It doesn’t look like much to the casual viewer of the magazine, but UL’s football team made a major step forward in this season’s Sports Illustrated college football preview issue.

The Cajuns, after languishing well into the triple-digit column every year since joining the Sun Belt Conference, are 87th in the magazine’s rankings of the country’s 119 Division I-A teams. UL was the top-rated Sun Belt team, with 2005 New Orleans Bowl representative Arkansas State ranked 93rd and the rest of the league ranked between 102 (Troy) and 118 (Florida Atlantic).

SI, like the rest of the preseason magazines, picks UL to win the conference and claim the league’s New Orleans Bowl berth. Its prediction is for an 8-4 season and a 6-1 record in the Sun Belt, the same as ASU’s — obviously figuring on a UL win over Arkansas State on Nov. 25 in Cajun Field as the tiebreaker.

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Dan McDonald
dmcdonald@theadvertiser.com