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 2002: A Look AheadThe height of my college football mania may have been 1999, when I established a Preseason link on the main menu and deigned to rank every team in college football after having picked the winner of every game on the Division I-A schedule. Then things happened: I started teaching undergraduates, I had a baby, and, well, there suddenly was no longer a vast quantity of time for all of that honest work. Although the memory of bundling three or four college preseason publications and a printout of every teams schedule for the walk down to the Starbuck's coffee cart at the University of Maryland hospital is a very fond memory, I have to say releasing myself from the burden of such useless feats of prognostication has been a blessing. Because I noticed something: if I actually paid attention to my preseason picks, I was up the creek. I'd want to pick someone based on momentum, a gut feeling, whatever, but was honor-bound to my flawed preseason ideas. Well no more. Sure, I've looked at the schedules, yes, I know who's returning, but there's been no elaborate calculus. What I'm offering this year are some bold and not so bold predictions. Each prediction is given a boldness index from 1 (a no brainer) to 5 (what's he smoking?). 1. Wisconsin wins the big ten (4). You don't hear a lot about Wisconsin in the preseason talk. They get a lot of top 25 votes in preseason magazines, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone picking them in the top 10 or first in their conference. But what's the Big Ten got? A Michigan team that struggled all of last year, a Michigan State team that's ready to stop overacheiving, a Penn State team that's fallen off the map, and a perennial choker at Ohio State. What's Wisconsin got? A big, seasoned offensive line, two capable quarterbacks, and a future superstar running back in Anthony Davis. The question for the Badgers is whether their young defense can improve on last year's lackluster performance. 2. Texas will win it all (4). Gets a 4 on the bold-meter not because it's so unusual to see Texas picked number one, but because it's so unusual for me to have faith in Texas. Can they actually beat Oklahoma? Can they survive the rough Big 12? I don't know, but all of that Mack Brown recruiting has got to pay off sometime. And Chris Simms is a good quarterback and can finally breathe with Major Applewhite gone. 3. Spurrier will win more games than Ron Zook (3). A fair comparison. Sure, Spurrier gets to play 4 more games than Zook does, but every team Spurrier's Redskins will face will be capable of winning on any given day. The problem for Zook, unfortunately, is the toughest Florida schedule I've seen in my 13 years as a fan: at Florida State and at Tennessee; home against LSU and Miami, in Jacksonville against Georgia. This is absolutely brutal when you factor in that South Carolina, Auburn, and Mississippi could also be tests. Zook inherited a good team but not a great one. Without Rex Grossman, they might well go 0-5 against the big boys. With him, well, they could honestly win every game, but realism says 8-4 is a likely outcome. 4. Georgia disintigrates in QB controversy (5). A bold prediction for a number of reasons: 1) no one's heard of David Greene's backup, 2) Mark Richt, Georgia's coach, comes out of Florida State, a program that has never had QB controversies, and 3) Georgia is picked to finish 2nd in the SEC east in many preseason publications. Besides, it's a really specific prediction. But Richt really likes incoming freshman D.J. Shockey, and he's shown a tendency as Georgia head coach to make some peculiar on-field decisions. Here's guessing he buckles under the pressure to win, and the first Georgia loss sends the team into complete disarray. 5. USC will not finish in the Top 25 (1). Not a bold prediction? But they're in everybody's top 15, and in a lot of top 10s! Yeah, and so it goes every year. They're just never in that poll at the end of the season. There. Now you can check out my preseason SJS rankings on the Rankings page, and I can pick games this year with a clean conscience! |
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