Let's face it, the one thing that has never changed in college football for many years. Winning teams are not built based on the performance of their highly rated players, but on the performance of those that many did not foresee.
Go and look at the 1998 championship season. If anyone had come to you in 1997 and told you that we would win a national title in 1998, without Peyton Manning, Leonard Little and Marcus Nash would you have believed it? It would be especially unbelievable had you been told that Jamal Lewis would have little to do with it.