By Kevin Scarbinsky, Birmingham News
How good will Mike Dyer be as a sophomore? (The Birmingham News / Hal Yeager)
Do you really believe that Auburn is going to follow 14-0 with 5-7 or 4-8?
That Cam Newton and Nick Fairley were so good that, without them, the rest of the Tigers will be just plain bad?
That Auburn will become the first team in the BCS era to follow a national championship with a losing season?
That was Ware's bold prediction Friday on ESPN's College Football Live. With all due respect to the former Heisman winner, he's only half-wrong.
Gene Chizik 's Tigers will drop off in 2011. They will not fall off the face of the earth.
There's too much returning and arriving talent on the team's sideline, among the players and coaches, and too much history on the program's side to indicate that kind of free-fall is on the way. A slide is inevitable, but it should be more like a bumpy glide through your back yard during Winter Storm 2011 than a tumble from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Part of the reason a repeat is out of the question is that Newton and Fairley were special players, as were the four senior offensive linemen and veteran defenders from Mike Blanc to Josh Bynes to Zac Etheridge .
Beyond the infantry Auburn loses, consider the company Auburn keeps. This is the SEC, where teams don't follow championship seasons with championship seasons. The rest of the league won't let them.
SEC teams may have dominated the BCS since its inception, with five different schools winning seven titles overall, the last five in a row, but there's a downside to that competitive balance and excellence.
No team has won back-to-back conference titles since Tennessee in 1997 and 1998. Of the SEC's six previous BCS champions, only two of them came back the next season to reach a BCS bowl.
But that 2008 Florida team is the SEC's only BCS champion that didn't have a worse record the year after. The Gators followed their 13-1 national title in 2008 with a 13-1 finish in 2009, but it was the wrong one. The loss came to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game.
Of the SEC's six previous BCS champions, only Florida 2008 and Alabama 2009 came back to win at least 10 games the next year. The Tide still dropped off by four victories, which is the norm.
There was a common denominator for three of those five drop-offs that now stares Auburn in the face. Except for Tennessee and Alabama, those defending champions had to replace their starting quarterbacks.
Barrett Trotter , the presumed Auburn starter in 2011, won't be as good as Newton - no one in major college football history has been for a single season - but he has a chance to be better than most outsiders expect.
So does Auburn because the rest of the usual suspects in the SEC West also find themselves in a state of flux at the most important position on the field. The top four finishers in the toughest division college football's ever seen could have new starting quarterbacks next season.
Auburn will have the most difficult assignment in replacing Newton, but Alabama loses Greg McElroy , Arkansas has seen the last of Ryan Mallett and juco arrival Zach Mettenberger will get a shot to beat out inconsistent Jordan Jefferson at LSU.
Elsewhere in the huddle, Auburn's set of skill players can match up with almost anyone else in the league. If the rebuilt offensive line can open some holes, Mike Dyer, Onterio McCalebb and friends will hit them. Gus Malzahn will see to that.
Ted Roof 's defense won't dominate, but it didn't this season, except for the fourth quarter of tight games and all four quarters of the BCS Championship Game. Most of the time, with Malzahn's offense, Roof's defense doesn't have to dominate to help the team win.
Auburn's going to win more games than it loses in 2011 - the likely range is 7-5 to 9-3 - because that's what Auburn does. Look at just the recent history.
Since 1992, Auburn has had three undefeated seasons. Among Football Bowl Subdivision programs, only Nebraska can say the same, and its last one was 1997.
Auburn's three perfect seasons since the SEC split into divisions matches the rest of the conference combined. The Tigers ran the table in 1993, 2004 and 2010. Alabama did it in 1992 and 2009, and Tennessee was spotless in 1998.
Since 2000, Auburn has the 11th-best winning percentage in the FBS. That's just behind Florida and Georgia and just ahead of Oregon.
Moral of the story? Auburn takes football seriously, and far more often than not, is pretty good at it. The Tigers went from good to great in 2010. It would be a bigger shock in reverse if they went from great to gulp!
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