Three-Point Stance: Week 1 review, recruiting thoughts, SEC

Rivals.com National Recruiting Director Mike Farrell’s Three-Point Stance is here with thoughts on the weekend’s games, some random recruiting thoughts and an early overreaction about the SEC.

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There’s a lot to unpack from the first full weekend of college football, but let's begin with the losses everyone is talking about – Tennessee and Florida State. The Vols lost to an awful Georgia State team and everyone is freaking out, calling it one of the worst upsets in college football history. Let’s pump the brakes a little bit. Yes, Georgia State was 2-10 last season, and yes some had the Vols going to a bowl game in Jeremy Pruitt’s second season as head coach. But I didn’t see that. I thought Tennessee would struggle this season as Pruitt tries to overhaul a roster that has some talent but has no idea how to win football games and fight through adversity.

Should the Vols have lost to Georgia State? No way. However, I’m not ready to start calling out Pruitt and his staff for the hot seat and all that, as many are. It will take consistent recruiting, which the Vols are showing under Pruitt, but more importantly a complete overhaul of the roster to bring guys in who aren’t used to losing. That takes time. Will Tennessee compete in the SEC East anytime soon? Not in the next few years, but given time Pruitt can get them there. If they give up on him after three or four seasons it will be like starting all over again.

FSU’s loss was not a pretty one either, but certainly not near the caliber or magnitude of the Tennessee loss. Boise State is a good program with a good coach and freshman quarterback Hank Bachmeier was a four-star and Rivals250 prospect for a reason. The problem is that FSU was outcoached in the game, and Willie Taggart has yet to prove he can lead a talented roster to victory. Even if FSU has another losing season, and I don’t think they will, there is no way they get rid of him after two years. However, patience is growing very thin and FSU shouldn’t be losing games like this.

How about those freshman quarterbacks? Bachmeier leads his team to victory, Sam Howell does the same at UNC and Bo Nix delivers in the clutch for Auburn. And let’s not forget Jayden Daniels and his strong performance for Arizona State and Max Duggan showing flashes for TCU. Quarterbacks are more ready than ever to make an impact, as we saw from Trevor Lawrence last year and coaches know they have to play their big-time commits at the position or lose them to the transfer portal. And strong debuts from players like Justin Fields, Jacob Eason and Jalen Hurts for their new teams show how important the portal has become.

The North Carolina win over South Carolina is a big one for the Heels in the recruiting department as both programs recruit the same territory often and Mack Brown is already off to a hot start when it comes to keeping regional players interested in UNC. Any improvement on a 2-9 season would have been acceptable and now you can say, barring a complete meltdown, Brown will have some good reasons to point to when it comes to comparing the arc of his program against Will Muschamp and the Gamecocks. Of course, Clemson is still out there, but that’s a challenge for a much different day. The win for UNC over the Gamecocks will be a recruiting boost.

Teams that were hurt from Week 1 losses in recruiting – Tennessee, Florida State, Purdue, South Carolina, Missouri and a few others. One game doesn’t define recruiting, nor does it make a decision for a prospect being recruited for four or more years by a school, but when your loss is called out by the national media, recruits notice.

Oklahoma should be able to pick and choose any quarterback they want in the coming years. They already have the nation’s No. 2 player in Brock Vandagriff for the 2021 class and I expect recruiting at the position to be quite easy as long as Lincoln Riley is the head coach. What Baker Mayfield did was impressive. What Kyler Murray did was perhaps even more impressive in just one year. But Jalen Hurts? We all know he’s a great athlete but he already looks like a much more accomplished passer through one game of the season. There’s something magical in the quarterback development in Norman under Riley.

UCLA had a rough loss in their season opener against a talented Cincinnati team and it won’t help recruiting much, but Chip Kelly and company are recruiting strangely anyhow. They don’t seem to be in it much for the biggest names on the West Coast and last year they took some odd recruits, reaches as we say in the industry. USC is equally puzzling this year and a narrow season-opening win won’t help Clay Helton much.

Georgia could land two five-star running backs in Kendall Milton and Zachary Evans and could do the unthinkable – land two five-star tight ends in Arik Gilbert and Darnell Washington, although that seems less likely. The only other teams you can mention in the same recruiting stratosphere as the Bulldogs under Kirby Smart are Alabama and Clemson. That’s it.

OK here it goes – the SEC is overrated. Hear me out. I’ll give you Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Texas A&M and maybe Florida as legit Top 25 teams. But after that? Maybe you can make a case for Auburn, as it pulled out a big win against Oregon. But let’s be honest – the Ducks lost that game more than Auburn won it.

And after that? Ole Miss loses to Memphis, South Carolina loses to UNC, Tennessee loses to Georgia State and Missouri loses to Wyoming. Meanwhile, Kentucky struggles against Toledo, Mississippi State gets a scare from Louisiana and Arkansas barely defeats Portland State.

Yes, I know it’s Week 1 and teams are working off of limited practice time and shaking off the rust, but this looks like to me a five-team league with the rest padding their records beating awful teams and each other. Georgia will win the East, Alabama will win the West and the league will send a ton of teams to bowl games and end up with seven or eight ranked in the Top 25 by season’s end. But I don’t see the depth of talent in the conference this year that I have in the past, and some programs could regress. Not an impressive Week 1 (or zero) for the SEC.