As long as things go according to plan, we should have college football in two months with week zero games slated to start on August 29th. We still have a ways to go before we know if the season will get started on schedule, what that season will look like and if it will go off without interruption if it does start on time.

While all of those topics have been debated at length and will be debated up until the start of the season, we have decided to step away from all of that for a little bit and focus more on some real "football" questions in advance of the season as programs are looking at ramping up workouts per NCAA guidelines and get back to the game that so many of us love.

We start this seven-part series by looking at one question that gets debated each and every year, a question of conference superiority. Only one team can win the national championship each year but if Clemson wins the ACC, wins the title and there are no other good teams, can the ACC really lay claim to being the best league or just the league that the best team in college football resides in?

Who is the best, from top-to-bottom? We take a swing at things two months out from the start of the season.

Kevin Noon: Do we base this off the the bowl record from the last season, because if we do that then I would have to say the SEC and its 8-2 record in 2019-2020 bowls. Don't forget that the teams that competed in those bowl games look very different this season with players moving on to the next phases of their lives, be it professional football, transfer or getting on with their post-football lives.

Under the same argument, the Big Ten can claim to have the most teams ranked in the final AP Top-25, with six teams. But just like the argument I made before, what happened last year means little for this year.

No, we are going to have to fast forward to this season and look at the teams that will be on the field "today" (or in two months) rather than successes and failures from a year ago.

LSU may be the defending national champion but the Tigers lose a lot on the roster as well as in losing Joe Brady from the coaching staff. The addition of Bo Pelini is intriguing and could be high reward or blow up fantastically with his 'hot blooded' nature. How will that work within the framework of the staff that they currently have in place and will players who were not part of that buy-in to it?

The Big Ten will see the same teams at the top as usual but this really comes down to how the middle of each league will look when trying to sort things out. This argument will not be solved by putting No. 1 versus No. 1 or putting the worst in the SEC against Rutgers and extrapolating from there.

No, how would Iowa fare against Tennessee under normal league circumstances? Would Indiana take down Kentucky? Could Northwestern get past South Carolina?

We want to look at what happens in a one-off bowl game, generally in SEC territory, after the Big Ten goes through its nine-game league gauntlet and the SEC goes through a challenging eight-game league schedule with at least two tomato cans on the schedule.

It is impossible to really play these games in a controlled situation where you take away location bias, scheduling bias and other outside factors (not excluding ESPN's cheerleading) that make this an exercise in futility.

I just feel that if you go from 1-14, I like the Big Ten in more match-ups than I like the SEC and I give the edge to the B1G by the smallest of margins and I probably am just showing my own bias from having covered this league for umpteen million years.

Griffin Strom: We all know good and well this has been a two-horse race for years, and will be once again in 2020.

Having not spent a year of my life outside of Columbus, Ohio, let me choke down a couple decades of pro-Big Ten bias to make a point that we probably all know to be true if we search our most earnest feelings; even if I'm only writing it for the sake of the counterpoint here.

The SEC will be a little better than the Big Ten in 2020, as it usually is.

If the question was which conference will be the deepest, I'd give the nod to the Big Ten, which boasted a college football most six teams of the top 18 in the final AP Poll last season. But the SEC is simply heavier at the top, and it's no longer a case of Nick Saban and Alabama ruling the roost.

LSU, Georgia, Florida and the Crimson Tide comprised four of the top eight teams in the nation according to the AP Poll, while Ohio State was the lone Big Ten team in that upper echelon.

But that was last year. If there ever was a season that college football's other elite programs could take the SEC out of the conversation come that final game in January, it may be this one, as Clemson and Ohio State should enter the season ranked No. 1 and No. 2 as title favorites following the departure of Joe Burrow and Brady in LSU.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. As excited as everyone is to write off Alabama following its lowest AP Poll finish since 2010, don't forget; the Crimson Tide lost only two games last year, with one coming to the eventual national champions who they played much tighter than Clemson.

I'm not convinced that matching up middling or bottomfeeder programs from each conference would be the deciding factor that proves which is superior, and each conference's bowl records from a year ago already shows the SEC was more game against nonconference opponents in the postseason.

Take the Buckeyes, Crimson Tide and LSU out of the equation, and chop off the bottom-half of each league. Wisconsin's run game won't improve with the departure of Jonathan Taylor. Minnesota is just one year removed from a 15-year run of pure mediocrity, and Michigan has shown little to convince anyone that it's finally ready to get over the hump.

After LSU's success a season ago, Georgia may be the SEC's third banana, but the Bulldogs have had the No. 1 recruiting class in the country three years running, and have been knocking on the doorstep of a national title for years.

Which Big Ten program besides Ohio State will even be in serious contention for a national championship in 2020? The answer to that questions settles the score on this debate for me.