Mark your calendars.

August 31st looks to be a day chock full of football, Disney style:

Georgia announced that its highly anticipated opening matchup with Clemson — at Clemson — is set to air on ABC at 8 p.m. ET on Aug. 31. This game could feature two top-10 teams once the season starts. The Bulldogs are 44-26-2 all time when playing on ABC.

LSU’s opener on Aug. 31 against TCU in the Cowboys Classic at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, will kick off at 9 p.m. ET and will be televised on ESPN. LSU and TCU will be meeting for the first time since 1968. The Tigers hold a 5-2-1 lead in the all-time series.

Before the Bulldogs and Tigers kick off their seasons, the defending champs will get the national stage inside the Georgia Dome in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game in Atlanta. Alabama will face Virginia Tech at 5:30 p.m. ET on Aug. 31, and the game will be televised on ESPN.

I wonder who wins the “You are looking live at…” sweepstakes.  Personally, give me Nessler and Blackledge any day.

And kudos on the night game at Clemson.  Maybe this time they won’t run out of ice before halftime.

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Rolling the dice.

Nice catch by the Red & Black:

The Athletic Board isn’t cutting available student tickets, but rather available student seats. Instead of 17,910 seats available for students, only 15,856 seats will be open.

However, because the Athletic Board isn’t cutting tickets, student seats will be oversold by approximately 2,800. In the 2012 season, full-season tickets were awarded to 18,645 students, according to a previous article by The Red & Black.

That means if everyone who had tickets came to the game, about 2,800 wouldn’t have seats and overcrowding would become a serious security issue.

A student makes the obvious point that this year’s home schedule is attractive, particularly in September, which makes it likely that seat demand will be greater than last year’s.  Is that a potential problem?  Not to worry… because.  Just because.

Even if overcrowding became a possible issue, Gray said the football operation teams are prepared to combat the problem.

“On game days, the operations and ticket operations staff are in constant communication with not only the fire marshal, but keeping up with stand rates as people come in,” he said. “So, we definitely wouldn’t fall into a situation where there’d be overcrowding.”

In the last four years, the highest scanned total, not including the marching band, was about 14,650 student tickets at the 2011 Auburn game, Gray said.

Essentially, the plan is hoping that history keeps repeating.  It’ll be interesting to see if we wind up in a situation this season when the administration hopes that students don’t show up for a big game.

Kerwin Bell, MVP

I guarantee you this Patrick Garbin post about the 1985 Cocktail Party (still my second favorite to attend after thirty-plus years) will put a grin on your face this morning that’ll take you half a day to lose.

And don’t miss a second of this, either:

Sadly, they don’t make on-the-field experiences like that anymore.

Oh, and up yours, Jake Godbold.

Stats dig the long ball.

More interesting stuff from Connelly’s play charting project:

If you combine the previously-discussed 99 big plays that went for touchdowns with the additional 73 big-play drives that eventually resulted in a touchdown, 172 of 214 charted drives that involved big plays ultimately finished in the end zone. Simply put, from the games we charted during the 2012-13 college football season, if an offense had a drive that contained a gain of 40 or more yards, 80.8% of those drives resulted in a touchdown.  [Emphasis added.]

If you dig a little further, you’ll see there were 17 field goals that concluded drives including big plays. If you add the 17 field goals to the aforementioned number of drives ending in touchdowns (172), you’ll find that 189 of the 213 total drives (88.7%) that included a big play this past season resulted in some sort of scoring for the offense.

Now I don’t know if Mike Bobo had any direct knowledge of that correlation, or if he was just lucky, but let me take a moment to remind you which offense was second in the country last season in plays of 40+ yards from scrimmage.

King me.

I confess that I’ve been a little slack on the Mandel Mailbag beat of late (so has Elkon, I might add in my defense), but his latest offering produced a chuckle.  A reader asks him about the two most overrated programs that Chris Stassen identified, which turn out to be Oklahoma and FSU.  Mandel responds with two lengthy paragraphs which boil down to “yeah, they’ve both been substandard lately”… but nary a word about what that means in the public perception arena.  (As a refresher, this is Mandel’s current list of “Kings”:  Alabama, Florida, Florida State, LSU, Miami, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Penn State, Texas and USC.)

I guess in Montana, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how they think you’ll play the game.

“Every year you’re starting over again…”

Yes, yes, we’ve all heard what a daunting task Todd Grantham faces this season replacing so many starters from last year’s defense.  But here’s something that should give you hope.

It’s rare that Georgia has had to replace so many starters on one side of the ball under coach Mark Richt, but not unprecedented. In fact, the two seasons under Richt in which Georgia returned fewer than four starters on a given side rank among the most notable in his 13-year tenure.

According to information provided by Georgia’s sports communications office, the 2003 Bulldogs returned just three starters on offense and that team went on to win its second consecutive SEC East title. Four years later, the 2007 Bulldogs returned three defensive starters and went 11-2 record and finished second in that season’s final Associated Press Top 25.  [Emphasis added.]

Geez, no pressure, Coach, but if Willie could do it…

SEC need, baby!

Dan Mullen doesn’t approve of death threats made against one of his signees, mind you.  He’s just sayin’.

“It’s the Southeastern Conference, come on,” he said. “That’s why we’re the best conference in the country, because of the passion people have for the SEC.”

Maybe Slive’s boys can work up a new promo for the conference featuring Mullen and Harvey Updyke.  Let’s see you top that, Delany.