Morning Six Pack: September 9, 2012

Howdy. Welcome to the SEC, y’all. Cold, clear and crisp… Six college football stories from around the country.

Georgia welcomes Mizzou to SEC with smash-mouth win in Columbia

A man approached Mike Slive in the back of the press box at halftime of Saturday night's Georgia-Missouri game. He wore a Missouri T-short. He beamed with a giddy smile.

Driskel Passes Difficult Test in First Career Start

The start was good. The finish was better.

La.-Monroe Beats No. 8 Arkansas 34-31

Going to Auburn…

Georgia runs away late, spoils Mizzou's SEC debut

Aaron Murray hit Marlon Brown for two of his three touchdown passes, the second for the go-ahead score as No. 7 Georgia recover from a shaky start with 32 second-half points that spoiled Missouri's SEC debut.

Big upset wins nothing new for UCLA, but what's the encore?

In the long, unhappy tale of UCLA football trying to emerge as a relevant entity, there have been these kinds of victories before.

Quotable:

A closer look reveals a lot. Alabama was decent defensively, especially considering that two All-Southeastern Conference defenders, cornerback Dee Milliner (hip flexor) and nose tackle Jesse Williams (concussion) didn't play at all. But there probably isn't a team in college football that could thrive, or even survive, with four turnovers against Alabama. Western Kentucky certainly couldn't.
More worrisome, perhaps, was the offense. Again, it is a pesky half-empty/half-full situation. Was Western Kentucky actually pretty good, as Saban spent a week warning everyone in terms as ominous as if he had been the Weather Channel announcing Hurricane Hilltopper on the horizon, bearing down with Katrina-like force? Or did Alabama just play poorly?

As you might expect, it was a little bit of both. Awesomely dominant teams don't give up six sacks, but, to give Saban his due, you don't play awesomely dominant football if you think that just happens weekly without hard work.

For instance, the simplest explanation of the six McCarron sacks came straight from Saban.
"On some of them, guys just got beat," Saban said. "On a couple of them, we held the ball too long, but on some others, they just beat us on the edge."

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