An unbiased opinion is that the SEC is probably not as good as you may have thought it is from top to bottom though LSU looks like a superior team. Tennessee, Georgia, Auburn, Miss st., Ol Miss, Vandy are all flawed teams that are very ordinary especially in light of previous sucess. S. Carolina, Ark, and FL are still in the air, Alabama looks better and KY is pretty good. Outside of LSU this may be a down year for the SEC.
Auburn has a bad QB and was simply outrun to the ball on many occasions by a decent S. FL team. Georgia has been masquerading as a top 25 team for 2 years but they have no offense. Miis St stinks, Vandy was never in it yesterday (though Alabama may be much improved) Ol Miss is not very good, Tennessee struggled with a very mediocre S.Miss team before adding a late gimme TD. I keep hearing about how many players that FL lost and its hard to judge from the 2 spring training games they have played so far but I believe they are dangerous and may be the only team to give LSU a run. KY will beat Louisville this week unless the Cards start tackling people.
The fact is that as coaches learn that big is not better and that speed is the #1 factor to success, the smaller teams will turn to spread offenses and recruit unpolished players that can run. The entire upper echlon of Big East has done this and it is how teams like Louisville and Rutgers became top 20 teams seemingly overnight. Plus the added exposure that the smaller conferences have now that virtually every game is on tv somewhere allows the 2nd tier prospect to go somewhere where they will play because they know they will get exposure. The truth is that only a few teams like USC and LSU have both speed and power. Watching a Michigan the last 2 weeks and in the Rose Bowl it is readily apparent that they just lack the team speed to be really good. I dont know if any team has as many individual talents at skill postions as they do but they cant overpower teams with their big lines anymore. I guess what I am saying is that parity is coming to the college game like it did to the NFL and the power conferences are not going to just waltz in and dominate all the time. Of course the unwanted side effect is teams deciding to schedule division III non conference games as to avoid an early season loss.
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