Paul Johnson’s memory loss

Just because you get defensive about your coaching scheme doesn’t mean you have to blank out.

“How many NFL quarterbacks are at Virginia?” Johnson asked. “How many NFL quarterbacks are at Duke? How many NFL quarterbacks are at North Carolina? How many NFL quarterbacks were at Georgia before Matthew Stafford?… “

Looks like there’s been a few.

It’s a selective argument he makes there anyway, as I don’t see him asking how many NFL quarterbacks are at Southern Cal.  Maybe he just forgot.

“Maybe Stephen will get his act together.”

The OBC’s really gonna do it – or so he says.

With South Carolina’s opener less than two weeks away, it’s not a matter of if true freshman quarterback Connor Shaw will play in that game, but rather how much he’ll play.

Shaw opened the Gamecocks’ scrimmage Thursday with the first team, and coach Steve Spurrier said afterward that Shaw would definitely play on Sept. 2 against Southern Miss.

Spurrier went on to say that Shaw had outplayed junior Stephen Garcia in the scrimmages this preseason, but the Head Ball Coach still isn’t ready to name a starter.

A quarterback controversy in time for Georgia’s SEC opener?  Fine by me.

Dumb penalties and a smart defensive coordinator

I keep trying to temper my enthusiasm over Todd Grantham down, but it’s hard to do it when I read things like this comment:

“You definitely don’t want to beat yourself. You don’t want to give anything away,” Grantham said. “But at the same time, you want to be aggressive in what you’re doing. That doesn’t mean you get penalties. But to say we were penalized (a lot) in Dallas, I don’t think it has any effect, number one, on how we’re going to play in Georgia, and it had no effect on us on how we won the NFC East and finished (high) in defense either.”

No, that’s not a red meat observation.  Just a sharp one.

Emerson hits on a lot of good points in the article, but a couple of things bear repeating.

• As Matt Hinton has demonstrated, penalties have little correlation with winning percentage.
• While Georgia ranked last in the SEC in penalty yardage last season, it ranked first in the conference in opponents’ penalty yardage.  The net loss was less than ten yards per game.  (For comparison sake, Auburn was minus-30 in net penalty yardage.)

Guess what?  Grantham knows that.

“You want to play aggressive,” Grantham said. “You don’t want to have dumb penalties. But at the same time you’ve gotta look at correlations. If you don’t beat yourself, then that’s a good thing. In other words you don’t turn the ball over, you don’t give them freebies, you don’t give them penalties like that. However, when you are aggressive and things like that, there’s really been no correlation to winning and losing if you go back and look.”

I love this guy.  He knows what matters.

So, yeah, if they can cut down on dumb penalties, so much the better.  Now if they could only get Mark Curles to do the same…

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UPDATE: I always like it when somebody else does the heavy lifting.  Seth Emerson went to the trouble to break down last year’s penalty calls.

OFFENSE (55 percent)
Holding, offense …………..11-110 yards
False start ……………….29-144
Personal foul, offense ……..5-56
Illegal block, offense ……..5-49
Unsportsmanlike, offense ……3-45
Clipping, offense ………….2-30
Delay of game ……………..5-23
Illegal substitution, offense .2-10
Illegal formation, offense ….1-5
Illegal motion, offense …….1-5
Intentional grounding ………1-0

DEFENSE (30 percent)
Defensive pass interference …9-106
Defensive offsides …………10-47
Personal foul, defense ……..5-71
Face mask, defense …………3-33
Defensive holding ………….1-10

SPECIAL TEAMS (15 percent)
Illegal block, .. …………..5-46
Personal foul ………………3-44
Face mask ………………….2-30
Holding ……………………1-10
Illegal formation …………..1-5

Do false starts count as dumb penalties?  I’m thinking yeah.

Friday morning buffet

I took off my Florida Gators cap before I posted this.

• Speaking of the Gators, it sounds like they’ve had a rough camp.
• Mike Bobo is staying on the field this season.
• How do you write an article about ESPN hyping certain teams for the BCS without a single mention of Herbstreit?
• In case you were worried, Orrin Hatch vows to keep fighting the good fight with the BCS.
• This is not a drill:  everybody out of the Whitney Hotel.
• Spurrier gets his groove back about Tennessee:  “We’re not going to bail out from playing North Carolina the way Tennessee did.”
• My Georgia preview, in the form of a Q&A at The ACC and SEC Blog, is here.
• Phil Steele breaks down every D-1 program by experience on the two deep, and the results are interesting.  He rates Auburn as having the most experienced team in the SEC, and Vandy LSU as the least.  But Florida and Alabama show up as pretty green, too.
• “It was like a business under (Kiffin),” said UT’s senior fullback. “It was run like the NFL.” That was meant as criticism.

Somebody really needs a mulligan.

I’m beginning to think we need to come up with an award for the dumb decision of the day by a college athletic director – and no, Mike Hamilton wouldn’t retire the trophy.

Anyway, if there were such a thing, today’s winner would be Utah State’s Scott Barnes, who, it turns out, was offered the first opportunity to jump to the Mountain West in the wake of BYU’s move to independence, turned it down… and then felt the need to publicize the decision in a letter posted on the school’s website.

Were I a Utah State supporter (there must be a few of them out there, right?), this is how I’d be feeling about Mr. Barnes about now:

In fairness, Barnes probably doesn’t disagree with that assessment this morning.

I see your cute girls, and raise you a nerd.

That “Orientation Live” video on YouTube made the rounds a couple of weeks ago on the Georgia Tech boards and elsewhere as an object of a certain amount of mockery.

In that same spirit, I bring you this.

I could be wrong, but I think that manages to touch on every stereotype in the Yellow Jacket playbook.  Well played, kid.