Saturday morning buffet

You gotta eat, right?

• Click, clack, my ass.  At South Carolina, only the head coach gets to run his mouth, Connor.
• Is Isaiah Crowell smarter than Michael Dyer?
• Mike Hugenin isn’t that impressed with Georgia’s post-Crowell running backs situation.
• More on the NFL fan experience.  It should be a cautionary tale for college football, but I’m not holding my breath.
• Oh, random Bleacher Report Vol dude, you’re such a kidder… wait, what?  You were serious about this?
• So much for JoePa knowing nothing about e-mailing.
• Brackets, babee!  “Eventually let’s hope we get to a 16-team field, where arguments about the 17th best team getting robbed will mostly fall on deaf ears. We’ll be too focused on the March Madness feel to the tournament and the fascinating possibility of the 16th seed knocking off No. 1.”  Ooh, can’t wait.
• Ranking this season’s SEC conference schedules.

The most important player on Georgia’s offensive line

… is… David Andrews?  Judging by this comment from the head coach, that doesn’t sound like much of an exaggeration.

The offensive line will remain a work in progress into the fall. After spring, the unit was composed of junior Kenarious Gates (6-5, 328) at left tackle, junior Dallas Lee (6-4, 300) at left guard, sophomore David Andrews (6-2, 280) at center, junior Chris Burnette (6-2, 313) at right guard and sophomore Kolton Houston (6-5, 291) at right tackle, though that doesn’t mean much yet. This remains a fluid situation with very little settled heading into the first game.

Burnette is a proven starter who’ll be there somewhere, either at center or guard. The same goes for Lee. And Gates, who switched this spring from guard to his old high school position, is likely set to replace second-round draft pick Cordy Glenn at left tackle.

The main questions seem to revolve around the center and right tackle positions, with much hinging on whether the inexperienced Andrews can hold on to the starting center job during the preseason. If he can’t, dominos will fall at other spots.

“It would be good for us if [Andrews] was the guy that ended up becoming the center,” Richt said, “because I think Lee and Burnette would be outstanding guards, and Kolton really could play guard or tackle.”

That’s an awful lot of hope to be putting on the shoulders of someone who measures – and at the last G-Day game looked – on the smallish side for an SEC lineman.  Fingers crossed, I guess.

Amateurism means never having to say you’re sorry.

This is about as angrily eloquent a rebuttal to the “whattaya mean student-athletes aren’t compensated?” line of thought as you’ll ever read.

Keep in mind there’s no famous football player involved.  No booster.  Not a whiff of an agent.  No dad shopping his child to the highest bidder.  No Saban-ish roster management (hell, Saban treats his kids in a similar spot a helluva lot better than Syracuse’s women’s basketball coach did).  It’s merely a cautionary tale about one of those 400,000+ student-athletes the NCAA loves to remind us “will be going pro in something other than sports.”  In other words, it’s the kind of thing that routinely goes on under the radar.

While there’s something profoundly un-American about telling someone they can’t market themselves, sadly, this part sounds like it fits right in with what we’re all about these days:

The reason why this happened is because they do not care. The bottom line is you are not a student-athlete as they love to profess to the world, you are an athlete-student, and you are there for one reason and one reason only. You can keep your grades up enough to remain eligible, but then again, that’s only so you can be able to play.

Just like most people, I roll my eyes when I read the over the top plantation talk and calls for college athletes to unionize or strike.  I hope it never happens.  But I’m not going to lie and claim I don’t understand why if it ever does.