georgia hosting Ole Miss. Plus, Florida rivals FSU and Miami meet in Tallahassee. Here's a look at what's on tap this weekend.

No. 8 Alabama (8-1) vs. Kentucky (6-3), Saturday at Noon ET/9am PT on TSN5 - Don't look now, but Alabama is once again starting to feel inevitable. There have been stretches this season where Nick Saban's Crimson Tide haven't looked convincing, but the team is coming off of back-to-back good wins over SEC rivals Tennessee and LSU and has a swagger about them that wasn't there in the early going. Particularly impressive in the 42-28 over the Tigers was quarterback Jalen Milroe. After being benched following the team's 34-24 Week 2 defeat against Texas, the starter's job is once again firmly Milroe's and he demonstrated his prodigious talent against LSU, throwing for 219 yards and rushing for 150 yards and four touchdowns. The win has left Bama's path forward very clear: “Maybe win the West, maybe get in the SEC Championship Game and who knows what happens from there?” Saban said after the game. Winning the West begins with a trip to Lexington on Saturday. Mark Stoops' Wildcats are coming off of a comprehensive 24-3 victory over Mississippi State last weekend. While the Tide ran for 288 yards against the Tigers, the might have more difficulty operating on the ground against a stout Wildcats' rush defence. "They don't have a lot of complicated pressures on regular downs, good third-down package, but because they play two 4is and a zero-nose and they've got these big guys in there it's hard to run the ball inside and because they've got those big guys standing on the edges it's also harder to get the ball on the perimeter sometimes," Saban said of Kentucky on his weekly radio show. "That's why they're very good against the run. The reason they play zone, they keep people in front, they don't give up a lot of big plays. I think their big play ratio is one of the tops in the country, how many big plays they make versus how many they give up. So you've got to be patient against teams like this and take what they give you and we've got to do a great job of finishing up front. We've got to get movement on these big guys and that's going to be a real challenge for our offence line." After the Wildcats, Bama finishes its season with Chatanooga and Auburn in the Iron Bowl. Should they win out, they will play in the SEC Championship Game and a victory there will very likely get the Tide into an eighth College Football Playoff in the past 10 years.

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Miami (6-3) vs. No. 4 Florida State (9-0), Saturday at 3:30pm ET/12:30 pm PT on TSN+ - The latest chapter of one of the ACC's great rivalries will be written in Tallahassee on Saturday afternoon when Mike Norvell's undefeated Florida State hosts Miami. The Seminoles have a very real shot at an undefeated season, but standing in their way over their final three games will be two team who would love nothing more than to take that away in Mario Cristobal's Hurricanes and Florida in their regular-season finale (FSU plays North Alabama in between on Nov. 18). Norvell said this week that the intra-Florida games are the once he's most excited about.  “There are only two games I talk about before the season and I talk about them before our offseason,” Norvell told reporters on Wednesday. “Every day matters when it comes to that. If that’s not important to you, then you’re not going to play in this game. You will get exposed. This game takes everything you have." The game on Saturday afternoon will be the 68th meeting between the two schools since their first matchup in 1951. The Hurricanes hold a modest 35-32 edge with FSU winning the past two straight after four Miami victories. Last year, the Noles hammered Miami 45-3. The game is a special one for quarterback Jordan Travis whose campaign this season has been built on a strong showing in 2022.  “We talk about at the beginning of the year, there are two games that mean the most to us,” Travis said on Wednesday. “It's Florida, Miami... We know what comes with this game, there's going to be a lot of energy, but at the same time, we have to keep the main thing the thing it is a football game and we have to focus on the play in front of us and keep our emotions under control." Travis, in his fifth season after transferring from Louisville, has emerged as a serious Heisman candidate. In nine games this season, he's thrown for 2,469 yards on 186-for-289 passing with 19 touchdowns and a pair of interceptions. He's added 190 yards and seven majors on the ground. Right now, Travis sits third at +800 on FanDuel in Heisman odds, behind only co-favourites Bo Nix of Oregon and Washington's Michael Penix Jr. at +180. The Noles have made it to only a single College Football Playoff in 2015, a year after winning their last National Championship in 2014. Closing out the regular season undefeated and a win in the ACC Championship Game, a game in which they've already clinched a berth, will assuredly bring FSU to their second.

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No. 10 Ole Miss (8-1) vs. No. 1 Georgia (9-0), Saturday at 7pm ET/4pm PT on TSN+ - Kirby Smart is well aware that the last team to win three straight National Championships was Minnesota in 1936. He knows this because he's been asked about it ever since Georgia won their second straight national title last January. As we approach the final weeks of the season with the Dawgs still undefeated, the questions are going to keep coming for Smart and his team. On the precipice of three straight consecutive undefeated regular seasons, Lane Kiffin's Ole Miss might be all that is standing in the way. The Rebs' lone loss in 2023 came in Week 4 against Alabama and with only UL-Monroe and Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl remaining in their season, a win over UGA makes a spot in a first-ever SEC Championship Game a real possibility (with some help, of course). The game will be the first ever meeting between Smart and Kiffin. Kiffin says he feels loose heading into the game against the Dawgs. "I think you've got to watch that you don't give off a tight, nervous vibe to your team," Kiffin told ESPN's Chris Low this week. "As I've looked back at the two road trips like this with elite teams, the two times we went to Alabama, the players could feel me get uptight and we played that way. "I don't feel like that this week." That could work in the Rebs' favour with Georgia having not lost a home game since 2019 and having reeled off 26 straight victories at Sanford Stadium. Kiffin was effusive in praise for what his counterpart has done with the Dawgs as the new driving force of SEC football. "What Kirby has done from a recruiting standpoint and the consistency on offense and defense is really amazing," he said. "Everybody thinks defence when they think about Georgia, and they're great on defence. But they've put up really good offensive numbers the last few years and that wasn't always necessarily the case in [Nick] Saban's run [with Bama] where it initially was great defense and some really good offensive players, but not a system where a lot of points were being scored. Georgia has done all of it." This will be the first meeting between the two teams in seven seasons with the Rebs claiming a 45-14 win last time out in 2016. It was their first win in 10 games against UGA. The Dawgs are 32-13-1 all-time against Mississippi.

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