Sunday morning buffet

A few things to nibble on before settling down with The Masters this afternoon:

• Some notes from Georgia’s second spring scrimmage here.
• Will the last Dawg standing for G-Day turn out the lights after the game’s over?
• The ACC lets its member schools conduct spring practices off campus.  The SEC doesn’t.  Could that become a problem?
• Here’s a more fleshed out comparison of Mike Dubose and Bobby Petrino.
• Looking at Georgia’s next generation of defensive players:  “We’re learning now. Most of us on the second team, some of us rotating with the first team, we all know (the defense) the same. And when we know it perfect like they know it, it’s gonna be the same thing.”
• Time to let it go, LSU.
• I don’t think John Infante’s next big idea is going to fly.
• If this kind of thing interests you, Aaron Murray is at the top of HP’s list of SEC Heisman candidates.
• It’s not football related, but I can hardly be expected to let this news pass.

Georgia’s got a plan?

Seriously, I think we can put to rest the question of whether Mark Richt shaped the size of this past signing class with an eye towards 2013.  The answer is yes, he did.

… The 6-foot-3, 205-pound Ramsey said he decided to enroll early after hearing that several other 2013 commitments were planning to arrive in January, including running back Derrick Henry and receiver Tramel Terry.

“Coach Richt and coach (Mike) Bobo asked me and I just felt like I needed to also because I wanted to get there and have an easy transition into football, have a chance at early playing time,” said Ramsey, who recruiters from Ohio State and North Carolina still checked on last week. “It would be better if I got there and played in the spring with the team and got in the books early.”

Georgia could have up to seven early enrollees this winter, recruiting coordinator Rodney Garner said, which means the Bulldogs could sign about 30 in its next recruiting class after signing only 19 in February, he said.

“As long as you’ve got room with the guys that graduate under the cap, you can bring them in,” Garner said. “You can count back to a number and then you can start counting forward. If you do it the right way and get all the right guys, you can do that.”  [Emphasis added.]

There are a lot of little things going differently with the program these days.  We may look back in a few years, add them all up and break the Richt era up into two pieces, one that ended after the 2009 season, and the one that followed.  It’s too early to tell, of course, but it’s something to keep an eye on over the next couple of seasons.

Is the Bobby Petrino glass half-empty or half-full?

It depends on whom you talk to.

There’s the “smart coach, asshole personally” school of thought, expressed nicely by one of his former Falcons players.

“That’s karma,” the former N.F.L. safety Lawyer Milloy, who played for Petrino in Atlanta, said Friday. Milloy added, “Just because he knows X’s and O’s doesn’t mean he’s a nice person.”

Then there’s the “smart coach, skip the personality” attitude.

Despite his personal feelings, Dover said he knew of people who swore by Petrino once they got to know him. “If he walked to the door to recruit one of my kids, I’d open it,” Dover said, “because he’s a great football coach.”

Er, wait.  “Despite his personal feelings”?

Louis Dover, who coaches at Seneca High School in Louisville, perhaps best summed up the feelings many people in football have about Petrino. “As a coach, he’s a genius, he’s one of the elite minds,” Dover said. “Personally, well, he’s a good coach.”

Dover said some of his distaste for Petrino stemmed from his treatment of D. J. Kamer, who played for Petrino at Louisville and for Dover at a previous employer, Waggener High School. Kamer told Dover that Petrino tried to persuade him not to attend a friend’s funeral in which he was a pallbearer.

“He was very disappointed D. J. was going to miss practice to go,” Dover said. “He didn’t say, ‘You can’t go.’ He said, ‘I guess you don’t want to play football here.’ ”

Yecch.

Assuming Petrino survives in one form or fashion (I still think it’s likely he will), I only hope at the presser they skip trying to sell us on lesson learning or being a changed man by the circumstances.  Because this is a guy who’s never going to be any different, regardless of how you view the contents of the glass.

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UPDATE:  Not that the Arkansas fan base stands ready to buy in to a tale of redemption, or anything…

When assholes collide

His Imperious One doesn’t think much of Jim Delany’s proposal to make the Rose Bowl the centerpiece of the new postseason format.

“This is not 1950, or 1960,” Adams said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “There are great schools in the [Atlantic Coast Conference] and the Southeastern Conference and the Big 12. I think it’s time to put everybody on an equal footing. I just reject the notion that the Big Ten and the Pac-12 ought to be treated differently in this process.”

Jim Delany, on the other hand, doesn’t think much of Michael Adams – when he does think of him at all.

Asked for his reaction, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said through a spokesman that he is “glad that Michael Adams and others are fully participating in the conversation…”

Yeah, he sounds thrilled.

About all these guys share right now is the firm desire to Under Armor their own conference turf.

… Arizona State president Michael Crow noted that the Rose Bowl is 110 years old and only recently has been associated with the BCS. He said the Pac-12 holds preservation of the Rose Bowl as its main goal, but that he thinks the bowl and the BCS can coexist.

Oregon State president Ed Ray, chair of the Pac-12’s CEO group, said BCS formats are still being negotiated and that no one in his group was making demands. Of the proposal that called for three semifinal games, Ray said, “we as a group never discussed that option. This is the first time I’m hearing it. But that doesn’t mean that people weren’t in conversations where all these things came up and somebody suggested it.”

…

“The predominant view seems to be for a four-team playoff of some sort,” Adams said. “I think that’s an improvement, but I think it diminishes the importance of the nation’s strongest athletic conference, the Southeastern Conference.”

It’s enough to make you wonder if the current arrangement survives as a matter of default.