5 Reasons Why Alabama Will Win the SEC Next Season

Yes, Alabama plays in the SEC, but the schedule sets up very favorably for the Tide in 2015. They ony have four true road games, the toughest of which will be the last game of the regular season against Auburn. Georgia is good, but we all remember what happened the last time UGA hosted Alabama. Texas A&M, even with new defensive coordinator John Chavis, will be the same as they have been the past couple years. And under the watchful eye of Nick Saban, Alabama has always played well in Starkville.

When I played tee-ball, my coach asked us what "defense" was. One of my friends said, "You don't climb on it."

Such a clever boy.

However, this defense in Tuscaloosa will arguably be the best defense Nick Saban has had since the 2011 national championship team. They boast one of the (if not the) best defensive lines in the country, a solid linebacking corps, and a vastly upgraded secondary, led by Cyrus Jones, Tony Brown, and Marlon Humphrey, among others. Offenses are evolving faster than defenses now, but Saban has finally built a complete defense; whether he's trying to stop ground-and-pound teams like Arkansas or spread concept teams like Texas A&M, he will always have the correct personnel this season.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the last point. Dak Prescott of Mississippi State, Brandon Allen of Arkansas, and Anthony Jennings of LSU are the only three returning starters who started more than four games last season in the West. Jennings may not even win the job at LSU, plus we all know that Allen isn't the biggest threat through the air, so the only real concern for the Tide defense related to experienced quarterbacks should be Prescott, but they managed to contain him last season, and with the departure of a significant amount of talent on last year's Bulldog squad, look for Prescott's numbers to fall slightly too.

X's and O's are critically important in the game of football, but execution of certain plays can be contributed to raw talent, and Alabama definitely has that. No player on this roster has never not been a part of a #1 ranked recruiting class. Do some recruiting pundits get things wrong from time to time? Sure. But the fact of the matter is that across the board, most analysts and experts say that the amount of talent that is congregated on the Tide's roster is unlike anything college football has ever seen.

In short, talent wins football games. X's and O's just help.

Did you expect anything else? Nick Saban is the playwright, the composer, the director, the conductor. This team is going on nine years in the making under his tutelage, and he is the captain of this year's ship. He was the first coach in the Associated Press era to win two national championships at two different schools, and ranks among some elite company as one of the select few coaches that have won four national championships overall.

He's fairly decent at coaching football.