Ladies and gentlemen, another great moment in sports punditry, courtesy of Dennis Dodd, who, in ranking the Florida Gators at #6 in his current preseason list, shares this insight about why those Gators will excel in 2008:
The only questions are the defense and how to keep Tim Tebow upright and healthy.
Let’s see… that covers about sixty percent of the team’s performance. Besides that, they’re perfect.
Get The Picture 
Where can I find how many minutes the backup QB(s) played at UF last year? I’d bet very little because I remember Tebow still playing in the 4th quarter of blow out wins over UT, USuCk and FSU.
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I don’t know where you can find it broken down by minutes, but I can at least tell you that according to cfbstats.com, Cam Newton didn’t play in eight of the Gators’ games last year.
Newton is credited with 26 total plays – rushing and passing – on the year. By comparison, Tebow had 560.
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Thanks for doing the leg work Senator. I was going to throw stones at Myer for not getting his backup QB any game time. However when you compare last years stats Joe Cox only got in 15 plays. I know Cox got a lot of game experience in ’06 but I remember before last season CMR talking about how well Cox had been doing in practice and how deserving he was for more playing time and it seemed like he played more than 15 plays. At least to me anyway. But the data never lies.
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Another tidbit I found interesting was each teams backup QB had ample opportunities to play. UF won 7 games by 20 or more points while UGA won 5 games by the same margin. UF had a margin of victory of 33.7 points in those games. UGA margin of victory was 26.8 points in the 5 blow outs (though the Ole Miss game was close until the 4th quarter). The numbers suggest the backups could’ve gotten a little more “garbage time” than what they both did. But I guess that’s why I’m behind a desk and not on the sidelines.
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“I can feel Georgia Nation’s hate right now”
thats BULLDAWGS nation you dick
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Comparing Newton’s lack of playing time to Cox’s is not relevant, b/c Tebow is a completely different kind of qb than Stafford and the UF offense needs a capable backup much more than UGa does. Tebow’s style of play guarantees that at the very least he will need to be spelled at times, and makes it very likely that he will be injured, even if he is a baby rhino. If the UGa offense is functioning properly, Stafford’s shirt should never touch a blade of grass.
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