We have made it to the halfway point of the season, which is both exciting and depressing all at once. We have so many important games left to play! We have already lived so much life and are therefore closer by one more moment to our own demise or the icecaps melting and covering the State of Alabama in ocean water and cholera!

We should take this bye week to churn out meaningless content and do what sports webpages do best: POWER Rank.

Now, a power rank is not the same thing as a regular ole poll. A “POWER Rank” says POWER and RANK and means this is the ranking of items in order of their current POWER. You might be higher in the so-called AP poll, but have you looked POWERful? See the difference? It’s OK if you don’t, but just know those of us who can make good sports-points all see the difference and you should feel left out.

I’m not doing a normal POWER ranking today, reader. I’m POWER ranking the teams in the SEC WEST—the most POWERFUL division in football—by relating them to various parts of burrito bowls. There’s a lot going on here. None of the parts of a burrito bowl are bad, otherwise the bowl itself would be bad. Some parts do a lot more work to make the bowl as good as it is, and therefore are more POWERFUL. Some parts of the burrito bowl are taking up space and getting their share of the bowl’s Bowl Revenue and putting a mediocre product on the field year after year no matter who is coaching.

MEAT

LSU

The Bayou Bengals are the meat of the burrito bowl in the first half of this season. That offense went from tofu to carnitas pretty fast, and looks almost as terrifying as an e.Coli outbreak. Letting Joe Burrows loose has turned this team into a terrifying death machine. I’m very excited to see how they screw it up, but I’m nervous that they won’t.

GUAC

TIDE

Alabama is the guacamole of this burrito bowl. It is delicious and costs extra. Also, I’m not here to debate my rankings of ingredients, but “I don’t like avocados” invalidates anything you say. I don’t like Alabama, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t the second most POWERFUL team in the conference right now. They might be mad at not being ranked first, but this is a POWER ranking not a poll of committee members you can influence with money and memories from the seventies of a miserable drunk in a hat.

FAJITA VEGGIE

Auburn

Our Tigers are the fajita vegetables of the burrito bowl and if you don’t order fajita vegetables you’re incorrect. Pulling a lot of weight, exciting at times, prone to tasting bitter if not done correctly—Auburn offense. Auburn has to figure some things out to move up in this POWER ranking, but the wins it already has amassed this early in the season make me confident in having the Tigers ranked alongside caramelized peppers and onions.

BEANS

Aggy

Texas A&M’s season so far has not lived up to the unreasonable expectations some of my more insane Aggy friends had back in August. That said, they look OK. They are going to make some higher ranked team sweat later this year, and maybe upset a stomach or two.

SALSA

MSU

I like Salsa a lot, so this isn’t a knock. I put it on everything, but understand it’s place in the bowl is as a condiment. You sometimes forget to get the corn salsa, don’t you. You shouldn’t forget about it, but you do. Sometimes I forget about the Bulldogs.

CHEESE

Ole Miss

“Cheese is great and should be higher on this list!” I love cheese more than you do, I promise. It’s just not what you’re getting the bowl for. It’s a thing that makes the bowl hold together, gives it some balance, and even counteracts the acidity in the salsa. At the end of the day though, burrito bowl cheese looks fancier than it is and usually doesn’t pull much weight.

Ole Miss Girl dot gif is a national treasure.

RICE

Arkansas

Filler. You can’t have the burrito bowl without it, because then you just have a bowl of meats and vegetables and not a meal. That’s basically all you can say about the rice though—it exists. It is necessary yet not exceptional in any way. Arkansas is on this list for the same reason. They have to be. You can’t have the SEC West in 2019 without them, so they are a necessary yet unexceptional schedule-filler.