Chris Low points out a couple of good ones:
- Georgia coach Mark Richt is 33-6 (.846) in true road games and actually has a better record on the road than he does at home or at neutral sites. He’s 47-11 (.810) at home and 10-11 (.476) at neutral sites.
- Knocking off nationally ranked teams has been a struggle for Steve Spurrier at South Carolina. He was 2-1 against ranked foes during his first season in Columbia in 2005, but has gone just 5-14 since.
Filed under Georgia Football, The Evil Genius
In case you’re wondering what a $1000 jersey looks like mounted on the wall, here you go:
Meanwhile, Darren Rovell makes the case that A.J. made himself a better deal with the sale to Hawkins than he could have expected if he were given a cut of the official school sales.
… Let’s take you through the math.
Let’s say the Georgia bookstore sells the jerseys — they have 22 different versions of No. 8 — for an average of $60.
They make $30 by selling it at that price. The licensee, Nike, takes the rest and distributes it to who make the jersey and gives 10 percent of that money to the schools.
So on a $60 A.J. Green jersey, Georgia only makes $3.
Now let’s say the NCAA allows the player to take part in these sales, as they should. They allow the Nikes of the world to put the names on the back. And since that would likely result in more sales, let’s say the licensee throws an additional five percent royalty to the school.
So now the school has a 15 percent royalty or $4.50. They split evenly with the player, so the player gets $2.25 per jersey.
So how many A.J. Green jerseys would sell? One insider who is in the business said, aside from Tim Tebow, the biggest players sell about 1,500 jerseys. Green doesn’t fall into the category. Another insider, who sells college jerseys, said Georgia could expect to sell about 300 No. 8 jerseys this year.
How much would that leave A.J Green with? $675 — or $325 less than what he got for selling his Independence Bowl jersey.
And Bruce Feldman reminds them both what should be the first rule of thumb for these sorts of dealings – if you’re going to engage in an under the table transaction, best to keep your business off of Facebook.
… Teams now control more of the access in getting out their coverage. They don’t “need” the newspapers as much as they once did. But with all of that, you also have more accessibility to the players and people involved through technology, which means there’s more potential pitfalls for the colleges to cope with. The Marvin Austin and A.J. Green stories grew out of social networking situations.
Filed under Georgia Football, It's Just Bidness, The NCAA
My favorite part of this study from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida is the reference to “a university town with a successful NCAA Division I football program”.
Hmm. I wonder where they went.
Filed under Crime and Punishment, Gators, Gators...
Over at Team Speed Kills, cocknfire is surprised by something about South Carolina’s and Georgia’s openers.
… Both of these teams looked impressive in their debut against midmajors, South Carolina waxing C-USA contender Southern Miss and Georgia leveling Louisiana-Lafayette. But here’s something that surprised me slightly when I looked at the numbers: While both teams saw a gap between their total offense and scoring offense numbers, it was a yawning one for Georgia, ranked 63rd in total offense but seventh in scoring offense. Part of that is sample size, sure, but it’s worth wondering whether the real Georgia offense is the one that scored 55 points or the one that posted a more average 377 yards. South Carolina was the 29th-ranked scoring offense with 41 points and the 39th-ranked total offense with 449 yards. That’s a bit more withing reason.
Honestly, given the sample size (as he notes), it’s not that much of a surprise. Georgia’s offense benefited from good starting field position resulting from an early interception, a stop on fourth-and-one at the ULL 26 and two fine punt returns of 29 and 24 yards. Add in the Jakar Hamilton pick-six, and it’s pretty easy to see where the points came from and the yardage didn’t.
This is what Phil Steele’s yards per point metric is all about. Good teams generally have lower offensive YPPs than poor ones, because they do so many of the little things right on special teams, turnovers and penalty yardage that they put their offenses in better positions to score with greater ease. I posted a couple of months ago about how Georgia was surprisingly efficient on offense last season in conference play and noted this in response to Steele’s bullishness on Georgia’s ability to put points on the board in 2010:
But it’s turnover margin that really makes Georgia’s 2009 offensive YPP so remarkable. Ordinarily teams with a low offensive YPP raise a red flag for Steele. As he says on page 299 of the Preview, “(t)eams that had an extremely low ypp the previous year usually have a weaker record the next season.” Since 1990, teams with a YPP less than 13.56 have a 67.2% chance of compiling a weaker or same record in the next year. But then he goes on to note that the probabilities aren’t as dominant as they are for teams with a high offensive ypp to improve “… because there are some teams like USC that benefit from turnovers on a yearly basis, keeping their ypp low.”
Good turnover margin = lower offensive YPP. Bad turnover margin = higher offensive YPP. Georgia was 11th in TO margin in SEC games last year, yet still led the conference in scoring efficiency. What does that suggest if Richt and Bobo manage to find a way to stop the bleeding? Steele seems to be pointing at a boatload of scoring for the men in red and black; we’ll soon see if he’s on to something here.
Just for yucks – and again, keep in mind that the sample size is as small as it gets here – here’s how the SEC looked in offensive YPP after week one.
SCHOOL POINTS YARDS YPP Florida 34 212 6.24 Georgia 55 377 6.85 Ole Miss 48 479 9.98 LSU 30 313 10.43 Arkansas 44 472 10.73 Tennessee 50 537 10.74 S. Carolina 41 449 10.95 Miss. State 49 569 11.61 Auburn 52 608 11.69 Alabama 48 591 12.31 Kentucky 23 466 20.26 Vanderbilt 21 432 20.57
Obviously that 6.85 YPP isn’t going to last – it’s almost half the YPP Georgia racked up in conference play last year – but if the Dawgs can maintain an efficient pace that leaves them in the top three in the SEC in YPP this season, it’s not unreasonable to expect that plenty of scoring will follow.
Get The Picture 