Welcome it.

Latest episode of that SEC podcast.

I'm your host Michael Bratton.

Go by SEC Mike.

Go on to Twitters.

And there he is our great friends,

Stephen Lassen, the senior editor over at Athlon Sports.

Stephen, it's been too long. How are you? Hey, Mike. It's good to talk to you, my friend. Man, it's the offseason, right? But so much news going on, the SEC. I am hard at work on the Aflon Sports preview magazine, but always good to be joining the hardest working man in the SEC and that is SEC Mike. So what's going on my friend?

Oh, I thought you were talking about cousin Shane.

No, cousin Shane, not here today, of course.

So what we had is Steven come up with another fun idea for this topic on this episode.

We're going to be talking about who's under the most pressure in the SEC in 2026.

And I specifically said in the title of the episode, Stephen, this isn't just head coaches.

I mean, everybody in their mother is going to do hot seat rankings with these coaches.

Heck, I think we've done about three this offseason already.

So I'm throwing myself into that conversation, but not just head coaches, players, coordinators, positions.

You know, we've got quite a few to discuss with Stephen, as well as kind of the news and notes around the SEC.

But let me ask you, Steve, what inspired you to come up with the who's under the most pressure in the SEC in 2026?

Mike, as you know, my brain is going 5,000 miles an hour for college football ideas during the off season because I'm starving for some college football stuff.

And, you know, like you said, we talk about coaches in the hot seat all the time.

But as we're kind of getting ready to go into this production process for the magazine and we're thinking ahead to this season, I'm thinking, okay, you know, there's a lot of quarterbacks that are transferring and there's all these coordinator hires and you're trying to come up with like, this guy's going to make this kind of impact. This coordinator hire is going to make this kind of impact too. And I kind of got to thinking, you know, we talk about all these, but like there's so much pressure in different angles to it too like national championship playoff getting to a bowl game so kind of came up with this idea

that everybody's gonna talk coaches and rightfully so but player there's different

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