Alabama Football will have a September advantage over Georgia if ...

Months away from one of the most significant Alabama Football games in Tuscaloosa, the consensus of pundit opinion favors the Georgia Bulldogs. There are reasons to believe September will be too soon in the Kalen DeBoer era for the Alabama Crimson Tide to knock off a top national championship contender. The Bulldogs will be very good again, with valid assumptions from Georgia fans that the Dawgs will be a better team than last season.

A most different Alabama Crimson Tide will take the Bryant-Denny field in the early evening of Sept. 28. The new Tide will not include much of what the Crimson Tide was in 17 Nick Saban seasons. Alabama only lost to Georgia twice in Nick Saban's run, and one of the losses was in overtime while Saban was rebuilding Alabama in the 2007 season. With all of Kirby Smart's success in recent seasons, the record also shows eight Georgia losses in the last nine games against the Alabama Crimson Tide.

Alabama may have some yet-to-be-discovered advantages in the September game. One of those advantages could be the deciding factor in an Alabama win. Alabama's new staff will have plenty of knowledge about the Bulldogs, on both sides of the ball. The situation will be different for Georgia.

Georgia will of course have fully analyzed Washington's offense under Kalen DeBoer and South Alabama's defense while Kane Wommack was head coach of the Jaguars. They will also scrutinize the systems used at Fresno State and Indiana. The analysis will give the Bulldogs plenty of information, but it will be incomplete.

DeBoer and Wommack will adapt their systems to the talent on the Alabama Crimson Tide roster. The adaption will leave much unchanged, but it will include new wrinkles that can be effective based on Alabama's talent.

None of the new wrinkles will be used against Western Kentucky or South Florida. It is possible they will not be needed against Wisconsin. In early spread projections, the Crimson Tide is favored by eight points over the Badgers. The game is not a lock win for Alabama, but the Tide can gain a double-digit victory without revealing too much to the Georgia Bulldogs.

The Alabama vs. Georgia game will be a tight contest. It could come down to a few plays at key points that catch Georgia unprepared for a Crimson Tide adjustment never shown before Sept. 28 in Tuscaloosa.