More tales told on the recruiting trail

From Carter Strickland’s piece on Georgia’s recruiting for the ’09 class, there’s this little comparison:

… Georgia has to hedge its bets when it comes to recruiting between 20 and 25 players.

“It’s a catch 22,” Garner said.

Georgia wants those players, may even need those players, but it can only offer so many scholarships or it might find itself in a pinch like Clemson. Clemson oversigned its class and was forced to not renew Atlanta native Ray Ray McElrathbey’s scholarship. (Scholarships are given on a year-by-year basis.)

Bulldogs coach Mark Richt has always said he once a player signs at Georgia, that player’s scholarship is good for all four or five years. So Richt and Georgia do not want to get themselves into a situation where they would oversign.

What’s the over under on how many current high school senior football recruits will hear the name “Ray Ray” in the next ten months?

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Beer drinkin’ and hell raisin’ in Columbia

The way they’re starting to talk about the Ole Ball Coach sounds a lot like the way we were talking about Dennis Felton before the SEC tournament:

Welcome to the football program at South Carolina.

That’s the continuing issue at the school. Under Lou Holtz before him and now under Spurrier, the football team has managed to keep itself in the news for all the wrong reasons.

When he walked through the door more than three years ago as the next big-name coach to replace the last big-name coach who couldn’t get the job done, one of Spurrier’s first acts was to show the door to a few players he didn’t want on his team.

Many times since, Spurrier has said it wasn’t that he thought they were bad people, only that their attitudes were unacceptable for his standards. He wanted players who were more committed to being good athletes and good students.

At the time, it reflected poorly on some of the recruiting decisions made by Holtz; but here we are three football seasons and then some later, and Spurrier is dealing with many of the same sort of problems, only with players he recruited.

Of course, Felton actually suspended players from (multiple) games, or kicked them off the team for bad behavior. Garcia gets a few days off from practice.

On a related note, Matt Zemek says Spurrier is doomed at USC until he can find another high character quarterback like Danny:

… It’s high time that Spurrier–who also witnessed less than exemplary behavior from Blake Mitchell, a quarterback who held the program back–start insisting on first-rate behavior (not the mere avoidance of wrongdoing) from his kids. After all, this is the man who–talented as he is as a play-caller–needed the character, courage and poise of Danny Wuerffel, a first-class individual in word and deed, to attain especially lofty heights in the annals of SEC history. Only when Spurrier gets another Wuerffel-like signal caller will he be able to set his sights on another SEC title.

One can sense the note taking on this stuff going on in places like Knoxville. You can never take enough good material with you when you go on the road to recruit.

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UPDATE:  Gawd, I love Gamecock fans.  This message board thread is priceless:

We are all being punished because a 20-yr-old drank a beer

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Hyman has decided to punish Garcia, the football team and all of the Carolina fans, because Garcia drank a beer. I’m not sure how many games we will win next year, but I do know that the quarterbacks that we do have do not have the physical skills of Mr. Garcia. I’ve read all of the posts from the “holier than thou” crowd on this board that think that SG should be gone for good, but unless the offensive line is a whole lot better than average, we will struggle on offense without a more athletic quarterback. Coach Spurrier knows this and that is why he was tweaking the offense, so that we could take advantage of someone like Garcia’s athletic ability. The punishment should fit the “crime” and in this case, EH has gone way overboard! The kid did the wrong thing and deserves a punishment, but having him suspended for the spring and not allowed to come back during the summer is too harsh. We will not reach the full potential of this team!

It’s tough to watch someone’s preseason MNC dreams (what is that, like the eighth year in a row?) go down the drain.

Why Florida?

CFN’s Fiutak unveils his early, early BCS picks today. And, no, he doesn’t have Georgia in the title game, as he feels the schedule will be the Dawgs’ undoing.

Fine, I can understand that. But here’s what I don’t get. In picking Florida to face Ohio State for the MNC (can you imagine listening to Herbstreit for the month leading up to that? ugh…), Fiutak argues that the Gators will be every bit as good as Georgia “if the secondary has overcome its growing pains“.

As if that’s a minor roadblock to steer around. Look, Florida was last in the SEC – and 98th nationally – in pass defense last season. That’s not some little hurdle to skip over. Add in the facts that the Gators lost their best pass rusher from a year ago and are looking for two members of their incoming freshman class to step up and start on the defensive side of the ball and I don’t see how that translates into a magical transformation of Florida’s pass defense.

Almost as big a leap of faith is being made with regard to Emmanuel Moody’s impact on the Gator offense. Hell, the Miami paper the other day noted that Moody is struggling a bit in spring practice. It turns out he’s never lined up in an offense that operates exclusively out of the shotgun before.

The Gators are certainly talented. And I like to think that the WLOCP is going to be insanely important this season, both from an SEC perspective and a national one, so maybe I’ve sipped the Kool-Aid a bit, too, but I just don’t get this easy assumption that a genuinely crappy secondary gets fixed that quickly.