Over at the excellent Team Speed Kills, Year2 offers an interesting rebuttal to Chris Low’s placement of Georgia in his pre-spring SEC power rankings. It’s interesting because it attempts to analyze the upcoming season through the prism of 2006, the last time a Mark Richt-coached team entered a season with almost zero experience at the quarterback position. (That team, remember, wound up winning nine games.)
One thing about his conclusion…
From where I sit today, I have no trouble seeing Georgia match its 2006 win total of nine. That ’06 team even dropped a couple of winnable games by losing to Kentucky 24-20 and Vanderbilt 24-22, so its record could have been better at essentially the same production level.
A big reason those two games were “winnable” instead of “won” was the injury to Coutu. Andy Bailey missed a makeable field goal attempt in the Vandy game that would have forced the Commodores to go for a touchdown in the end to win. In the Kentucky game, Bailey had an extra point blocked and whiffed on two field goal attempts. Assuming Blair Walsh stays healthy, it’s reasonable to expect that Georgia avoids those sorts of hiccups along the way in 2010.
Get The Picture 
Does all of this negativity constitute flying under the radar?
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Historically, the worse these know-it-all’s bad mouth us the better we turn out to be, if Grantham can make the defense into a solid (not great) unit, we can easily win 9 games next year.
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That’s one of Year2’s points. I agree with him that if we can cut our points allowed from almost 26 to 20, which is a significant, but doable amount, we will pick up at least a couple more wins.
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Even if Walsh did happen to get hurt, my hope is that Bogotay can fill in better than Bailey did. He could hardly do worse.
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Which game was it that Bailey hit one of his own linemen in the back? That was one of the more incredible things I have ever seen.
He did also miss a 25-35 yarder by at least 25 yards to the left, again, absolutely astonishing. I honestly thought that the ball would have wound up back at his feet had the bleachers not gotten in the way.
I believe Coach Fabris was responsible for that scholarship offer.
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Has there ever been a bigger wasted scholly than Andy Bailey?
Maybe Kevin Perez, but at least he never played and didn’t actively participate in losing games for us.
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Remember those pictures of Perez, Stafford and Durham at the Blind Pig on NSD?
I remember seeing that Perez was about 5″ shorter than Stafford, and that Stafford had much broader shoulders and thinking “uh-oh.”
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Brandon Bogotay, Ricardo Crawford, Akeem Hebron, N’daris Ward?
You’ll notice all 4 are from out of state. I hate to be xenophobic, but I’m not a big fan of getting a guy from outside the deep south. I’d rather get a 3 star LB from GA like Jarvis Jax than a Parade All America LB from Maryland. MD doesn’t play the quality of ball that is played down from here to TX.
Yes, exceptions exist (KM). But we’ve had a lot more misses than hits when going so far afield.
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Knowshon Moreno was yankee waste of a good schollie.
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Low shoots from the hip and understands that ridiculousness = viewership. I wouldn’t put much into what he says, although some folks obviously do.
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The difference between those guys and gals at NBC,CBS, ESPN, White House, and Congress is less the width of a gnats hair. All they do is write and talk…and never say a thing worth hearing or remembering. All of them lack prescience…along with knowledge and intelligence. Most have never put two good thoughts back to back in their life. Plus I have it from a reliable source that all them have their mama’s dress them in the morning. They need to give Sharon a call and get a life. Thank goodness for the mute button on my TVs…you learn more by watching teams rather than watching and listening to those announcers.
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Can anyone explain why our D under CWM failed so miserably on a QB outside the pocket (see Garcia and Crompton)?
I don’t have enough Fan-Q to understand why it was so effective against our “defense”. It can’t possibly have been as easy as a few Safety blitzes from the naked side to blow up the QB and make him honest, could it?
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In Garcia’s case, I’m not sure it would make any difference.
One of the more amazing things to me about last season is that Garcia never got knocked out of a game. With the chances he takes physically, you wonder how many SEC seasons he can get through like that.
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Keep in mind also that if Kregg Lumpkin doesn’t A-Pete the ball on the 2nd half KO, Georgia takes Florida to OT. Ain’t no way we win that with Andy Bailey as our FGK, but hey.
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I had an email confrontation with low about ESPN a couple of years ago. We agreed to disagree. We still do. The Dawgs will win 9 or 10 games in 2010.
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We are the easy target. He lives in Knoxvegas, so he can’t say anything bad about them. ESPN won’t let him say anything negative about Saban or Urban. SCU is well SCU so cheap shoting them is not going to get you any hits. So there we are alone in the East to take the hits. Heck 2010 depends on 2 things neither of which is the QB. 1. If our OL can actually live up to what we thought they should have done in 2009 and 2. CTG can get UGA’s D to play at least as good as UCONN did against SCU, we win 11 yes 11. We still can’t beat UF because our O just pi$$es their pants in JAX every f*ing year.
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All this analysis stuff is making my head hurt. Is the D for 2010 gonna be equal to or better than the D in 2006? Can the offense increase production 10% over last year? All that is a bunch of hypothetical hooey. Look at the schedule for crying out loud. If we can get past South Carolina in Columbia in week 2 ( the same team that just got whacked in a bowl game badly by UConn) and beat Arky in Athens week 3 (I think we’re better than they are, don’t you?) there is a high probability UGA will be undefeated going into the WLOCP. UT’s no good. The only potential OOC team to worry about, Tech, is decimated by graduation and NFL defections. The only teams on the regular season schedule realistically we have to worry about are FLA and Auburn. As long as we don’t lose to both of them we’re going to the SECCG, baby. Even if we lost both we might still go. Besides UGA, FLA has to play LSU and at Bama. Think positive! This is gonna be the year of the Dawg in SEC East. Personally I think its 50-50 that UGA gets through the regular season undefeated.
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I agree with the “Mayor”. However, check out the spring roster. Only 4 CB’s listed. Lack of depth at DB & DL is a concern. Two springs and 2 falls s/b enough to develop a QB. The offense will be great. It looks like a 10 & 2 regular season to me (maybe even better). Go Dawgs.
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