I’ve made a lot of predictions over the last month, about every team in every conference in the country, many of which I frankly can’t even remember. Many, even after diligent research and charts and maybe some rudimentary math, still amount to educated guesses cobbled together with a random strain of fatigued logic. But if for whatever reason you feel it necessary to hold my feet to fire about anything I’ve said about the 2010 season when the calendar hits December, there are only a handful I’m willing to risk looking like an idiot for on the eve of the first Saturday kickoff, before the actual muscle and sweat grinds the offseason logic into irrelevant dust:

• Tide will fall. In general, the odds advise against projecting pretty much any specific team to run the table to a perfect season, no matter how dominant it happens to look on paper. That goes double in a season that appears ripe for chaos, where there is no dominant team on paper. And it goes triple for an outfit that’s already flouted the odds over the course of a frequently harrowing, 24-game regular-season win streak. For lack of an obvious successor, Alabama opens the season where it ended the last one, as the consensus No. 1 in every major poll. But down nine starters, six draft picks and three All-Americans from the nation’s best defense – not just the core but almost the entire group responsible for a 12-0 regular season in 2008 and the perfect, 14-0 run to the BCS championship last year – and now facing some uncertainty surrounding two of its best players, if ever an undisputed frontrunner has been vulnerable to an unexpected lump or two, ‘Bama is it.

• Democracy is coming to the Rose Bowl. Whatever its other concessions to evolving realities over the year, clearly the Granddaddy has never been for the little guy: Even since the Rose Bowl relinquished its 50-year-old death grip on the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions to join the BCS in 1998, only five teams have won their way into Pasadena without a major conference championship, and only one of those (No. 13 Illinois in 2007) came into the game ranked lower than No. 8 in the AP poll. The Fiesta or Sugar bowls might be willing to descend to some mid-major upstart, but never the Rose. It’s just not done, you see.

Like all barriers, though, the gate guarding one of the most exclusive venues in sports from the barbarians has been chipped away just enough – most recently by ESPN, which mandated as part of the BCS’ new broadcast contract that the Rose Bowl replace a Big Ten or Pac-10 champion bound for the BCS Championship Game with a qualified outfit from a non-”Big Six” conference –