No Prime Time for you

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for this meeting (h/t Michael Carvell).

“I went to the University of Georgia,” Sanders said. “On my recruiting trip, Vince Dooley is the head coach. I had just witnessed them getting their butts kicked against Georgia Tech.

“They got their butts kicked, and I went to Vince Dooley’s office. And he says, ‘Well, I’m sure you’re going to contribute for us. I want you to redshirt and learn the system.’ And I said, ‘Redshirt?’

“And that was it. He’s talking about redshirting, and I know what I’ve got. So that was it. I crossed him off the list.”

You know, it’s not like Dooley hadn’t started a true freshman with other-worldly talent before.  You’d think he’d have known how to phrase his sales pitch better.

Advertisement

You don’t have to sound so surprised about it.

Actually, I can’t blame Ben Jones for this response to the news that the coaches ranked Georgia 22nd in their preseason poll.

“I’m shocked, but I think people believe in us,” senior center Ben Jones said.

Either that, or a lot of coaches ran out of names for their lists after about the first fifteen or so schools and went into default mode.

Strength through cupcakes

Shorter Adam Rittenberg:  Take our advice, Big Ten – nothing makes a conference look better than playing a bunch of non-conference weak sisters.

4 tickets, 4 hot dogs, 4 cokes

This story about marketing Georgia Tech season tickets is almost too funny for words.  Almost.

… Georgia Tech is hoping Aspire will be able to continue a success story that associate athletics director Wayne Hogan and Aspire GM Fagan were eager to tell during a presentation in mid-June at the College Athletic Business Management Association convention in Orlando.

Standing before a packed meeting room, Hogan explained the humbling experience that led the school to hire Aspire, and Fagan discussed how its system works.

Coming to Georgia Tech in 2006, Hogan said he figured selling the Yellow Jackets in a huge metropolitan area “ought to be a piece of cake. If I can’t do this, I’m in the wrong business.”

Three years later — surrounded by the economic slowdown, four pro teams in Atlanta and the University of Georgia in nearby Athens — Hogan “out of desperation” met with Aspire CEO Bernie Mullen, who had formed his firm after working as an executive in college sports and with teams in the NHL, NBA and Major League Baseball.

The “is hoping” kind of foreshadows the punchline.

… Even with Aspire, Georgia Tech’s football season-ticket sales have decreased from 26,308 in 2009 to 22,848 so far in 2011, Hogan says.

However, because the firm seeks only new sales — not renewals — it has “turned what would have been a monumental decline into a moderate decline,” Hogan says…

For Tech, that constitutes a raging success story.  Hopefully that means it should still be fairly easy for Georgia fans to get ahold of tickets for the game at BDS this year.

Dawg porn, first day of fall camp edition

Nice long slide show, via Dawg Post.

Tough day in the heat, big fella.