I had a couple of people in the past ask me why I don't make predictions of the Indians, Warriors and Wildcats like I do the Hogs at the beginning of the season. My basic answer to this is to respond with something to the effect that I would just as soon prefer needles to be poked in my eyes rather than to have to endure the repercussions of predicting anything other that an undefeated season for any of the local teams.

Is this basically gutless….yes. However, keep in mind that we are not dealing with sports news on a national scale, but on as local a level as you can get. As such, while I will report the games as I see them, no matter how ugly, there's no need adding fuel to the fire with pre-season predictions.

In fact, I temper what I write even about the Hogs and Red Wolves (hard to get used to that) considering what occurred two years ago.

In a pre-season column, I wrote about something I had read about Auburn and some of their players. I won't go into detail here, but I'll have to admit that the information I had was some two weeks old. In the intervening days, the information I based my column on proved to be false.

At the time, though, proud of the column as I was, sure of my information and never imagining that anyone from Alabama would ever see it, I put it on our website. Bad mistake.

Within 24 hours, I think, the paper was getting emails from seething War Eagle fans. To their credit, none of their communiqués were R or X rated, but there was no mistaking their feeling for me and my words.

Clearly, I had no idea that there were so many people who monitored the internet so carefully. Since then, I've found that a person can set his browser to scan the World Wide Web and flag certain words (Auburn, War Eagle, etc.).

Then when they look at the origin of the story, column or whatever and read that some guy from a small town in the Delta is chopping at their Tigers, they get bent out of shape. But to add to the problem, when they see how wrong the info is, they get positively livid.

Well livid those guys (and gals) from the plains of Alabama got.

To make a long story short, I ended up doing another column as an apology and got some very nice responses in return. But that's why I don't make any local predictions or the like.

As a final word, and in deference to our fellow SEC Western Division brothers on the eastern side of Alabama, good luck this season. Nevertheless, Woooo-Pig-Soooie……. Razorbacks!

And that's my opinion this week, for what it's worth.