Frankly, it can’t get here soon enough.

Joe Schad reports that Georgia’s fall camp opens July 31.

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UPDATE: Maybe they should consider moving the date up.

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UPDATE #2: As Ivan Maisel puts it,

… July is the end of the college football summer. You can tell it’s about time that practices start. Look at the headlines on our college football page: a bar brawl at Tennessee, drug charges at North Carolina, alcohol issues at Georgia and Iowa. Coaches want players on campus so that they can keep them practicing, in school and busy. Evidently, they aren’t busy enough.

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Every team is special at the “First Four”.

Year2 does about as clear a job of contrasting the difference in approach to the college basketball postseason and the college football postseason as I’ve ever read:

… This [ed. note: the “First Four”] is a very NCAA-ian way of doing things, and it clearly illustrates the difference between college football and the sports where the NCAA is directly involved with the post season. Because the majority of schools in Division I basketball are not perennial powers, the NCAA must take as egalitarian a posture as it can. Forcing eight conference champions (no matter how middling the conferences) to the 16-seed line is too unfair to the body as a whole. Therefore we get this “First Four” garbage. Meanwhile, the BCS gets to largely ignore the irrelevant-to-the-post-season Sun Belt Conference for the 13th straight year.

This issue cuts right to the heart of what you think the purpose of the tournament is. Clearly it’s not just for determining a champion, or else it would be smaller than 64 teams and the Patriot League wouldn’t have a guaranteed spot. I get that you have to throw a bone to the smaller conferences when they have an equal say in how things work.

Now you may think brackets are the way to go in football, and that’s fine, but that’s not really the point here.  What’s important to consider is that once you go down the expanded tourney trail – particularly one maintained by the NCAA – what you wind up with is a very different animal than what you started with.  To insist otherwise, whether out of pure stubbornness or some belief that you can’t compare the two sports (my favorite convenient excuse), is to ignore reality.

“This is Big Ten football. The weather is part of the game.”

Please make this happen.  I can’t imagine a better recruiting tool for every SEC coach than to watch a Big Ten championship game take place the first week in December at Soldier Field.  Or, even better, Cleveland.

I can hear Nick Saban/Urban Meyer now:  “Hey, did you catch that game last Saturday night?  Sure looked cold, didn’t it?  I used to coach in the Midwest – you don’t know the half of it.”

… David Gilbert, president of the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission, told The (Ohio) Morning Journal that he expects the game to be rotated among cities and that non-domed stadiums should not be ruled out. The game likely would be played on Dec. 3, 2011.

“This is not SEC football,” he told the paper…

True ‘dat.

Hangin’s too good for ’em.

Of all the over-the-top points in this sanctimonious exercise in hyperventilation, this stands as my favorite:

… Richt has got to do something, or he needs to be shown the door. The University cannot continually endure summer after summer of this juvenile and immature behavior from its most high-profile athletes.

A start would be bringing in more high-character players. Could you imagine these shenanigans happening during the reign of David Greene or David Pollack? They would not have allowed it.

To which I can only reply with two words:  Odell. Thurman. Funny, you’d think a self-described “fourth-generation Georgia student and an ardent supporter of the Bulldogs” would have remembered him.

I’ve got two predictions for you.  Coming down the turnpike are meant-to-be-taken-very-seriously proposals that (1) the football team wear the initials “JG” on their jerseys and that (2) Mark Richt be required to cut a public service announcement about drunk driving that eulogizes Jordan Griner.  Because those will show that we mean business about this problem.  An empty gesture that makes so many feel better without having to make hard decisions about what’s really going on is what 21st century American society is all about.

On the other hand, maybe Fitzpatrick’s on to something here with his run the bums out of town approach.  How about we extend it to revoking the HOPE Scholarship of any student pinched for underage possession?  Nah, wouldn’t work.  We’d be putting too many “high-character” kids at risk with an approach like that.

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UPDATE: This post at Bernie’s is proof that great minds think alike.

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UPDATE #2: Just to give you an indication of how absurd the “Mark Richt has to do something” blather is, check out this post from Marc Weiszer’s blog.

“Now my feeling is every single Georgia football player must have not only a valid license but a Class C (unrestricted license),” Richt said. “I can’t snap my finger and get it done overnight. If a kid gets a ticket and he doesn’t take care of it quickly enough then he could find himself with an issue there. It’s a real pain in the rear quite frankly.”

For a story I wrote in April on motor scooter safety, it was clear that efforts have been made by Georgia’s support staff to ensure that players that drive have proper license and insurance. This weekend’s incident shows that there’s still work to be done there.

I don’t know if I’m more amazed that Richt has assumed the responsibility for this sort of stuff (don’t these kids have parents riding their asses about it?) or that it seems expected that he should.