Sunday morning buffet

Get that plate and go…

• Orrin Hatch:  health care socialism bad, college football socialism good.
• Here’s Florida’s current two-deep chart.  That secondary looks pretty frikkin’ stout.
• Factoid of the day #1, from Joe Schad’s Twitter feed:  “How hard for some schools to CFB recruit? Only 43 of 120 FBS schools had a ESPN Top 25 class last 4 years”
• Marlon Brown wants to hear some cheers this season.
• Here’s another reason to expand March Madness.
• Factoid of the day #2:  “The two worst seasons under coach Mark Richt were the two in which the Bulldogs threw the most interceptions and had the most turnovers.”
• Georgia wouldn’t mind if its quarterbacks were a little more mobile this year.

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Oh, those crazy punt returns

A.J. Green wants to return punts.  Let me say that again:  Georgia’s most electrifying player on offense thinks he can make a difference running back punts.  He’s not talking completely out of his ass about that either, having returned twelve punts for touchdowns in high school.

But there’s this thing that seems to get a lot of people hung up about him doing that.

Green said he wasn’t worried about risking injury.

“Nah,” he said. “It will just add another dimension to my game.”

To read the message boards, you’d think that returning punts was the most hazardous part of the game.  Hell, make that special teams in general – I read one comment from a person who still claims to be scarred by Boss Bailey blowing his knee out while covering a kickoff in the Georgia Southern game a decade ago.

Now I’ve got no idea if Green is Georgia’s best option here.  But I wouldn’t bet against it either.  And if he is a legitimate difference maker who should play, how credible is the injury concern?  I see two ways of looking at that.  If you see football as a violent, dangerous sport, then there’s a point to be made that increasing the number of times a player sees the field also increases the risk of injury.  But to simply argue that there’s a greater risk of injury simply fielding punts… well, I’d be curious to see the data on that.