‘Bout damn time

In 2015, Alabama comes to Athens for the first time in seven seasons.

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UPDATE:  Here’s the West rotation through 2023.

Future UGA Western Opp 15 vs Bama 16 @ Ole Miss 17 vs Miss St 18 @ LSU 19 vs Texas A&M 20 @ Bama 21 vs Arkansas 22 @ Miss St 23 vs Ole Miss

— Adam Gillespie (@AG680) May 19, 2014

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The Donnan verdict

I don’t usually do requests like this, but since Mayor asked so nicely, here’s a thread for everyone to opine about Jim Donnan’s acquittal.

The only thing I’ve got to say about the whole thing is that the next time somebody tries to impress you with how smart college coaches are, remind him or her that Donnan didn’t have any problem finding plenty of buddies who believed they were making a risk-free investment generating a 50-200% return.  So much for “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is” folk wisdom.

“It was not a gun to the head.”

Nah, it was just a pleasant euphemism (“it was simply not playing a football game on a Saturday”) for the death penalty if Penn State didn’t roll over for Mark Emmert.

Some negotiation, that.

If only Emmert could do that with O’Bannon’s lawyers.

“The Murray Deficit”

ESPN pitches its preseason list of the top sixteen playoff contenders, and there aren’t really any surprises there.  But this little statistical tidbit caught my eye:

4.9

The Murray Deficit

That’s how many more points per game Georgia QB Aaron Murray contributed to the Bulldogs’ offense compared to an average FBS quarterback.

That doesn’t mean Hutson Mason has to pick up the slack entirely by himself.  It’ll take a village on offense to do that.

August: plenty of grist for the blogging mill

Barrett Sallee interviews Mark Richt, who has good news if you’re a Georgia blogger:

B/R: Is it safe to assume that, since some pieces are moving around to other positions and schools, that some of the pieces of the secondary are falling into place?

MR: Yeah, I think so, but we don’t have anybody who’s nailed down a spot in the defensive backfield right now, quite frankly. We’re going to see what these new arrivals can do. We have four defensive backs coming in who we feel can compete right away and give us a chance to get better.

Gosh, I tell you, I’ll bet we don’t know who’s starting in the defensive backfield until maybe a week prior to the first game would be my guess. It will probably be pretty deep into camp.

A whole month of practice to gnaw on and speculate who lines up in the shakiest position area on the team?  Thanks, coach.

The Six Million Dollar Man

In a world in which E. Gordon Gee can pull in the astounding sum of $6,057,615 while being shown the door at Ohio State, combined with this…

In the study by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ohio State was No. 1 on the list of what it called the most unequal public universities. The report found that from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2012, Ohio State paid Mr. Gee a total of $5.9 million. During the same period, it said, the university hired 670 new administrators, 498 contingent and part-time faculty — and 45 permanent faculty members. Student debt at Ohio State grew 23 percent faster than the national average during that time, the report found.

… well, it’s not so hard to see why athletic departments operate the way they do, is it?

Strengths and weaknesses

Friend of the blog Ed Kilgore had a comment last week that I wanted to revisit:

Assuming we might now go a couple of weeks without additional attrition, it’s increasingly clear the ’14 Dawgs will be an outfit with large strengths harnessed to one big weakness and a question mark. When Phil Steele’s unit ratings come out, I betcha Georgia is in the top five nationally at RB, WR and LB. That would be amazing, and usually the sign of a serious national championship contender. But Lord only knows where we would rank in the secondary (not in the top 50), and the OL rating has to be relatively mediocre at present.

I think Steele will also have the d-line ranked respectfully.  But special teams will likely also fall into the “Lord only knows” group.  (For 2013, he ranked Morgan 3rd in the country and the rest of special teams 107th.)

Overall, Ed’s spot on, it seems to me.  This year’s edition of Georgia football will marry big pluses to some very shaky minuses.  Which is where coaching comes in, figuring out how to maximize the strong suits to work around the flaws.  Shoot me if you like, but I’m not particularly worried about Bobo holding up his end of the deal on that.  Last year, despite all the injuries, Georgia’s offense managed to average 112.6 yards per game more than its opponents allowed.  Steele ranks that tenth best nationally.

Defensively?  Maybe Pruitt’s got more to work with than we suspect.  Steele measured Georgia’s 2013 defense holding its opponents below their average yards per game.  Obviously, that doesn’t tell the entire story.  Special teams killed Georgia on several occasions.  So did a poor turnover margin.  (Georgia was +1 in its wins and minus-8 in its losses.)  Turnover margin is partly random and partly good preparation, so there’s only so much you can do beyond putting your faith in our old friend regression to the mean. (Improvement in this category certainly couldn’t hurt.)  But special teams have been crying for a fix for several seasons.  Now would be a good time to do something about that.

The course of true urnge never did run smooth.

I’m not sure what it is about Tennessee football and gettin’ hitched, but here’s another woman who’s going to have to spend the rest of her life explaining to people what in the hell she was thinking about her wedding.

True romance, babe.