Prairie View Takes the SWAC West's Three-Way Tie to Pine Bluff

The SWAC West has three first-place teams and one Saturday left to sort most of it out. Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Prairie View A&M and Alcorn State all sit at 4-2. On Saturday afternoon, Prairie View goes to Pine Bluff, and Alcorn goes to Southern — which is 3-3, alive, and out of margin entirely. Somebody's season effectively ends in each stadium.

Wednesday's updated Toyota Celebration Bowl projections ran the remaining schedule more than 20,000 times and still made Pine Bluff the West's favorite, at 48.5 percent, with Prairie View up to 32.5, Alcorn at 15.2 and Southern at 3.8. That Pine Bluff number is the strange one. The Golden Lions will play the biggest game of their season without nine suspended players, fallout from the postgame fight at Grambling that the conference punished on Monday. The model knows. It shaded Pine Bluff's chances down and kept them first anyway, because Pine Bluff is home, and because of what its defense has done all fall for a team picked to finish last in the division.

The game the West turns on

Kickoff in Pine Bluff is 2 p.m. CT on Saturday at Simmons Bank Field, on SWAC TV. The mathematics are not subtle. Prairie View, the defending SWAC champion, wins the West by winning twice — at Pine Bluff, then at Alabama State on November 21. Nobody has to help the Panthers; they already beat Alcorn 41-38 on homecoming, which is the tiebreaker sitting underneath this whole race. Pine Bluff's position is the mirror image. Beat Prairie View and the Golden Lions still need Alcorn to lose once, to Southern on Saturday or to Jackson State a week later, because Alcorn owns the head-to-head from their double-overtime meeting in September. Lose to Prairie View, and Pine Bluff is eliminated — a season that spent November in first place, gone in one afternoon.

Prairie View earned its share of this tie the loud way. Alabama A&M arrived at Panther Stadium last Saturday ranked No. 24, fresh off winning the Magic City Classic, with one of the most productive passing games in the conference. The Panthers held Cornelious Brown IV to 124 passing yards and intercepted him twice, outgained the Bulldogs 437-231 and closed the game with 17 unanswered points in a 31-10 win. Tevin Carter — eighth among HBCU passers on Previously's Stats Hub board — went 25 of 35 for 292 yards and two touchdowns, one of them the 14-yarder to Braylon Finney that opened the scoring. Damien McDaniel caught eight balls for 155. Tremaine Jackson, who has turned November into a program slogan, opened his postgame session with two words — "Panthers win" — and closed it with the line his locker room has been repeating since: "What we found out tonight is 2 dogs, one bone, and we got the bone."

Pine Bluff's path here was narrower and louder. The Golden Lions trailed Grambling 25-21 in the fourth quarter last Saturday, in Grambling, and won the game in a three-minute burst: a 95-yard drive finished by Jaylen Jennings from three yards out, then DaeDae Allen returning a punt 76 yards for a touchdown. Grambling answered nine seconds later with a 78-yard touchdown pass, and Pine Bluff simply kept the ball — ten plays, the last 5 minutes and 38 seconds, a fourth-and-2 conversion along the way — and walked out 35-32 winners. Jack Schierholz threw for 208 yards and ran for 80, with an 82-yard touchdown to Demetric Whitlock Jr. in between. That is the team that now has to do it again with nine players in street clothes. Alonzo Hampton has built the conference's surprise season out of a roster the preseason poll buried in last place; Saturday asks whether the depth charts underneath the starters can hold a division lead for one more week.

Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge

The other half of the tie resolves at A.W. Mumford Stadium, also at 2 p.m. CT, on HBCU GO. Alcorn State brings the conference's most productive passing game to Southern, and it is not close to a secret why. Jaylon Tolbert threw for 314 yards and four touchdowns against Florida A&M last Saturday — three of them to Malachi Augustus, who turned four catches into 171 yards and touchdowns of 92, 10 and 63 yards — as Alcorn erased a 14-0 deficit and scored 38 of the game's final 44 points. Tolbert stands first among HBCU passers on Previously's Stats Hub board, and NCAA.com's award-race review this week counts him among the names in the HBCU Player of the Year picture. Alcorn's problem is arithmetic, not talent: at 6-2 the Braves still need Prairie View to lose at least once, because that 41-38 homecoming loss is the result standing between Alcorn and control of its own season. The Braves close against Jackson State on November 21, so their help could come from either direction. It just cannot come from anything Alcorn does alone.

Southern's season is simpler and harsher. The Jaguars have won two straight by a combined 87-31, they own a win over Prairie View, and none of it survives a loss on Saturday. Marshall Faulk's team has become a ground operation with a Hall of Fame running back coaching it, which reads like a slogan until the numbers show up: 381 rushing yards against Bethune-Cookman last Saturday, Trey Holly carrying 16 times for 206 yards and two touchdowns — both from 44 yards out, his second straight 200-yard game. NCAA.com puts Holly at 1,239 rushing yards, the most of any Division I HBCU player, with a SWAC-high 11 rushing touchdowns; he also leads the Stats Hub's HBCU rushing board. "It's not the pretty throw the ball 30 times a game," Faulk said after the Bethune-Cookman win. "It's a little dirty, a little gritty, you know, getting it out of the mud." The mud gets thinner this week — freshman back Champ Davis broke his leg against Bethune-Cookman and is done for the season, Faulk confirmed Tuesday. If Southern beats Alcorn, the Jaguars sit idle on November 21 and watch the rest of the race move without them; if they are still alive after that, the Bayou Classic against Grambling on November 28 decides the division on the season's last day.

By Saturday evening the West will have a leader with a name instead of a tie with three. The winner in Pine Bluff holds the inside track to the SWAC Championship Game on December 5 and a shot at the Celebration Bowl in Atlanta a week later — the same afternoon Jackson State plays at Alabama State with the East lead in the balance, a game this page has already walked through. Eight teams in this conference are still alive. Two stadiums are where that number shrinks.

The full HBCU slate — the CIAA final in Durham, the Orangeburg decider and the SWAC's moving day — lives on the HBCU front. This morning's CIAA championship preview is here.