Momentous matchups

You know the season is drawing closer when you find yourself poring over your favorite team's schedule figuring out which games are the gimmes, which ones are the lost causes and which ones will make or break the season. You can do the same thing from a national perspective, too.

While we obviously don't know for sure which teams will live up to their reputation as national-title contenders and which ones will come out of nowhere, we can certainly make an educated guess. And for each of those teams, you can usually identify at least one game -- most likely on the road, most likely against a similarly-talented foe -- that will make or break that team's fortune, and in turn, help define the entire course of the coming season. There are also those games that might not necessarily carry title implications but will still prove to be a defining moment, be it as a milestone win for an emerging program or a landmark moment -- positive or negative -- in a coach's tenure.

Here is an early guess at the 10 most important games of 2007:

1. Florida at LSU, Oct. 6
Unbe