Music to my ears

I don’t know if this season will wind up being more a satisfying one for me than last year, but I do feel certain that Mark Richt knows what it’s going to take to get his team to a better place.  One example of that is this quote from this Tim Tucker post at the AJ-C page today:

“Football is game of momentum, and we gave away more momentum than we gained,” Richt said Tuesday. “I think most all of us know that if you’re going to win one statistic besides the scoreboard, [you’d want it to be] be turnover ratio. If you knew you were going to win the turnover-ratio battle every single game, you’d know for certain you were going to have a winning season and probably one of your better seasons.

Amen.  And amen again.  Getting all the little things right can do a lot to overcome the loss of two first round draft picks.

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“How many times have we seen Georgia…”

Bill King has a post up at his AJ-C blog in respose to the USA Today article on the golden eras of all the D-1 football programs.

USA Today points to Georgia’s stretch from 1980-3 as its golden era.  As Bill notes, it’s hard to argue with this legacy:

… when Vince Dooley’s Bulldogs were 43-4-1, Herschel Walker won the Heisman and the undefeated 1980 Dogs took the national championship.

But there was something else in play back then, more intangible in nature.  You didn’t want to leave a Dooley team hanging around, because those squads possessed an uncanny ability to pounce on a key error and convert it into a win.  The post-Herschel, post-Erk 10-9 Cotton Bowl win over Texas is the best known example of that Dawg resilience.

It’s something that we’ve seen crop up under Richt on occasion, but never to the level that we grew accustomed to in the first half of the 80’s.   That’s what I most fondly remember from that period.

And that’s why, after all this time has passed, one game from that time continues to register the greatest shock to me as a Georgia fan.

I still remember how stunned I felt sitting in the stands after that game.  My best friend looked at me and said, “that’s the end of the Dooley era.”  He didn’t mean it in the sense that Dooley was going to be ousted as head coach.  He simply meant that the old magic was gone.  And he was right.

Wednesday morning buffet

A little of this, a little of that…

• The SEC is still reviewing and tweaking its media policy.
• In the conference’s defense, you can get a taste of some of what it’s struggling over in this story about two dudes with a blog being given ACC media credentials and causing problems for the school they’re fans of.
• There’s no new ground broken, but here’s a nice Joe Cox story.
• Joe may work out, but for now he takes a back seat to Florida’s John Brantley, “who many believe is the third best quarterback in the SEC right now”.  I hereby dub Brantley the Greatest Backup Quarterback Of Our Era (GBQOOE™).
• Your morning snark:  the good news is that the Dawgs have returned to their old ways of fundamental tackling work in preseason practice.  The bad news is that Reshad Jones has been out for the last three weeks.
• The Pac-10 has introduced a rule for the NCAA to vote on that would end the practice of schools housing football teams in hotel rooms the night before home games, ostensibly because it would “help integrate athletes more fully with the student body”.  Riiiight.  The real reason – it would save the average school about $40K in expense each year.
• The screwiest Georgia prediction I’ve seen in print yet – Georgia won’t live up to the hype (what hype?) because of its schedule, and it’ll finish 7-5 but still “deserve to stay in the rankings”.  Oy.
• After reading (and puzzling over) this Tommy Tuberville comment, I’m beginning to comprehend why Auburn’s offense went in the toilet last season.

“You try to build an offense away from the defense,” he said. “When everybody was running the ball, everybody was big and physical. Then everybody started spreading it out and … you’ve got defensive backs who are linebackers. The option will start coming back.”