Sagarin’s preseason rankings

He’s got Georgia ninth, LSU second, Michigan eleventh and Arkansas twenty sixth, for starters.  And he’s showing Southern Cal as the dominant team in the game this season, with a huge spread between it and LSU.

Since his numbers are power rankings to which you would add 2.87 points for home field advantage, he’s calling for Georgia to lose three games in ’08, to LSU, Florida and Auburn.

He doesn’t have strength of schedule numbers posted, but he shows Georgia playing #116, #85, #62, #46, #43, #32, #31, #21, #13, #10, #5 and #2, which seems pretty respectable at this juncture.  Take it for what it’s worth.

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Blood in the water

Is Florida State on the verge of having its arse handed to it?  If so, the aftershock could be pretty devastating.

Random one liners

Some items of note:

• The Wiz points out some weird goings on at Alabama.
• Groo has a long memory.
• As the last quote in this post indicates, Georgia still isn’t in their heads.
• Herbstreit is jealous of one thing about the SEC.
• Stewart Mandel says it’s time for Matt Stafford to live up to the hype.
• Matt Simms, quarterback, dumbass.
• A. J. Green makes a top 10 list.

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UPDATE: Maybe she got a little carried away; maybe it’s a test run for Jimmy Johns.

How to win a championship, in three easy steps.

The guys at Saurian Sagacity are back from their offseason siesta with a vengeance.  Mergz put up a terrific post yesterday that takes a detailed look at the last eight BCS champs to see what categories of statistical excellence they have in common. Not surprisingly, as he put it, it’s the defense, stupid.  More specifically, scoring defense, passing efficiency defense and total defense were what mattered more for the winners than a slew of other statistical categories.  Based on the historical data, the king should have these levels of performance:

Look for a team likely to finish in the top 11 in Scoring Defense, the top 15 in Total Defense, and the top 18 in Passing Efficiency Defense.

Six teams met that bar last year – Auburn, Clemson, Kansas, Ohio St., Southern California and Virginia Tech.  (LSU would have but for their overtime games, which skewed the stats.)  You may notice that a certain team in red and black isn’t on that list, although I’d love to see how the national stat rankings looked over the last seven games of the ’07 season.  Anyway, Mergz has this to say about Georgia:

… Or, if you like Georgia, do you think the 2008 Georgia defense can improve from their scoring defense in 2007 of 18th nationally to at least 11th, keep their total defense at least as good as last year’s 14th, and really improve their Passing Efficiency Defense from last year’s 36th to better than 18th? If they do all that, the statistics of past winners show they have a fairly decent chance.

Good stuff to keep an eye on this season…

Youth will be served.

David Hale’s most recent practice notes indicate that Richt wasn’t kidding when he indicated that the incoming skill position players need to anticipate action this season.

According to Hale, Green and King have cracked the two deep at split end and flanker, respectively.  Responding to Caleb King’s injury, Richard Samuel is leading the race to be the #2 tailback behind Moreno.

Granted, these are talented kids and the RB position behind Moreno is wide open from a depth standpoint.  That being said, for true freshmen to be moving up on the depth chart that rapidly tells me that Richt isn’t going to be complacent about deploying his resources this year.