Georgia-Florida Atlantic: the obligatory preview post

If you’re looking for some false humility – OMG, UL-M won! – about the Florida Atlantic game here, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong post.  There’s a reason that Georgia is looking at the biggest point spread of the Mark Richt era.  Paul Myerberg explains (in a post that’s not about either Georgia or FAU):

Blind squirrels are known to stumble upon a nut every now and again, especially if that nut is, say, Maine’s football team. Or if the blind squirrel is Middle Tennessee State and the nut is Florida Atlantic, which houses the only Sun Belt team more impotent than Rick Stockstill’s Blue Raiders. So what to make of these wins? At face value, dates with Maine and the Owls pushed Boston College and Middle Tennessee State into the win column – that’s the biggest takeaway for both the Eagles and Blue Raiders. But beyond that point, what did these wins prove? That B.C. is not good enough to run with Miami (Fla.) but good enough to beat an F.C.S. opponent? That Stockstill’s gang can beat F.A.U. but not McNeese State?

There you go.  McNeese State > FAU.

This is a game to go in, get a big lead, pull your starters (except for Commings and Vasser, who need the game reps) and prepare for Vanderbilt.  And before you play your looking-ahead-is-bad card, note that Grantham did just that against Buffalo.

They did it by making adjustments to their traditional scheme in order to defend Missouri’s wide-open spread offense. The Bulldogs trotted out some of those changes in the opener against Buffalo — and it didn’t always look pretty in Georgia’s 45-23 win — but Grantham believes it made a difference when the quality of competition improved against Missouri.

“Really, we’ve actually played this way for two weeks,” Grantham said. “We kind of played a little bit of the stuff we were going to do against these guys last week to get them used to it. I felt like we needed the extra prep and didn’t always match up. But I think in the end it allowed us to play better today.”

Three weeks from now, people are going to care a lot less about whether Georgia covered the spread against the Owls than they will about whether the Dawgs are undefeated in conference play.  Trust me on that one.