Jim Harris: Hogs' Corrections Will Pave Way for Win Over ULM

Luckily for this prognosticator, our prediction column was planned for Friday, which meant we didn't have to start this week off 0-1 by picking South Carolina over Vanderbilt.

Even though Vanderbilt but the Gamecocks in Columbia last year, surely 98 percent of the country would have picked the great one, Steve Spurrier, and his ‘Cocks to triumph and live up to ESPN's annual hype, no?

I would have. But how enjoyable it was to see the Southeastern Conference's version of Navy play as hard as it could and overcome a ranked team for the first time since Grantland Rice covered Commodores games.

Little about the Southeastern Conference so far is going to form, at least the way I view it. Let's review last week's picks and what we learned:

We fully expected Arkansas to give up a lot of points (28, instead of the 24 Western Illinois scored) but felt like the Hogs could do lots better than the 28 they scored. In hindsight, which is always better for football prognosticator, we remember now that just as Rome wasn't built in a day, complete overhauls of college offenses take longer than a spring and an August preseason. They take the weeks of a regular season, with the mistakes under pressure and before large crowds that teach better than the platitudes after a spring game or an August scrimmage. With those in-game mistakes over the next few weeks will eventually come successes, then impressive success further down the road as freshmen become sophomores and new Bobby Petrino recruits arrive on campus.

We expected Clemson to at least show up and the Alabama contest to be one that would be hard-fought and go either way. My gosh, we didn't expect Alabama to show up with the same linemen they had last year looking like they'd been pumped up like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Did they dress them in five layers of winter clothing under their uniforms? What's going on there? Sports Illustrated jumped on the Crimson Tide bandwagon fast, warning the rest of the SEC to "Beware." We knew that the day they hired Nick Saban.

We thought Tennessee would be strong enough to not let UCLA off the hook in the first half, when the Vols could have dominated the Bruins. Instead, it appears Mr. Summons in Knoxville was outcoached.

Florida did as expected. Auburn was much, much stronger defensively against the Razorbacks' opponent this week, Louisiana-Monroe, but quite a sharp on offense. Again, remember, offensive overhaul corollary No. 1 about how long it takes, but it will come and these Tigers will soon bite as offensively as they do defensively. We predicted Mississippi State would be in a dogfight with Louisiana Tech (pun and accuracy intended), and sure enough it went against last year's SEC Coach of the Year, Sylvester Croom, whose team stumbled the final 30 minutes.

Only Ole Miss' game with Memphis lived up to the way we expected, somewhat - the Rebels dominated so quickly, though, that this was a surprise and was even more high-scoring.

And, for state performances, we knew Steve Roberts' team would compete with A&M, but our question as to whether A&M had enough talent to be a Sun Belt team was answered to new coach Mike Sherman's chagrin: No. They couldn't stop the run and they could barely run. Meanwhile, A-State got over a huge hump with the biggest win in school history.