There’s already plenty of heat on the coaching staff for Georgia’s abysmal special teams play last season, but if Blair Walsh goes on to have an outstanding NFL rookie season because his position coach corrected a flaw he found fairly easily (h/t AirForceDawg @ DawgRun), it’s gonna get a lot hotter. And deservedly so.
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“We remember the Sugar Bowl, I think it my junior year of high school, we let Alabama beat us twice,” Brinson said of a team that also lost to the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship game. “We’re not letting Alabama beat us twice. In the Sugar Bowl in 2018, they… thought they should have been in the playoffs and lost to Texas.” -- AB-H, 12/27/23
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Get The Picture · Bloviation for the Dawgnation
Get The Picture 
The Vikings appear to be really confident in Walsh since they don’t even have a back up.
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I was wondering what Rex might have to say about this and clicked on the link to his blog on the right and it was dead. Don’t know if he is still blogging, but it would be good to get his thoughts on this.
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Rex is on Twitter fairly often. @Rex_Robinson5
You might try asking him there.
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The Disneys will not like this.
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…but the Eeyores will love it!
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Two critical words there in the key paragraph of the post…..
“BUT IF Blair Walsh goes on to have an outstanding NFL rookie season”
Let’s hope he does, but until then….
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In fairness, a full-time special teams coach should know more about kicking than a college assistant with other duties apart from special teams and no experience with kicking. Now, the other issues with special teams last year I’ll lay on the coaches, but not this one.
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really? Cause last time I checked, ALL aspects of the team were under the head coaches duties. How bout when your can’t miss kicker starts missing like he was, and we have to assume he was missing the same in practice, get someone in with knowledge to consult if our coaches can’t figure it out.
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I agree to an extent, but how many college kickers go into funks every year? How many of them snap out of it? I don’t think this problem is exclusive to Georgia. Preferably, Georgia would hire a permanent special teams coordinator, but until a push is made to expand the number of coaches allowed that’s not going to happen.
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There’s also this:
http://blogs.ajc.com/uga-sports-blog/2011/11/10/walsh-getting-plenty-of-kicking-advice-amid-worst-slump-of-career/
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forgot about that article, I guess it was too much advice and he started thinking too much. Kinda like I do on my golf swing.
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At least you don’t blame your golf swing funk on Richt or us Disney Dawgs.
Golfers like Michelson, Tiger and others get into yearlong swing problems, it seems, about every other year. Baseball players and other football kickers do the same. Some fans seem unaware of such rather commonplace happenings in sports. Notice in this case, they are trying to give Walsh all the confidence he needs and are avoiding the mind analysis. Wasn’t there a woman involved at that point in his college football life?
Richt probably introduced her to Walsh.
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Agreed. I blame Dan Wetzel. He single-handedly has completely ruined college football, which includes Blair Walsh’s kicking form while he was in college. On the other hand, Mark Richt is flawless and never deserves blame.
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More likely Bobo.
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It’s simple Blair didn’t trust his Oline to block for him. On long kicks 40+ he was awful and long kicks usually get blocked because the kicker can’t get the ball up fast enough. Between the line blocking and the low kick he was rushing his kicks and missing. When he was kicking from a shorter distance he did not rush and he made them. None of our coaches are kicking coaches and I get the feeling they don’t even watch the film of him kicking.
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I agree with everything you wrote except the last sentence. It seems his kicking coach who got him to UGA and other UGA kickers from the past (all of them giving him advice on how to pull out of his funk) couldn’t see it either. What should we think of all of them if Walsh pulls out of his funk? Place an asterisk by their names in the Bulldog Hall of Fame and say they weren’t any good at spotting the problem as well?
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Coaches? We don’t need no stinkin’ coaches!!!
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Sanity at last!
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During Richt’s tenure how many of our starting kickers (excluding 1 year starters) went into kicking slumps like this? Walsh had the most drastic fall-off of any of them if I remember correctly. Bennett, Coutu, etc missed some, but none of them went from 90+%consistent to 60% in the span of one year. The point is I think this kind of problem would have reared its head a lot earlier during Richt’s tenure if the fault lay entirely with the coach(es).
Maybe I don’t have a good enough memory and some of these guys struggled mightily after dominating most of their career at UGA. If you guys remember, let me know, otherwise I don’t think blaming Richt or any of the other coaches will help. Is it somewhat their fault? Sure, why not. Is it 100% their fault? No way.
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Bennett had a pretty rough sophomore year (68%), but you’re pretty much correct that nobody had a significant drop off at any point in their careers. Even Bennett’s somewhat disappointing 2001 wasn’t nearly as bad as Walsh’s last year.
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“”He was rushing every kick,” Priefer said. “Every kick he missed, he hit them well, but he was much too fast with his get off time. I don’t know if that was what he was coached to do, maybe that’s what he wanted to do.
“Usually you watch the ball get snapped to start (the) approach. I have him watching the holder’s hands. When the holder lifts up his left hand, that’s when he’s going. That’s what I’ve been coaching for years.”
I hesitate to say this, but it’s the truth. And I began saying it in late-September. It was SO bloody obvious, and it’s hard to believe somebody didn’t notice it … of not a coach, then Butler, Rex, or somebody. I said something about it and got a cold stare in return.
There were rumors as to what caused Walsh to get out of the groove, but this was the end result. Kudos to the Viking kicking coach.
~~~
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Walsh was dating one of the cheerleaders before the season started and then she dumped him for a no talent georgia tech minor league baseball player. The issues followed. And that is an absolute fact. Not even joking.
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I’ll bet that girl’s parents are banging their heads against the wall.
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That probably indirectly had a lot to do with the mechanical flaw…the mechanical flaw that the coaches didn’t even identify.
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Or she wrote “Up Yours, Blair!” on the football and he read it on his foot’s downswing.
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