“Richt is the rare survivor of a seemingly long bout with the hot…”

Bill Connelly’s Georgia preview is out and it’s nigh on impeccable.  I mean, I could get on him for burying the lede about why the fan base grew restless with Richt – more than anything, it was over sticking with the defensive coordinator overseeing this decline:  “Despite all the high recruiting rankings in the world, the Dawgs’ defense had fallen from 14th in Def. F/+ in 2007, to 68th in 2008 and 41st in 2009” – but that would be nitpicking.

Really, there’s a ton of statistical analysis that you should spend some time going over.  Start with this bit about the offense:

Still, Georgia fielded a top-20 offense because of a top-five passing game. Bobo kept things both simple and old-school; “simple” in that Murray faced as few no-win situations as possible (Georgia ran the ball 47 percent of the time on passing downs, much higher than the national average of 33 percent, meaning a disproportionate number of Georgia’s passes took place on pass-friendly standard downs), and “old-school” in that Georgia went downfield often. Only one running back (Crowell) was targeted more than six times all season, and of the five most frequently targeted wideouts, only one averaged fewer than 14.7 yards per catch. Bobo wants little to do with the east-and-west stuff; he wants to go north, using play-action to open up downfield routes whenever possible. That Georgia was effective as it was with this despite the complete and total lack of run game tells you that the Bulldogs could be unstoppable if they could figure out how to move the ball just a little on the ground.

More than anything, 2012 is going to be about the offensive line.