Guerry Clegg: Too early to buy into any team

So it seems that I touched a nerve or two last week when I suggested that I'm not sold on Auburn winning the SEC.

But here's the deal: I'm not sold on anybody just yet.

Call it a cop-out, if you will, but we simply don't have enough information about any team to make kind of accurate guess.

That's true even for Ohio State. Yes, the Buckeyes are the prohibitive favorite because they return virtually everyone of importance from the team that won the national championship in convincing fashion. Their schedule is as soft as it gets. But what we don't know is how will they handle success? Will they become complacent?

The Buckeyes aren't going to regress to 8-4. Not with that schedule. But they could lose their edge and slip up and lose a game. Look at Alabama in 2013. The Crimson Tide was perfect until the final play of the regular season.

So back to the SEC. The field is as deep as it has ever been. No, there are not 14 national championship contenders. But with the possible exception of Vanderbilt, there's not one team in the SEC that can be overlooked. Mississippi State is considered a Top 25 team, a virtual lock to go to a bowl game, and has one of the best quarterbacks in the country in Dak Prescott. Yet the Bulldogs were picked to finish last in the SEC West.

No other conference in college football even comes close to that. It's easy to say that Will Muschamp will fix Auburn's defense just enough to hold teams under 30 points, which would be enough to win with that offense. But it's just not that simple. Not anywhere, and especially not in the SEC.

Again, go back to 2013. Three plays were the difference between Auburn going 11-1 in the regular season and 8-4. The first was Dee Ford's sack of Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel. The second was The Prayer at Jordan-Hare against Georgia. The third was the most stunning single play in college football history -- Chris Davis's 109-yard missed field goal return to beat Alabama.

It's impossible to sit here in August and know how things are going to play out in November.

Again, it's not just Auburn. I'm not sold on anybody.

Georgia? The obvious concern about the Bulldogs is their quarterback. But there's also a faulty assumption that they are the team to beat in the East no matter who plays quarterback. And that if Brice Ramsey, Faton Bauta or Greyson Lambert can just run the offense efficiently, the Bulldogs will be a national championship contender.

I think this is the Bulldogs' best roster, top to bottom, since the 2008 team, which began the season ranked No. 1 in the country. I also think defen

sive coordinator Jeremy Priutt has brought in new ideas not just on defense but in strength and conditioning and attitude.

But let's never underestimate Georgia's ability to lose a game it's supposed to win. There's no mistaking the devastating impact of losing Todd Gurley twice last year. But before all that unfolded, they lost to a rather mediocre South Carolina team.

If they avoid tripping up against South Carolina, they should be 4-0 going into October when Alabama goes to Athens. But even if they win that game -- which figures to the national game of the week -- how will they respond the following week at Tennessee? Then the next week back home against Missouri? And two weeks later against Florida?

The schedule is set up perfectly for the Bulldogs. A bye week before Florida, relatively softer opponents before Auburn and Georgia Tech -- Kentucky and Georgia Southern, respectively.

Again, there's too much history with the Bulldogs to ignore before buying into them.

Alabama has its own questions and challenges. Almost the entire offense has to be rebuilt. The schedule is one of the toughest in all of college football. But just as Georgia's history cannot be ignored, neither can Alabama's. If I have to buy into any team in August, it would be the one that has recruited better than anyone in the country over the last five years -- really longer but anything beyond five years is irrelevant now -- and has the best coach in college football.

-- Guerry Clegg is an independent correspondent. You can write to him at sports@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published August 15, 2015 at 6:08 PM with the headline "Guerry Clegg: Too early to buy into any team ."