The 2010 college football bowl season should be particularly engaging because most bowls have changed their conference  tie-ins.  We also add two new bowls in the Pinstripe Bowl and Dallas Football Classic but consequently lose the much-maligned International Bowl. As you may know, I annually make a more comprehensive and obviously more accurate set of bowl predictions during Thanksgiving weekend in [...]

When all the smoke is cleared, here’s how I see the final postseason rankings for the 2010 season. For full analysis of each team, see the conference predictions in the prior entries.  Here’s a  quick guide to deciphering the chart below.  The numbers to the left of all the teams my predicted rankings.  The number in the experts column is [...]

First of all, I’d like to announce that today marks the one year anniversary of “The Ramblings of the Ultimate Sports Sentimentalist” blog.  I just want to thank the readers who have taken the time to read my material over the past year.  It has been very much appreciated.  Now, let’s move on to the bad news of the day and that is the [...]

Now that I have provided you with a comprehensive analysis of every Divison 1-A conference, I will now proceed to post a few additional portions of my preview guide.  The first of these posts will be a summary of my surprise picks.  As you probably noticed, I chose ten teams in all of 1-A who I believe will [...]

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: The SEC is still the best football conference in America.  Some conferences may be as deep as them and others may be as dominant up top, but no conference combines these two characteristics in quite the same way that the SEC does.  For more information as to [...]

The Big 12 will have one last season to enjoy its 12-team super conference before Nebraska and Colorado secede to rival leagues.  Now one really knows what will happen to the Big 12 then, but at least they avoided extinction this summer by holding onto Texas.  As for the upcoming season, expect your usual Texas-Oklahoma [...]

Now that the Trojans are out of national title contention for at least a couple of years, the Pac-10 becomes like the ACC in that it has great depth but lacks a team that will contend for the national title.  In fact, the two teams I have picked at the top of the conference are [...]

Yes, I know that now that picking the Big 10 as the fourth strongest conference is probably based on my anti-Big 10 bias, but I just can’t take a conference seriously that possesses an obscure uneven scheduling system that doesn’t result in a title game.  I know they go to 12 teams next year, but [...]

Many feared that conference realignment might hurt the ACC as rumors swirled of possible defections by Miami, Florida State, Georgia Tech, and Clemson.  In the end, the conference was unaffected by the changes and still looks to overcome its stigma of being a “basketball-only conference”.  The problem with the ACC has not necessarily been its [...]

I think we all saw just how weak the Big East can be when Cincinnati got absolutely demolished in the Sugar Bowl by Florida.  The top teams of this conference are just several steps behind the powerhouses in the other five major conferences.  However, the depth of the Big East is pretty solid with six [...]

Don’t really have a good place to put my blog entry for the Independents, so I thought a logical place would be sandwiched between the BCS and non-BCS conferences.  The number to the left of each team name is their predicted conference ranking with the conference champion displayed in all caps.  The number in parentheses [...]

To  summarize my non-BCS conference rankings so far, I’m calling for the C-USA and Sun Belt to be better than usual and for their be down years in the MAC and WAC.  Believe it or not, I’m also going to predict that the Mountain West will be weaker this season.  TCU will again be among [...]

For the first time since I started my preview guide, I am changing the order of my conference rankings.  Since 2007, I have ranked the conferences: 1) SEC, 2) Big 12, 3) Pac-10, 4) Big 10, 5) ACC, 6) Big East, 7) Mountain West, (8) WAC, 9) C-USA, 10) MAC, and 11) Sun Belt.  That [...]

The WAC will take a major hit next year with the departure of Boise, as the Broncos are the only thing making this conference stronger than the MAC.  Boise State will once again win the conference, but they’ll have tougher competition at the top from stronger Nevada and Fresno squads.  On the other hand, the [...]

The Mid-American conference will lack a solid top 25 team like they had the past two years with Ball State (2008) and Central Michigan (2009).  In fact, I don’t see any MAC teams finishing in the top 50 this year.  The conference will clearly be the worst in all the land, except for the Sun [...]