No respect: Ragin' Cajun football team picked near bottom of Sun Belt

[NewsCopy]

Exactly how much depends on where you look. According to the combined results from five college football preview magazines, the Ragin' Cajuns are picked to finish seventh in the nine-team Sun Belt Conference. They're .

The rest of the story

[Just1More]

A reasonably informed SBC fan has a better handle on ranking the SBC than the national collegiate football magazines. They may be good at assessing BCS conference outcomes, but there is no doubt in my mind that if I quizzed these guys on their SBC ranking justifications, they would fall flat on their face. But then again, predictions matter not.

[Parrott]

My blog with more college football preview talk and predictions from other newspaper reporters in the league:

http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pb.Id=personaDest

[zephyr]

_ A reasonably informed SBC fan has a better handle on ranking the SBC than the national collegiate football magazines. They may be good at assessing BCS conference outcomes, but there is no doubt in my mind that if I quizzed these guys on their SBC ranking justifications, they would fall flat on their face. But then again, predictions matter not. _

Absolutely. They simply look at starters returning vs those lost. They also seem to put a lot of weight into OL losses and previous years' numbers. They obviously don't know that we continuously play 8 or more linemen per game which effectively matters little when we have to replace a departing starter with someone as they've often played as much as the starter did. It matters none as we've been ranked near the bottom of the preseason SBC rankings by the experts the last few years and always seem to end near the top.

Also, Josh did a breakdown of the various publications and compared them and came up with a composite ranking. The funny thing is the variance is many of the rankings for various teams from these publications. NT was ranked as high as 3rd in one and 8th in another. FIU was ranked 2nd by one and 8 by many. It shows that many writers have little knowledge of what goes on in the SBC as its not a premier conference. They mention some recruits and JC transfers but ignore others. Hopefully, Aaron Spikes, Kevis Streeter and Bernard Smith will have as big an impact as any other mentioned for other schools even though their names were forgotten.