Small pond syndrome

The New York Times posted an article about bloggers who abandon their websites, which is the overwhelming rule, not the exception, in the blogosphere.

The stats are interesting, but this is the part that caught my eye:

… Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta, had no trouble attracting an audience to his self-explanatory site, Things My Dog Ate, which included tales of his foxhound, Watson, eating remote controls, a wig and a $400 pair of Prada shoes.

“I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said.

A blog about a dog eating a remote control generated 50,000 views a month?  Either college football blogging is more of a backwater than I thought, or you’re reading the post of one very humbled blogger right now.  Sheesh.

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Steele’s Draft Day Party Hangover

If you’ve seen the comments on the Web, Phil Steele has a generally favorable outlook for Georgia’s 2009 season – at least as favorable as a team ranked #13 in his preseason rankings that resides in the same division as his #1 ranked Florida Gators can expect, anyway.  But there’s one area that doesn’t bode well for Georgia’s chances, and that’s talent lost to the NFL draft.

… Basically I assign a point total for players selected in the different rounds of the draft and here is what the numbers have totaled.

Over the last 12 years teams that earned more points than the previous year and accumulated….
12 or more points – Weaker or same record 164 of 216 (75.9%)
24 or more points – Weaker or same record 47 of 55 (85.4%)
35 or more points – Weaker record 13 of 15 (86.7%)

Georgia, in case you’re wondering, finished second on Steele’s list, with 28 points.

The good news is that Steele believes there’s a strong likelihood that the MNC will come from one of the teams on his DDH list.  So there’s that, at least.

We may need a new nickname.

This is the idlest of speculation, but, is it possible, with all of his talk about the neutral field, travel and weather, that Mark Richt is sandbagging us about this year’s Florida game?  That all this focus on whining is just a smokescreen?

I ask this in response to an e-mail I received from a reader whose mom just attended the most recent Football 101 clinic the team hosted.  She found the following poster plastered all over the weight/locker room:

GATA, boys!

So while he’s got us wringing our hands over whether we need to keep making the trip to Jax, he’s got the team getting after giving the GPOOE™ a reason to make another one of those teary-eyed, post-game motivational speeches.

I like it.  Needless to say, a win this year has the potential to rank right up there with the 1985 game in terms of personal satisfaction.

If he pulls it off, we’ll need to come up with another persona for the man – Sneaky Richt?  Devious Richt?  Mr. Misdirection?

Ranking the road games

A commenter to one of my posts yesterday asked the musical question how Georgia ranks on the StubHub scale for each of its road opponents this season.  Ask, and ye shall receive, I always say here, so this is what a brief search on StubHub turned up:

• Oklahoma State – Georgia is second, behind Texas.
• Arkansas – Georgia is third, but that’s a bit misleading in that the games with more expensive ticket price demands were the two in Little Rock, with its smaller seating capacity.
• Tennessee – Georgia is third, behind Auburn and South Carolina.
• Vanderbilt – Georgia is first.
• Florida – Georgia is first (again, seating capacity is an explanation for this, to some extent).
• Georgia Tech – Georgia is first.  Duh.

Any surprises to you there?

I don’t miss him at all.

Doc Saturday’s turned his “Premature Assessment” spotlight on those lovable Tennessee Volunteers.  It’s both restrained – there’s nary a mention of those dreaded secondary violations – and informative.

The Doc thinks there’s one big thing that did in Phil Fulmer.

… Including quarterbacks and tight ends, Tennessee has put exactly one skill player — again, Meachem — on a year-end All-SEC lineup, first or second team, since 2004. In the same four-year span, Georgia has had nine All-SEC skill players; Florida and Arkansas have had seven; Alabama, Kentucky and LSU have produced six; and South Carolina and Vanderbilt can each boast five. Tennessee has produced one. That’s Mississippi State territory.

That’s a solid point, but there’s an omission from his post that I find surprising, considering how able an observer the Doc is.  Here’s a clue, from UT’s stats over the past four seasons:

• 2008:  17.3 ppg (SEC, T10th)
• 2007:  32.5 ppg (SEC, 6th)
• 2006:  27.8 ppg (SEC, 4th)
• 2005:  18.6 ppg (SEC, 10th)

Notice a pattern there involving a certain coordinator position?  Maybe this will jog your memory:

… With Cutcliffe as his offensive coordinator, Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer was 85-19 with two SEC championships.

Without Cutcliffe, Fulmer is 64-29 with no SEC championships.

Rest assured that Georgia is thrilled to see Cutcliffe in Durham, N.C., right now, because he owned the Bulldogs.

Cutcliffe never lost to Georgia in nine games as Tennessee’s offensive coordinator/play-caller (1992-98 and 2006-07). In those nine games, the Vols averaged 35.3 points and were held under four touchdowns only once.

In the five trips to Athens with Cutcliffe overseeing the offense, the Vols averaged 35.4 points. In the three trips without him, they averaged just 14 points.

So the question I’ve got going forward is simply this – does Kiffin and his offensive brain trust scare you as much as David Cutcliffe did?  As a Dawg fan, I’ve got to say no.