It’s real… and it’s spectacular.

Check out Gentry Estes’ photo tour of the Butts-Mehre renovation.

All I can say is wow.  No wonder recruits are paying attention to Richt this year.

“We are training for football.”

Ordinarily, I’d brush quotes like this off as typical Georgia offseason sunshine pumping…

“I look at it this way,” Tereshinski said. “When December comes, I want to be able to sit in my chair and say I did everything I could in my power, in my mind and my heart and my soul, to make the Georgia football program better than I found it, when it comes to the strength and conditioning area.”

… except that the man radiates so much intensity about his business, even through a printed interview, I’m afraid he’d track me down and make me answer for it.

I just hope he’s making his players feel the same way.

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Wednesday morning buffet

It takes all kinds of things to fill a buffet.

• This may be the most inane criticism of Gene Chizik you’ll ever read.
• According to the Harris Poll, college football continues to hold steady as the third most popular sport for Americans.
• Texas A&M athletic director Bill Byrne wonders if Texas’ new cable network with ESPN could conflict with NCAA recruiting rules about contact with high school prospects.
• Lane Kiffin exploits a loophole in signing this year’s class.
• Here’s how to measure whether a school’s offseason workout program is sufficiently intense.
• Sometimes it’s not so much that the rich are different from you and me, it’s just that they’re bigger assholes.  (Not to mention that you have to question the judgment of a guy who throws a ginormous temper tantrum over not hiring Steve Addazio.)
• Hugh Nall discusses Georgia’s coaching staff vacancy, among other things.
• With all the excitement building over Florida’s spring, how soon is it before some pundit declares that Charlie Weis has remade John Brantley into the SEC’s second-best quarterback?
• If that happens, Stan Drayton won’t be there to share in the buzz.
• Record BCS revenues can only mean one thing:  PlayoffPAC is miffed.  “That imbalance [ed. – revenue distribution between the Big Six and the mid-majors] is unconscionable, given that it has no basis in post-season performance on the field and in the marketplace…” If the mids can match performance in the marketplace, why bother to stick around with the BCS anyway?

Sometimes, it’s more than the Jimmies and Joes.

A depressing chart, via Doc Saturday:

If you need it spelled out, here’s what Matt observes:

… But that still doesn’t change the bigger picture: Those 13 schools alone have consistently produced a majority of the top five in the final polls, half of the top 10, at least half of the teams in the BCS and all of the national champions in the BCS era. (With Auburn’s triumph – thanks mainly to über recruit Cam Newton, the five-star headliner of a top five class last year – only two of the top dozen recruiting powers have failed to win a BCS championship: Georgia and Michigan. [Emphasis added.] Last year, Oregon was only the third team form outside of the group to even play for a BCS title, joining Virginia Tech in 1999 and Nebraska in 2001, and we might find the ’01 Cornhuskers were a pretty highly regarded bunch themselves if those numbers were available.)

I’m excited about the recent news on Georgia’s recruiting front, as much for what it indicates about a motivated coaching staff as for the potential talent infusion itself.  But if recent history is relevant, that’s only part of what needs to be addressed for Mark Richt to get things turned around this year.  If he can’t get the longstanding flaws suggested by Hinton’s data fixed, all he will have accomplished by signing a stellar 2011 class would be to leave a nicely stocked roster for his successor.  That’s not exactly the epitaph for his career at Georgia that Richt wants.

There’s oversigning… and then there’s really oversigning.

This is interesting:

… The point of all this NLI talk is to show 2009-48 is not just a toothless rule, it really doesn’t limit oversigning at all. Bylaws 13.9.2.3 and 15.5.1.10.1 only limit NLIs to 28. The number of scholarship that can be doled out is still unlimited. Programs are still permitted to commit as many scholarships as they want, so long as the NLI is not attached. [Emphasis added.] The twins don’t limit oversigning, they just require some of the oversigned prospects to be free to walk, since the GIA commits the school to the prospect but not the prospect to the school. And by a quirk of NCAA rules, institutions are prohibited from mentioning that they have signed these additional prospects.

Now there’s a loophole just waiting to be exploited.  The question is by whom – the coach who’s seemingly run out of room in his signing class, the player who realizes that not signing an NLI allows him to maintain some degree of leverage in his college career or a player’s parent who sees this as an opportunity to explore a bidding process more than once (no doubt Mark Emmert and Mike Slive would cluck disapprovingly about that)?

My money’s on Houston Nutt.