Kellenberger: Predicting the football season

JACKSON, Mississippi -- Brandon Bryant has eight career starts. Breeland Speaks has two. Tony Hughes has never been a head coach before. Jay Hopson has never been a head coach at a FBS-level school.

Yet these are the men that are on the front of this year’s The Clarion-Ledger college football preview because they represent the future. We’ll always remember 2014, and 2015 was pretty great with Ole Miss winning a Sugar Bowl, Southern Miss and Alcorn State both taking home conference titles and Mississippi State sending out Dak Prescott with nine wins.

But it’s 2016 now, and it’s time for something new. It’s time for who is next.

That does not mean we’re predicting a slide. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s our opinion that there’s no outside forces preventing Ole Miss and Mississippi State from continuing to win in the vaunted SEC West, and why should Southern Miss not continue to score at will against most of Conference USA? Hughes was the best hire Jackson State could have possibly made, and those games against Alcorn State should be contentious, meaningful and fun as hell to watch.

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