Suspended Florida receiver Chris Rainey was back at practice Tuesday, and coach Urban Meyer said Rainey will have a chance to rejoin the team if he meets certain conditions.
Meyer said Rainey would not play this Saturday against Mississippi State, but there’s a chance Rainey could be back for the Georgia game on Oct. 30.
There’s a chance hell won’t freeze over, too.
Filed under Crime and Punishment, Gators, Gators...
In this case, a crackdown.
Georgia coach Mark Richt said the two-game suspension he issued starting tailback Caleb King for Monday’s traffic-related arrest represented stricter guidelines in punishing off-the-field incidents for Bulldogs players.
… Richt has stopped short of saying there is a “zero tolerance” policy now in place. But considering Baker’s dismissal, players are now saying they’ve noticed a change in Richt’s handling of these matters as the arrests have compiled.
“Everybody knows at this point in time, if you get in trouble, you’re going to get a pretty good lashing,” said wide receiver Tavarres King, who was suspended for the first game of the 2010 season for an alcohol-related arrest this summer.
“There’s been a change in Coach Richt, not necessarily in a bad way,” defensive end Abry Jones said. “But you can tell how much he cares about us. He sees he has a certain responsibility for us. And this change getting stricter, taking away a little bit some stuff we could usually do, I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing, because we know we didn’t do the right thing in the first place. He stepped up and did his duty as a coach to control the team and keep everybody on a correct path.”
Jones said Richt is now taking the step of revoking privileges for players to be able to go out to the downtown district in Athens.
“He’s taken those away,” Jones said. “That’s pretty much it so far. But he’s been more strict about how we act and things like that.”
Five’ll get you ten that three years from now I’ll have commenters complaining that the stricter rules are impeding recruiting.
Filed under Crime and Punishment, Georgia Football
Jeez, is this a depressing read. Unsurprising, but depressing.
… One of the misconceptions about the agent business is that the kids are victims, preyed on by people like me. When Alabama coach Nick Saban and others rail against the agent business, they don’t mention that most of the time the player or someone from his family approaches us. Guys see that one of their teammates has some cash, ask him about it, and suddenly my phone rings. It was rare to find a player who wouldn’t take the money. I put $10,000 cash in front of Kansas’s Dana Stubblefield, and he wouldn’t take it. I tried to pay UCLA’s J.J. Stokes and USC’s Keyshawn Johnson, and they said, “No.” But for every kid who didn’t take the money, there were dozens who called me and asked to get paid.
Filed under It's Just Bidness, The NCAA
Caleb King gets a two-game suspension.
Mr. Malcome, come on down.
Filed under Georgia Football
Er, um… well, we’ve had a technical problem with the first ballot. We only had about 25% of the ballots register, so, unfortunately, we need to ask that everyone recast their vote. The polls are open until 9 PM tomorrow to accommodate you.
Our apologies, and hopefully the Internet gods won’t bite us in the ass the rest of the season.
Filed under Mumme Poll
One of the many criticisms I’ve seen bandied about as a root cause for Georgia’s problems this season is that the staff has slipped on the recruiting front and that the team simply isn’t as talented as we were led to expect. I’ve watched every game so far this season and have yet to see one where I thought the Dawgs were the less talented team on the field (not the same thing as saying they were the better team) and this detailed article from David Ching does nothing to lessen my conviction about that. Here’s his conclusion:
… If you did the same thing with the two-deeps from Alabama or Florida, I’d wager their rosters’ list of offers would be more impressive. If you look at this kind of list for Arkansas or Auburn, and I think they’re faring relatively well this year, it’s probably less daunting. What I think this list clearly shows is Georgia has more than enough talent – if you buy what Rivals is selling – to play with most anyone, SEC or otherwise. [Emphasis added.] It’s a matter of taking the talent you have and doing something with it, and there are a lot of guys on Georgia’s roster who were supposed to be better than they’ve played thus far. That happens everywhere. I don’t know whether it happens any more frequently at UGA than at other top-tier programs, but I suppose it could.
That doesn’t read like a Rodney Garner problem. You can complain that Richt should have been more proactive with offers in dealing with the attrition the program has faced over the last three or four years (that’s a somewhat valid critique), you can acknowledge some bad luck and you can certainly point to the developmental wasteland that we’ve seen occur at defensive end, linebacker and secondary over that time. But I don’t get the argument that Garner has suddenly become a bad evaluator of talent. If he has, a lot of other reputable programs are guilty of the same thing, it seems.
Filed under Georgia Football, Recruiting
Grab a bite before another player gets pinched.
Get The Picture 