SEC Power Rankings after week 4: Vols near bottom

Just like the Vanderbilt Commodores, the Mississippi State Bulldogs had a terribly poor showing against one of the top teams in our SEC Power Rankings, forcing us to drop them. Dan Mullen’s team made us look much worse, though, than the Commodores did.

We had the Bulldogs as the No. 1 team in our power rankings after their destruction of the LSU Tigers last week. After all, they had far and away the most impressive quality win of any team in the conference at the time.

This team was giving off vibes similar to the 2014 team, and Nick Fitzgerald was bringing back shades of Dak Prescott.

Well, that changed on Saturday.

The Bulldogs got torched by, well, the Bulldogs. Fitzgerald looked lost throwing the ball, and that forced us to knock our opinions of him a bit.

However, there’s no reason to panic. Mississippi State’s spread can struggle against 3-4 defenses as complex as what Kirby Smart runs at Georgia. And they’ll only face that one more time this year, at home against Alabama.

So we didn’t feel the need to drop them outside of the top four of our rankings. After all, that quality win over LSU still counts for something. And the defense is still pretty solid as long as it gets some help from the offense, which it usually does.

Everybody else on their schedule is beatable. However, we’ll know how legitimate they are this weekend with another huge road game against the next team in our SEC Power Rankings.