Back on the same page again

May I just say that after all the griping I’ve done about the players and the coaches lacking faith in each other, this quote from John Jenkins about his bowl game interception is such a pleasure to see:

“On the interception, I was in the right place at the right time — reading my keys and doing what the coaches taught me to do,” Jenkins said.

Robert Altman’s Modern Football

Okay, maybe it’s not exactly McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but how many of you know Robert Altman’s first movie is a 1949 short film entitled Modern Football?  A little background on how this turned up after so many years:

… Filmmaker and archivist Gary Huggins—a director with his own Kickstarter-funded feature in the works—impulsively bought his discovery along with a bunch of similar instructional films at a flea market in Altman’s hometown of Kansas City. Huggins didn’t know what he had until he finally got around to looking at the movie and recognized the director’s face in a shot. The seeds of Altman’s later greatness may not be readily apparent in Modern Football, but it’s a well-made, fascinating curio—and with its stiff line readings and period haircuts and fashions, ripe material for some Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing.

You could say his technique (and certainly his budget) improved over the next twenty years.  He stopped using a pseudonym, too.

Fun stuff…

From Abraham Baldwin to Herschel Walker

If I’m doing the math correctly, we can expect the University to erect a statue honoring its greatest football player around 2208.

It sounds like Greg McGarity is worried about statue creep.

“We’re always looking for good players.”

In a year when the in state talent base is so deep that Mark Richt is maneuvering to sign his largest recruiting class in years, Georgia Tech is going a different route.

Georgia Tech’s 2013 recruiting class may turn out to be the smallest since Paul Johnson has been the coach at the ACC school.

The Yellow Jackets project to sign around 14-15 football recruits next February, according to Johnson.

What I can’t figure out is why there’s a numbers crunch at Tech in the first place.  It’s not like Johnson’s been loading up on recruits.  According to Carvell, Tech’s classes under Johnson run like this:  17 in 2012, 23 in 2011, 19 in 2010, 21 in 2009 and 20 in 2008.  Do the math and you’ll find that’s an average of 20 per year.  The NCAA allows 85 football players to be on scholarship at any given time, so the only way I can figure that Tech is squeezed now is if there’s been almost no attrition and a boatload of players from his first two classes redshirted.  Otherwise it looks like Johnson has left scholarships on the table.

Is there a method to his madness?  You tell me.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get close to 25 signees like some of the other schools because we try not to over-sign. We try to hit our number.”

Two things from this:  one, if you’re looking for the real reason the Johnson Doctrine has been crumbling of late, here you go.  When you limit your numbers and you’ve got a kid who’s qualified and given a verbal commitment, drawing a line in the sand about taking visits to other schools gets harder and harder.  And, two, if Georgia Tech follows a deliberate strategy of not offering the full amount of scholarships it has to make available, it’s an invitation for some other schools to come into this state to pick up the slack.  Which it appears many are now doing with some success.

Of course, the other possibility is that Johnson truly believes that when it comes to the triple option, it really is more a matter of the Xs and Os than the Jimmies and Joes.  Me,  I think it’s just proof that Tech misses Giff Smith badly.