It’s not so much about assigning blame as it is looking to turn the corner.

I really like this:

Here are 3 pieces of coaching advice that have had a major impact on my coaching career.

#1 The dirtiest words in coaching are We talked about it. Players don’t learn from talking they learn from well designed simple drills and repetition.

#2 What you see on film was either taught or allowed. You don’t like what you see find a way to change it.

#3 Players don’t screw up because they want to be failures. The vast majority of failure on the field is failure of understanding. The understanding or alignment, technique, or scheme all must be taught in a meaningful way that can be applied not in theory (on a whiteboard) but in a real life situations (game). There is always another (possibly a more effective) way to coach a given technique.

That’s why I have hope the defense begins a turnaround this season.  I recognize the downside to installing a new scheme – the learning curve, less than optimal fits in personnel, etc.  But even with that in mind, there’s lots of room to improve things that aren’t directly tied to scheme.  The question is whether Georgia has the staff in place to get things across to the players effectively.

I doubt we’ll ever hear it from him, but I’d be curious to hear Garner provide a comparison of the staff’s approach under Grantham with that of the approach under Martinez.

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He’ll handle “dadgum”, and it’s going to be a big deal.

I gotta tell you, if this is the best Corch Meyers is going to be able to come up with to generate feigned outrage in Jacksonville this year… sheesh.

The emu also rises. (Just not last night.)

Since the NFL is essentially dead to me, I’m probably one of the few college football bloggers on the planet who could give a rat’s ass about the draft.  I don’t have the stomach to listen to guys like Kiper and Berman for hours on end, so I didn’t watch last night.

So waking up this morning, while I was amused to find out this, I think Matt’s hit upon the one interesting take from the first round:

… Here is the real story of the first round, as pointed out by the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen at the end of the night: Notre Dame? With Clausen falling out of the first round, the Irish had zero players picked. Southern Cal? With safety Taylor Mays, offensive tackle Charles Brown and defensive end Everson Griffen passed over, the Trojans had zero picks. Ohio State? Zero picks. LSU? Zero picks. Miami? Zero picks. Florida State? One pick, with the final selection of the evening, and it could be the Seminoles’ last of this draft.

Between them, those schools produced 82 first-round picks from 2000-09, more than 25 percent of all first-rounders in that span. (That holds for Miami, FSU, USC, LSU and Ohio State even if you remove the Irish, who produced only three of that number.) The Buckeyes, Trojans and ‘Canes have had more players drafted in the event’s 75-year history than any other schools…

As he notes, that’s not necessarily bad news for Ohio State, which looks to be stockpiling lots of younger talent, but for some of those other programs, you have to wonder if it means something more.  Lane Kiffin, Trojan Nation turns its lonely eyes to you…

The end of the rainbow?

Amidst the sighs of relief from the chattering class that the NCAA only expanded the basketball tourney by three, there’s been surprisingly little comment about the money from the new TV deal.  Groo hits on something that I wondered about when I saw the news:

… The deal is worth $771 million per year. That’s up nominally over 40% from the $545 million the former deal paid, but that previous deal was signed 11 years ago. You’ll have to do the math to see if the tournament has kept up its value in real terms (vs. inflation), but at first glance it doesn’t seem as if the tournament is worth a great deal more now than it was at the end of the 1990s.

Does it occur to anyone patting the NCAA on the back today that the reason it didn’t push on to a 96-school tourney was because there wasn’t enough money in it to justify spreading the wealth that much further?

The market giveth and the market limiteth… a lesson not lost on the BCS suits, I suspect.

Looks like they picked the wrong week to quit growing dope.

In a refreshing the-shoe-is-on-the-other-foot development, ULaLa announced the suspension of four players (including one starter) for the season opener in Athens as a result of their arrests for felony marijuana cultivation.

Hopefully that will contribute to Grantham being able to place his starting outside linebackers in bubble wrap on the sidelines for the second half.  In any event, you’ve got to figure that the Dawgs will only look slightly less vanilla than they did on G-Day as the coaches try not to tip their hands too much for the OBC and game two.