SEC Media Days starts with new coaches in a new city | Mizzou

Other than the new location of this week's event – just a five-minute walk to Mercedes Benz Stadium, SEC championship game site – the new Faces around the league, some more familiar than d & rsquo; Others, make up the main storyline in Atlanta this week. Here is a preview of what to expect during the four day event:

The SEC has five new coaches, six if you count Ole Miss Matt Luke, who trained the rebels on an interim basis last fall then landed the concert full time in the offseason. While schools are convinced that they are far from challenging Alabama for the SEC's supremacy, the coaching turnover rate has never been so high during the conference.

Florida hopes to return to relevance with the addition of quarterback Dan Mullen, who left the state of Mississippi for one of the league's elite jobs. At worst, the Gators should be proficient offensively in a new direction. Mullen's successor in Starkville is Joe Moorhead, a newcomer to these regions who arrives with great honors as an architect behind Penn State's prolific offensive in recent years. Arkansas broke ties with Media Days favorite Bret Bielema, and replaced him with Chad Morris, the former Southern Methodist coach, who will not deliver as many juicy punchlines but could bring in an offensive punch to Fayetteville. Tennessee followed Georgia's plan and hired Alabama's defensive coordinator, Jeremy Pruitt, hoping that Nick Saban's coaching lineages will turn their program as they did when UGA hired Kirby Smart

Texas A & M Aggies broke the bank's most successful new league coach, Jimbo Fisher, of the state of Florida, who takes over a program that rarely meets the hefty expectations he inherits now , with a cost of $ 75 million over 10 years.

SEC coaches have changed a lot in recent years: Only four coaches in the league have been in charge of their respective programs longer than Missouri's Barry Odom, who is starting his third season at his alma mater, as Smart at Georgia and Will Muschamp in South Carolina. Ed Orgeron took up his duties as interim coach at LSU in the middle of the 2016 season and begins his second full season at the head of the Tigers

The Supreme Court's decision to allow States to legalize effects through sport as schools and conferences gear up for the nation's new landscape for sports betting. Some conferences have talked about requiring weekly injury reports, similar to those of the NFL and the Atlantic Coast Conference, to ensure more transparency in the sport once the game is legalized in the courts. States affected. Do not expect that a consensus opinion emerges this week from SEC coaches, some of whom are reluctant to shed light on the wounds of the season.

"I report injuries … I'll be happy to do that," Saban told CBSSports .com this spring. "But I do not think anyone has the right to know, if you want to know the truth about it."

Speaking of the Crimson Tide, Saban has the country's most intriguing quarterback situation on his hands. Jalen Hurts (25-2 as a starter) was lined up at halftime in last year's national championship game, then watched the first rookie Tua Tagovailoa Bama overtake Georgia with a touchdown pass in prolongation in prolongation. Both returned to Tuscaloosa, but Tagovailoa missed a hand injury in the spring. Is it Jalen or Tua in 2018? Saban figures will be hit with a monsoon of shifts this week.

Not so at other schools around the league. Missouri's Drew Lock and Jared Stidham of Auburn could have entered the NFL Draft but would return to the SEC's lead quarterback, Mississippi's Nick Fitzgerald, Jake Fromm of Georgia, Jake Bentley of Carolina South and Jake Shurmur of Vanderbilt. Lock, whose Heisman Trophy campaign was launched earlier this summer, is one of the SEC's six quarter-finals in Atlanta this week, ready to arrive with Odom and teammates Terry Beckner Jr. and Terez Hall on Wednesday.

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