Can the Bulldogs recruiting successes be immediately transformed into on-field success? Can a fairly agreeable schedule of games at least by SEC standards equal improvement over a finish in ? Green between the hedges? From there, even though the Bulldogs only have four true road games, may be more of a struggle than it looks like on paper. If Georgia can manage to give Mark Richt another go in , more serious improvement and postseason rewards may certainly be on the cards.
The stars all aligned perfectly for Auburn to make a run at the BCS title in Luckily for Tiger fans, their team executed, won some huge games and ended the season holding the coveted crystal football aloft.
The stars do not seem to be aligned for any such a run in when the defending champs only return four starters on each side of the ball. Not only is QB Cam Newton gone, but so are the offensive line and a long, heart-breaking list of talented defenders.
Auburn will go on the road and visit Clemson, South Carolina, Arkansas and LSU this season before wrapping things up against an Alabama team who will come to town with a huge laundry list of reasons to wreak revenge-filled havoc on the defending champs. Unfortunately, the Spartans managed to put a fairly sizable damper on a highly successful , season with an ugly thumping at the hands of an angry Alabama team in the Capital One Bowl.
Repeating the magical run in may be made even more difficult with a schedule that includes road trips to South Bend, Indiana; Columbus, Ohio; Lincoln, Nebraska and Ames, Iowa. Regardless, Mark Dantonio continues to field scrappy Spartan squads who will be in a position to knock off opponents when they least expected it. Though the skill positions retain much of their firepower, questions on the line on both sides of the ball could prove a big stumbling block for the Gamecocks.
South Carolina makes an early road trip to Georgia and then travels to Mississippi State and Arkansas later in the season. Auburn and Clemson both are home games in The , Irish return ten offensive and nine defensive starters to the squad and have a Top 10 recruiting class to deepen the trenches. That all sounds pretty promising until you stop to consider that the Irish will play nine opponents in that were bowl bound in not including bowl-banned USC who went last season.
Notre Dame will continue to move forward in , but a BCS bid seems a bit of a stretch. Wisconsin fell just short 10 points to be exact of making the BCS title game in and ultimately went on to finish their season with a close loss to a great TCU team in the Rose Bowl.
The Badgers return five offensive and six defensive starters in but will have to replace QB Scott Tolzien, key offensive lineman and a hefty portion of their linebacking corps. The Badgers face a tough early season test vs. Oregon State and have daunting back-to-back midseason road trips to Michigan State and then Ohio State. Either a regular season conference defeat or a loss in the first ever Big 10 championship game will hold the Badgers out of the Rose Bowl and ultimately the BCS title game.
The Aggies have a somewhat favorable schedule which includes a September 24 visit from Oklahoma State and an October 1 game vs. The first thing about this game anyone is going to notice is that it's not on New Year's Day. This will be the first January 2 Rose Bowl game since , but the 13th time since the first game on January 1, As everyone knows, the Rose Bowl typically pits the champion of the Big Ten against the champion of the Pac, now the Pac, unless one of those teams is playing in the BCS championship game.
The off-the-field mess in Columbus has certainly thrown a wrench into the Big Ten prediction process. For the better part of the last decade, Ohio State could be counted on as one team that was sure to be in the national championship mix at some point each year.
It seems pretty clear that the Buckeyes will be facing some pretty hefty sanctions and will most likely lose at least one year of postseason eligibility. That means no Big Ten championship, as there's now a conference championship game to determine the Big Ten winner, and no bowl game in late December or early January. While it's true we won't discover the extent of the penalties probably until early August, for the time being, we're going to assume that Ohio State is out of the running.
Even if they're not prohibited from appearing, it seems less and less likely they'll be able to survive long enough to be Big Ten champions. Wisconsin certainly had the better of the two teams, and ended up winning a share of the Big Ten title last season and earned a trip to the Rose Bowl.
As long as nothing changes between now and September, it's likely that Wisconsin will be the favorite to win the first-ever Leaders Division championship in the Big Ten. But before they can win a ticket back to Pasadena, they'll need to get past the Legends Division champion in the Big Ten Championship Game. The Legends Division is a little murkier, especially with the addition of Nebraska—still an unknown in terms of Big Ten conference play. It seems likely that this division will be decided on October 29 in Lincoln, when the Cornhuskers host Michigan State.
Michigan State is also a defending co-Big Ten champion, and this season they'll be looking to prove that wasn't a fluke year. Sparty is also hoping to erase the memory of a shellacking by Alabama in the Capital One Bowl at the end of last year—a game which led many to believe that MSU was a definite pretender of But Mark Dantonio is no slouch, and he has quite the collection of returning talent for While it's too early to tell what kind of noise Nebraska can make in the Big Ten, right now, Michigan State has to be the early favorite in the Legends.
The outcome of that game could go a long way to determine who will be victorious on December 3 in the inaugural Big Ten Championship Game. Michigan State has always shown the ability to play Wisconsin well, even when Sparty was vastly over-matched. In , don't expect the Spartans to be over-matched by anyone they play. Because of that, Michigan State gets our nod as Big Ten champion and Rose Bowl participant for the first time since To face off against MSU, we'll need to find a team from the Pac Oregon is everyone's early pick, and there's not much fault to find in that pick.
Stanford does have Andrew Luck returning, but beyond that, the Cardinal are massively depleated. USC is still ineligible to play in a bowl game this season or for that matter, the Pac title game. Newcomers Utah and Colorado don't appear to have the firepower yet to really compete week-in and week-out in the Pac Arizona State has one heck of a football team shaping up for this season. While many look at ASU's win-loss record of last season and dismiss the Sun Devils out of hand, it's important to look deeper to determine how good ASU can be this season.
Four of ASU's six losses last season were by four or fewer points—two of them were one-point losses. The projected No. Tech reeled off 11 straight wins after dropping its first two games to Boise State and, err, James Madison. Another win for the Cardinal will extend the already-school record 11 wins mark to Arkansas makes its first appearance in the Sugar Bowl since , with a record of just in its previous five appearances.
Middle Tennessee vs. Miami Ohio Mobile, Ala. Ladd-Peebles Stadium. MTSU will appear in a bowl game for the third time in five seasons under coach Rick Stockstill, and their second in a row. The Blue Raiders feature all-star quarterback Dwight Dasher, just the 15 th player in NCAA history to pass for over 5, yards and rush for more than 2, yards in his career.
Both contests were in the now defunct Hall of Fame Bowl. The games happened in and against West Virginia and Wisconsin, respectively. Pittsburgh coach Dave Wannstedt has just resigned, so it will be interesting to see how the Panthers play against Kentucky, who will be led by Morgan Newton at quarterback after starting quarterback Mike Hartline was suspended by Phillips for a recent arrest.
Boston College made it to its 12 th straight bowl game by way of a backup contract the bowl had with the ACC, as not enough Pac teams were eligible for bowl games this season. The Wolfpack is led by Colin Kaepernick, the only player in college football history to ever pass for over 9, yards and rush for over 4, yards in his career. Instead of just looking at the rest of the games, making quick predictions and plotting out the bowls, I wanted to use two fun little tools in the arsenal: Adj.
Score and momentum. I wanted to utilize Adj. Score in the same way I did for last week's Undefeateds column , and I wanted to more heavily weight recent results. You can see the entire list of teams ranked by hotness or notness here. As one would expect, this produces some interesting, unexpected results; however, the games at the top play out more or less as we would expect.
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