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CLEMSON | If your occupation is propagandist for the SEC -- feel free to insert joke about ESPN here -- imagine some of the creative liberties you could've taken with this past weekend's developments to make them fit the conference's traditional boasts.
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Most of those boasts center on grown-man football and great defense, and ridiculing conferences elsewhere (hello, Big 12 and Pac-12) for their rinky-dink brand of high-scoring football.
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Saturday, only three examples existed to fit into a narrative that has shrunk to the size of a thimble.
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Georgia held Tennessee to minus-1 rushing yard.
Kentucky held Mississippi State to two points.
South Carolina yielded just a touchdown to Vanderbilt.
And that's the whipped cream on top of ... excrement produced elsewhere in the conference where it just means more.
This is a Clemson-themed website, so why are we spending time writing about what's going on in that conference?
The first and easiest answer would be that we spend a lot of time hearing about what's going on in that conference.
The second and most practical answer is that from a Clemson perspective the most viable threats to the Tigers' national supremacy tend to come from the SEC.
When you take up permanent residence atop the college football mountain, in-season scorekeeping becomes a real and defensible thing. You want to know how you might measure up to one or more of the luminaries over there come playoff time.
It's early in general, and it's early in particular in the SEC where their season is three weeks old.
But boy do you have to be feeling really darned good right now if you're a Clemson fan and sizing up the SEC's heavyweights.
A year ago we wondered how much longer Nick Saban could keep doing this if he's regularly watching his defense surrender 40-plus points in a game.
It happened in January of 2019 against Clemson and it felt like armageddon. It felt that way then because Alabama had gone 41 consecutive games without allowing an offense to crack 40 points.
Now it has happened four times over the past 17 games: 44 to Clemson, 46 last year to LSU, 48 last year to Auburn, and 48 two days ago to Mississippi.
Great defensive coordinators have nightmares about giving up a bunch of points. Brent Venables gets the sweats simply watching another team do it on television.
Saban is just not wired to cope with this pandemic, er, phenomenon on a regular basis, as he indicated after his team's 63-48 win in Oxford when asked how he kept his sideline calm.
"Well I'm not really calm. I'm boiling and bubbling. I try to be encouraging to the players. I tried to make the best adjustments we could make at halftime. It seemed like everything we did they had an answer for."
Five years ago, Saban walked off the field boiling and bubbling after his team won the national championship. He couldn't find an answer for Deshaun Watson, and only a masterful onside kick turned things back in Alabama's direction enough for the Tide to escape 45-40.
A year later he walked off the Raymond James Stadium field with the same feeling, and this time after Watson and the Tigers solved his murderous defense in the second half.
Here's why we bring that up: It's one thing for Saban to feel helpless to come up with an answer against one of the greatest players and programs in college football history.
It's quite another when he has that exasperating feeling walking off the field at Ole Miss.
In fairness, maybe Lane Kiffin's team ends up being pretty good (though certainly not playoff good).
Also in fairness: Alabama has looked shaky in Oxford several times before and turned out OK.
Maybe ultimately this period will be viewed as yet another way Saban has reinvented his approach during rapidly changing times in college football, doubling down on bringing in elite offensive players to make Bama more capable of just outscoring people when its defense wilts.
But there is nonetheless a pattern here that cannot be dismissed. Saban will turn 69 later this month, and he's not growing any less irritated with the trends toward offensive scoring bonanzas.
In light of the SEC turning into the Big 12 East, Saban was asked if it's time for a numerical redefining of what good defense means.
Having already suggested Ole Miss knew Alabama's defensive plays, and bemoaning the Rebels' success at pick plays (sound familiar?), Saban rattled off more tactical objects of his disgust.
"I think there's a lot of advantages to the offense," he said. "The quarterback runs a quarterback draw and the offensive line is blocking a running play and they pop pass to the tight end -- I don't know if there's anybody downfield or not. It's just hard to play RPOs. Every time you play middle-field coverage they run RPOs so they're running slants. They're bang-bang plays, but they're 10-yard plays. Then you try other things to take that away and it's hard to stop the run.
"So I think the offense that we have in college football right now is very, very difficult to defend. It's not any old-fashioned offense. It's spread. It's lots of very difficult plays to defend. So we have to score a lot of points if we're going to win. But we have to play better on defense too."
The fact that LSU isn't even on Clemson's radar anymore tells you how far the Bayou Bengals have free-fallen. Florida's defense was a red flag before Saturday's mess at Texas A&M but now everyone properly recognizes it.
From the Clemson side of things, this has to make you feel even better about the Tigers' positioning with a ninth-year defensive coordinator who unearthed yet another masterpiece against a supposedly lethal Miami offense.
Dabo Swinney's logic in bringing Venables aboard in 2012 was that he was ideally suited to -- and enthusiastic about -- regularly adapting his defense in a new-age offensive era.
Maybe the SEC propagandists can pivot to the conference being the standard for great offense, while the rest of us stifle our laughter in recalling when the SEC ridiculed such a standard.
It's good news for Clemson that the grown-man conference has a fully-grown problem on its hands.
Unless they want to brag about what Georgia, Kentucky and South Carolina did last week.
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