not to let my judgment get clouded in preseason (this is when i bet with all my co-workers that bama will have more total wins than ASU, nebraska, and Pitt thus far..) but I seriously think we could win 10 games maybe 11 this reguarlar season, and I think if we beat auby, we’ll win the sec west for sure.

we kicked the crap out of tennessee last year, and should beat them again this year.

we were very close to upsetting LSU last year (the refs called back a 40 plus yard, 3rd down, catch halfway through the 4th quarter, which had us in field goal range, instead we punted, they scored twice more in the final six minutes), and they lost their RB and have no QB at all this year, so I think we’ll beat LSU also.

as far as Miss St and la monroe, clearly i'm expecting better performances this year vs the MSU bulldogs and ark st. indians.

I see the SEC west being undecided until the iron bowl, winner plays georgia or florida. and i think we win.

Bama will win 10 games, maybe 11 this regular season.

is that we lost six games last year by a touchdown or less. We have many players back and some new guys who, despite their inexperience, are better than what he had or have. I don’t expect us to beat everyone we play, but I think we have the potential to surprise some people, especially some of the dominant teams we’re expected to lose to.

I only coach HS football, but I’ll be perfectly honest in saying that I would love to be in the same situation Alabama is in. It’s perfect for a run. Perfect. Experience. New talent. A massive chip on the shoulder. No one fear and little respect. Years of trash talk from our opponents and their fans. I get the feeling Coach Saban senses the same thing. Any coach would. By criticizing and underestimating Alabama, people only strengthen our chances in 2008. If they really knew football, they might understand this.

I sure hope our kids are motivated. I foresee some surprising games this year. I just have a real feeling that we’re going to beat somebody we’re not supposed to beat in dramatic fashion. I hope it’s Auburn. I’ll never forget watching the 1990 Iron Bowl and the sound of the announcer’s voice when it was clear that Bama would win. That was really exciting. This could be one of those years that will be remembered forever. I look forward to the season.

I like our chances, I really do.

As Bamagrad pointed out, a lot of these young kids are nevertheless flat-out better players than their predecessors, and that will help even with the inexperience. I’ll be honest… I’d much rather have freshmen kids like Julio, Love, Upshaw, Harris, and Lawrence than I would have guys like Hall, Capps, Saunders, Castille, etc. return for their senior year. I’ll take extremely talented and highly motivated freshmen over mediocre and poor work ethic seniors any day of the week.

And you guys are right, we’re going to win a couple of big games, you can bank on it. We did it last year, and we’ll do it again this year. I don’t know who it will be or when, but it will happen.

The problem is beating the teams you should beat. If we beat the seven teams we should, we’ll probably finish up somewhere between 8-4 and 10-2, and it’s all gravy. But again, the problem is we often lose some games we should otherwise win. Let’s go back to 2003 and look at the games we should have won based off of pure talent (and not necessarily how the games themselves played out):

2003: Northern Illinois, Arkansas, Hawai’i
2004: Arkansas, South Carolina
2005: None
2006: Mississippi State
2007: Louisiana-Monroe, Mississippi State

As you can see, it’s not always so easy to just assume that you’ll win all of the games you should win. We’ve had a tendency the past few years to lose a couple of games per year that we should have, and we’ve got to fix that ASAP. If we can do that, a bare minimum of 8-4 is all but guaranteed.

Still though, I really do feel pretty good about this squad. We didn’t lose anything from last year, we got rid of some bad seeds, and now we go into 2008 with a talented but young team. I think we’ll surprise some people.

Honestly, I think winning 9 games would be amazing. I think it would have to come down to JP, and I just do not think with the talent we have around him that would be possible. I like JP, but he is not the type of QB who makes players significantly better around him.

It was mentioned earlier about the LSU and UGA games from last season. I have gone back and watched those games this year when they come up on replay from CSS. I think we were fortunate to be in both those games at the end. Flynn threw 3 interceptions in that game, a few were drive killing interceptions. In the UGA game, quite honestly if UGAs TE Tripp Chandler makes a few more catches for first downs, we lose that game in regulation. I think he had 3 dropped passes that would have been first downs.

Everyone also wants to talk about all of the close losses, but at the same time we had a bunch of close wins. We nearly let the Arkansas games slip away, and many say that if McFadden had not gotten hurt we lose that game. We beat Ole Miss, and if that replay had gone the other way who knows. The replay was called correctly, of course. We had the Houston game, and that was much closer than it should have been. They almost came back and won the game in the second half. Then, there is the Colorado game. We have the huge lead just like the Arkansas and Houston games, and nearly lose that one as well. While it is easy to say we should have won more games, it is just as easy to say we should have lost more games. Honestly, unless the team takes a massive leap forward I just cannot predict more than 8 wins, right now.

In my mind real progress would be seeing the team win every game we are supposed to win. If we can win those 7 games we are supposed to win, then I think it is reasonable that we could win 1 or 2 more. I know it is a long ways away, but I have a good feeling about the Iron Bowl this year too. Of course, all this being said there is no possible way to know what type of team we will have until the season kicks off.

play up or down to the level of competition. In the games we barely lost, regardless of what might have happened (dropped passes, replay calls, etc), we tended to play up to the LSUs, UGAs, Vols, etc. Some games we won, most games we lost. Like OTS said, we’ve got to make sure we win the games we’re supposed to win, and I think if we do that the other will take care of itself. It might fix itself this year, depending on how much better the new players are or are not. Or it might fix itself farther down the road, but eventually when we play up to tougher competition we’ll end up being better, if not more talented, than they are. We just have to avoid getting Croomed, Nutted, and whatever-else-ted we might get by losing to inferior teams.

that we haven’t started the season with this caliber of opponent in over 20 years, so it’s tough to say how we would resond to losing the first game of the year. We did it against UCLA, our only tough starting opponent in the past 20, in ‘00 and ‘01, which lead to 3-8 and 7-5 seasons respectively; these two games being the only openers we’ve lost since Stallings first year. If we lose this game, it could turn into ‘00 all over again. (I have read BamaGrad’s reasons for the ‘00 fallout, which I don’t think we even have a fraction of those problems, but you get a team’s confidence down from the gate, it could be bad. I’d also like to put on the record that I’m a pessimist’s pessimist.)

to open the season. The UCLA games were supposed to be showcase games between an elite Pac-10 team and an elite SEC team, but we had a world of problems and were falling fast. They had been dominant 1996-1998, had a lot of injuries in 1999 (and were without Cade McNown) but they had a good roster entering both the 2000 and 2001 seasons. They actually beat Michigan and Ohio State after the beat us in 2000 and 2001, but injuries absolutely devastated them when they got into their conference schedule. They were much better than their final record indicates. Still, we had the personnel to win both years. They did what they had to do better than we did.

I would love to see Alabama get revenge for obvious reasons, but my wife graduated from UCLA, so I don’t know if another game between our two teams would help my marriage, lol. I got my MA from USC, so the 63-19 game in 2005 really salved my ill will toward UCLA.

Going back to 1999-2001, we didn’t have good cornerbacks, which showed up big time in our losses. No disrespect to Kecalf Bailey, Reggie Myles, Gerald Dixon, and Milo Lewis, but many teams pinpointed those guys as our defensive weakness and they exploited them. Losing Kindal Moorehead in the 2000 preseason didn’t help, simply because Kenny Smith, God love him, was not the greatest leader a team could have and guys like Kenny King and Jarrett Johnson were still a little bit inexperienced. The other huge weakness was the loss of Cornelius Griffin. Kelvis White was honestly not very good. Many of our coaches knew he had only been signed as part of the old spoils system DuBose had going. His brother started on our National Championship team in 1992 and his father was his head coach in HS. We signed him and he did nothing for four years, then was thrust into an important position his senior year. UCLA pounded the ball up the middle on us that day and then they threw it on us.

Not to take anything away from the Bruins, but perhaps if Alabama pre-Saban were not so caught up with appeasing boosters and high school coaches, we would not have signed some of the guys we signed to scholarships and then been forced to use them in key situations because of injuries.

Look at the quarterbacks we signed in the 1990’s and look at some of the guys we could have had. It was ridiculous and it resulted from that old school mindset of appeasing certain people.

Tee Martin never should have signed with Tennessee; he should have been our quarterback. Major Applewhite should have been signed instead of Luke Tucker. Little things, but when we were losing games they played out big time against us.