Thursday morning buffet

More random bits of college football nourishment for your reading pleasure…

• John Pennington looks at SEC schools’ non-conference schedules over the past few seasons and makes a good point:  “There are a lot of people who look at Georgia’s talent and the Bulldogs long run of success who ask, “When’s Mark Richt gonna win a BCS title?”  First, those aren’t easy to come by.  Second, they’re especially not easy to come by when you play eight SEC contests and you schedule 10 games in five years against BCS-level competition.”
• Another day, another law suit against a company selling player images.  When will these amateurs learn their place?
• This doesn’t sound good.  At all.
• Michael Felder takes an interesting look at what happens to all those top QB prospects after they enter college.  Let’s just say it’s not exactly a science.  Makes me appreciate what Richt and Bobo have done with quarterback development all the more.
• Danny Sheridan breaks down the 2013 title odds for you and guess what – it’s all Alabama!
• Skip Bayless talks to Johnny Manziel about Tim Tebow.  The mind reels.
• Nifty graphical post about college football drive outcomes.

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The Jimmy Williamson apology tour

Just kiddin’.

When I spoke to UGA police chief Jimmy Williamson after the arrest, he wanted this out there: “If you think about the last decade of athletes and particularly the football team, they are not malicious troublemaker kids, they’re not. I don’t think they pay attention to some of the details of requirements that they have to meet. They just don’t rise to their level sometimes. The accountability for that in our state now is much higher. It’s not like 12 or 14 years ago when we had some (players) that could be considered troublemakers. These guys are just young and not thinking about some of the decisions they make. They’re good guys. They’re friendly, they’re respectful, they just don’t always think about their decisions.”

In other words, don’t blame poor ol’ Jimmy.  He’s just a guy caught in the middle between dumb lawmakers and dumb kids.

Seriously, I do find it interesting that, in Weiszer’s words, “he wanted this out there”.  Is he feeling some heat from the attention?

Shoe, meet other foot.

Sure do like the tone of this paragraph in Chris Low’s review of Florida’s 2013 schedule:

Gut-check time: It’s the date that jumps out there for all Florida players, coaches and fans — Nov. 2. The annual showdown with Georgia in Jacksonville might as well be circled in blood this season. Georgia has won the past two in the series, and that’s after Florida dominated this rivalry for much of the past two decades. The Gators had won 18 of 21 prior to losing the past two. Florida also hasn’t played in the SEC championship game since 2009, and losing a third straight to Georgia would make getting back to Atlanta a long shot.

It wasn’t too long ago when all the angst was on the red and black side.  If Georgia can pull off a third straight win in Jax, there will be some serious sphincter tightening going on in Gainesville.

Mark Richt may not have won a national title, but if he’s truly able to recast this series as a balanced rivalry, that’s a helluva legacy in my book.

Wednesday morning buffet

Come grab a plate.

• “[Georgia]  Tech ran the ball 81% of the time, so that merits the majority of our attention, but they also averaged 9.37 yards per pass. Only Georgia was better.”
• If the rumors are true, it looks like Les Miles should be happier with the bridge schedules coming up in 2014 and 2015.
• In case you’re interested, here’s the list of the top 15 players in EA Sports ‘NCAA Football 2014′.  Aaron Murray made it.
• If ever there was a story made for Bleacher Report, this is it.
• Sanford Stadium makes #2 on Athlon‘s ranking of SEC stadiums.
• Georgia’s offseason prep is focused on the first two games.
• Coach O on academics:  “He M-F’d me all over the place,” says DeMars. “He made me feel like a bad person for going to class.”
• Per Steele, Georgia returns the second highest percentage of offensive yardage in the SEC, behind only Ole Miss.

Georgia’s preseason consensus

Over at Football Study Hall, kleph gathered up a bunch of magazines (Athlon Sports, Lindy’s Sports, The Sporting News and Phil Steele, to be exact), looked at their top 25 lists and their All-American teams and then crunched them all together to get a general picture of where they have things in the preseason.

Georgia finished seventh, behind three other SEC teams, including South Carolina in the East.  Alabama was the #1 pick; every magazine has the Tide listed at the top.

Meanwhile, Chase Stuart took the point spreads the Golden Nugget published last week and ran them through his SRS ratings to get a top 25 based on those.

We don’t have a full slate of games, but we do have at least 1 game for 83 different teams. Theoretically, this is different than using actual game results: one game can be enough to come up with Vegas’ implied rating for the team. That’s because once we’re confident in Oklahoma’s rating, Tulsa being 18-point underdogs in Norman gives us a good estimate for how Vegas views Tulsa. I assigned 3 points to the road team in each game in coming up with the implied SRS ratings. For example, Arizona is an 11-point favorite on the road against California. So for that game, we assume Vegas believes the Wildcats are 14 points better than the Golden Bears; if we do this for each of the other 247 games, and then iterate the results hundreds of times, we can come up with a set of power ratings.

My impression when I saw the spreads was that Vegas likes the Dawgs (if you remember, Georgia is currently favored in every regular season game).  Stuart’s math backs that up, as Georgia is ranked fifth in the implied SRS ratings.  (Bama and Texas A&M are the SEC teams ranked higher.)  He’s got this to say about it:

Another team Vegas is pretty high on is Georgia. The Bulldogs return Aaron Murray, the quarterback who finished atop my 2012 passer rankings. Last December, I argued against Georgia on the basis of a (for the SEC) creampuff schedule; this year, it makes sense to assign Georgia a high rating but a low ranking. In addition to division games against Florida and South Carolina, the Bulldogs get LSU from the West and face Clemson out of conference. And then in Atlanta, they’d still need to beat the West champion (presumably Alabama, A&M, or LSU). Georgia may be good, but they have a tough road to get to the BCS title game.

Sounds about right.

Zero tolerance

Here’s a helluva quote:

“You have to know that, man, early in the season if you face Georgia you’re going to face them the last couple of years half cocked and not at full strength,” said ESPN analyst Kevin Carter, a former Florida defensive lineman…

And here’s another one, from He Who Won’t Be Missed:

Federal law continues to ban marijuana use, but since that NCAA study, voters in Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana last year. Such changes in society haven’t moved outgoing UGA president Michael Adams to move to change policy at the university.

“We’re not in Colorado, we’re not in California, we’re not in Oregon,” Adams said earlier this spring. “We’re in Georgia. When I took this job, I agreed to uphold the laws of the state of Georgia. I’ve tried to do that. And I happen to think in Georgia in this case is a better law for the health of society. … I think we have a sound policy.”

Okay, fine.  A question, though – if this is about upholding Georgia law, then why has Georgia pushed for a uniform drug penalty approach across the entire SEC?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.  We Georgia fans already know that virtue is its own reward.

And now, for you conspiracy theorists…

If you’re somebody who, for whatever reason, thinks SEC refs have it in for Georgia, then this John Pennington post should be right up your alley.

Steele on Georgia, 2013 edition

You can find the link to his preview of #9 Georgia here (note the link there downloads as a pdf).  It’s chock full of stuff and it’s certainly not an unreasonable analysis, as this comment about the offensive line indicates:  “With the way this unit has gone I’m not sure how to interpret this, but the line returns intact w/101 car sts and should be one of the top O-lines in the country.”  I feel ‘ya, Phil.

If you’re looking for predictions, he calls for Georgia to win the SEC East again.  But the most interesting tidbit I’ve gleaned so far comes from his statistical analysis of last season.  I’ve mentioned before that Steele puts a lot of stock in a team’s yards per point metric.

Steele makes a very big deal out of yards per point (YPP).  You can read a breakdown of it here.  Essentially, it’s a measure of offensive and defensive efficiency – the lower a team’s offensive YPP is, the more efficient it is at scoring and the higher a team’s defensive YPP is, the better it is at making its opponents less efficient on offense.

Take a look at Georgia’s defensive YPP numbers.  From 2008 through 2011, they ranged from 12.7 to 14.9.  Last season, that number jumped to 18.2.  That number isn’t Sabanesque, but it’s a big swing in the direction of the elite.  And that’s in a year when SEC offenses improved generally and Georgia’s run defense had its ups and downs.  Maybe Grantham didn’t impress us last year, but it looks like he did alright.

Advice to the new kids on the block

Fellas, as you show up in Athens this summer, remember this:  nobody is out to get you.  And if you think it’s weird that beat writers and police chiefs have to go out of their way to issue denials like that, well, you’re probably just being a little paranoid.

That being said, if somebody with a badge asks you for your middle name, it’s best to be forthcoming.

Are they experienced?

It’s a tune we’ve heard before, but according to Steele, Georgia brings back the seventh-most experienced offensive line (in terms of number of returning starts) in the country and second in the SEC to Tennessee.

There’s a temptation to say that and five bucks will get you something tasty at Starbucks, but here’s hoping it’ll mean a lot more… if only for Aaron Murray’s safety.