Nice shark ‘ya jumped there, ESPN.

For some reason (okay, I know, I know) Chris Low tells us that Mark Schlabach has updated his top 25 for 2013 post-signing day.  Which led me to wonder ever so briefly whether Schlabach would jump Ole Miss into the top 25 based on its signing day for the ages.  I barely got the mental snort and “no way these guys would pander that much” out of the way when I got to this observation from Low:

Still no mention of Ole Miss and its top-5 signing class in Schlabach’s new Top 25.

Sometimes you can just tell when it’s going to be an exceptionally long offseason.

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No hard feelings

I found this story on Nick Marshall interesting, not so much because of his return to the SEC, this time as a quarterback at Auburn, but because of how he was treated by Georgia’s staff on the way out the door.  Check out what his JUCO coach had to say about that:

“What the Georgia coaches told me was he was a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they had to do something, but they didn’t want him to have a bad name,” Tatum said. “That’s one of the reasons Coach Ledford brought him to me, a chance to clear his name without somebody always bringing it up.”

Now that we know you’re staying, what are you going to do about it?

Well, they’re cracking jokes on Twitter this morning about Grantham’s agent putting his name in play for the papal opening, so I guess we’re not done with that meme quite yet, but assuming that he’s roaming the sidelines in 2013 and most of his starters from last season aren’t, I figure Georgia’s defense will likely be “the” offseason topic here (if for no other reason than that most of us have shifted from being in a blame Bobo mode to an expect Bobo one).  I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that Georgia’s chances for a third straight return to the SECCG hinge on having a defense that’s more consistently stout in crunch time than what we saw in 2012.

Which begs the question:  how good (or bad) were those guys last season?  I was going to start doing some data mining on that, but fortunately for me, Tyler Dawgden did the heavy lifting for me with a couple of posts he knocked out this past weekend.  (I love the Internet, by the way.)  Take the time to wade through both.  I don’t think you’ll find anything particularly shocking – it’s pretty obvious which games were poorly played (South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky were the worst) and which weren’t (Vanderbilt, Florida, Tech and Ole Miss).

The overall picture is a defense that gave up too many big plays, but managed to hold things together in the red zone.  When you only lose twice, there are obviously more successes than failures.  But, still… I will be curious to hear if Grantham identifies any particular areas that need shoring up in his opinion, like he did after the 2010 season with regard to third down conversions.  Speaking of which, given the slide from 2011 to 2012, maybe that’s an area he needs to point at again.

Thoughts?

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UPDATE:  More fun stuff to come from the Internet.