2006 SEC West Football

Now take a look at our 2008 SEC Football Predictions!

With both divisions being strong this year, you are going to want to check out our 2006 SEC West football preview to prepare yourself for another great season of SEC football.  It looks like Auburn and LSU will once again be at the front of the pack, but with this group of teams anything is going to be possible.

Alabama finished 6-2 in the SEC last year, but they’ll need to do better than that to get past conference leaders LSU and Auburn. I’m confident that they’ll be able to get past one of those 2 schools, likely LSU, but not both. The preseason should get most of the butterflies out for first year QB starter John Parker Wilson, and he’ll be ready to go for conference play. The Tide have one of the best coaching staff’s in the country, led by Mike Shula, and with perhaps the most talent in the SEC, they should be BCS bowling at season’s end.

Arkansas ended up 2-6 in the Southeastern Conference Western Division last season, but the Razorbacks are hoping that they can make a u-turn quickly with a new play caller. 1st year assistant coach Gus Malzahn will be calling the offensive plays instead of head coach Houston Nutt who made plenty of faulty calls a season ago. Malzahn will also coach the wide receivers and you will see him focus his offensive play calling on getting the ball to his big play guys. Expect big things from Marcus Monk who caught 7 TD passes last season. Although things are undoubtedly heading in the right direction, things won’t come out smelling like roses in Malzahn’s first season under heat. Expect just a 1-2 game improvement in the SEC.

Things are looking good for Auburn who finished 7-1 in the loaded SEC last year as they get their highly touted QB, Brandon Cox, back to control the offense In his first season as a starter, he threw for over 2300 yards and 15 TD passes. He’ll be even better this season which leads me to believe that Auburn has to be a favorite to take the SEC.

LSU has the most depth at quarterback in the SEC West, but it will be JaMarcus Russell getting the snaps this fall if he can fully recover from his wrist and shoulder injuries. Russell won 10 games for the Tigers last season before suffering an injury in the SEC title game. With Flynn and Perrilloux showing that they can get the job done this spring, Russell will play even better because he’ll have to to keep his job and coach Les Miles has made that very clear. LSU will have their work cut out for them to make it back to the top of the conference as everyone else in the West is getting better.

Without a Manning under center Ole Miss has a hard time stacking up against the conference giants and that will be the case again this season. It has set them back even further that they didn’t get to have this season’s starter, Brent Shaeffer, under center until this summer as he had to finish junior college. Former Miami assistants Werner and Kehoe will try to jumpstart the Rebels offense this season, but the reality is that Ole Miss just doesn’t have the talent that the upper echelon teams in the conference have.

Can Mississippi State improve on last season’s 1-7 conference showing. The answer is: they should beat Ole Miss anyway. Coach Croom has been playing lots of underclassmen the past 2 seasons and now that they are another year older experience should start to show, especially from QB Omarr Conner. I expect the Bulldogs to do better in their non conference games this season, but they’ll still struggle in the loaded SEC.