Randy Sanders, ladies and gentlemen… he’ll be here all week.

Kentucky’s offensive coordinator whips out the one-liners as he prepares his quarterback for his third career start this Saturday in Athens.

“The first thing (Sanders) said to me in film (study of Georgia) was ‘Max, throw it fast,'” Maxwell Smith said.

Great moments in excuse making

Shorter Will Muschamp:  If I wanted to blame our 5-5 record on depth, I’d say so.  But I won’t, even though I have.  By the way, have you noticed our numbers?

“Mike’s had a great season.”

You may have missed it, but last Saturday Auburn’s Mike Dyer became just the fifth running back in that school’s history to rush for 1,000 yards in back-to-back seasons.  Considering the talent at the position that Auburn has had over the years, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Which makes the fact that Georgia held Dyer to his lowest yardage figure of the season perhaps the most impressive feat the Dawgs’ defense has performed so far in 2011.

Advertisement

Todd Grantham is on to something, ctd.

More stats for you this morning, as we look at what might be fueling Georgia’s surge this season.

Bruce Feldman has a good piece up on Iowa State’s offensive coordinator and his philosophy about winning what he calls the “double positive”.  What’s that?

… Herman’s big on preaching to his players about trying to win “the double positive,” he explains of his biggest stat barometer.

“If you win the turnover battle and the ‘explosive’ game, stats say you win the game 97 percent of the time.  [Emphasis added.]  We preach that to our kids daily. I think I read a study a few years ago about it and it’s certainly held up in all of my years as a coordinator. I think there’s maybe been one game where we lost them both and still won the game and that happened this year against Northern Iowa.”

Herman defines explosive plays as running plays of 12+ yards and passing plays of +16 yards.

I thought I’d take a stab at seeing how that applies to Georgia’s season.

Turnover margin was the easy part to run down.  This season, the Dawgs are undefeated in the six games in which they have a positive turnover margin and they’ve lost the only game with a negative one (which leaves them 2-1 in games with a balanced margin).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find where Marty tracks explosive plays on a game-by-game basis, so unless I find somebody else with a database on that, it’s something I’ll have to count by hand (that sounds like a good subject for an offseason post).  But you can find season totals for big running and passing plays at cfbstats.com, and those show that Georgia is on the right side of these stats as well.

• Offensive running plays of 10+ yards:  63 (1st in the SEC)
• Defensive running plays of 10+ yards:  35 (3rd in the SEC)
• Offensive passing plays of 20+ yards:  31 (2nd in the SEC)
• Defensive passing plays of 20+ yards:  20 (4th in the SEC)

By the way, you may notice that Georgia’s conference standing in those statistical categories is better on offense than it is on defense.  There’s something else you can blame on Bobo.

Todd Grantham is on to something.

“In pro ball you don’t have to recruit, so you’ve got to do something,” Grantham said. “So you do stats.”

It turns out in his spare time Todd Grantham is a stat-head.  And the stat he’s focused on at Georgia is turnover margin.

That seems to have paid off.

… On defense, Georgia couldn’t go anywhere but up after 2009. The Bulldogs recovered two fumbles, last in the nation, but have grabbed 10 each of the past two seasons.

It forced 18 in 2009, 22 in 2010 and has 29 already this year.

“We need to recover some more,” Richt said. “When you’re knocking the ball out, you’re going to get a chance for turnovers.”

The Bulldogs have gone from 76th in the nation in interceptions gained (10) to 27th last year (16) to 15th this year (13). Georgia starts each practice with three minutes of ball disruption drills.

“We’re putting pressure on quarterbacks so DBs can get interceptions,” said defensive end Abry Jones. “Just group tackling and really getting the ball out of there.”

Georgia has gone from minus-16 in turnover margin in 2009 to +19 in the past two seasons combined.  Grantham believes the current eight-game win streak is no coincidence.

… The fact that Georgia’s current winning streak coincides with its turnover success — it came out ahead of its opponent in six games with Mississippi State and Tennessee even — is consistent with what Grantham found out in his own study when he was an NFL assistant.

Grantham said a minus-one turnover ratio meant a team’s chances of winning were about 20 percent and if a team was plus-one, a team’s chances of winning are at least 80 percent.

He said he saw Georgia’s defensive turnover statistics when he arrived, but didn’t look at reasons for them.

“I just knew that it was critical that we got turnovers and we were in the plus-margin,” he said.

And before you yell about the anomaly of the 2010 season – plus-10 in turnover margin and a 6-7 record – look at the game log.  The Dawgs were 6-1 in games with a positive turnover margin and lost all four games with a negative one.

“Gus Malzahn is overrated. Someone had to say it.”

Man, when they turn on you at Auburn, they turn with a vengeance.

Paul Finebaum’s creative homerism

Oregon getting a rematch against LSU in the national title game if Okie State loses?  Absolutely not, says Paul Finebaum.  The Ducks have had their chances and whiffed twice.

Um, twice, Paul?  I thought Oregon only has one loss this season.

So tell me why some now think Oregon, which has had two shots against the SEC (remember the Auburn loss in January), deserves another opportunity, assuming the BCS meltdown scenario plays out.

So a loss to last season’s Auburn team combined with a loss to this year’s LSU team disqualifies them from consideration.  And that’s different from Alabama’s resume exactly how?

Of course, I’m kidding that he’s even engaged in a rational discussion here.   SI.com ought to use this photo on the header of his e-magazine page and be done with the pretense that he possesses a shred of objectivity.

(By the way, since we’re on the topic of pundit logic and the title game, note that Herbstreit is poised to modify the Herbstreit Doctrine… again.  You’ve got to admire a man who keeps an open mind like that.)

Just a reminder that Jimmy Sexton plays in the SEC…

In case you forgot.

… To put an exclamation point on just how far the salaries in the SEC have spiraled into the financial stratosphere, the 11 coaches in that conference — Vanderbilt was not included in the database — will make a combined $34,121,380 in 2011 according to the latest figures published by the paper.  The combined total pay of the 47 coaches in Conference USA, the MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt and WAC?  $28,848,050.