Finally, somebody at the NCAA with a shred of common sense:
Stacey Osburn smiles knowingly. But has no comment.
Daily Archives: May 28, 2014
“Yeah. I think he really wants to be great.”
While I think this is one of the sillier quotes I’ve seen from Mark Richt lately…
“I think he’s on a turning point of maturing some, and becoming a very dependable guy,” Richt said while attending SEC meetings. “I’m not saying he is a dependable guy, or has been at this point. But I have a feeling that that’s his desire to become that. And he needs to. It’s time.”
… it does appear to be an indication that there is still a place on the team for Tray Matthews. Considering that similar behavior has led to the departure of others, I’m kind of impressed Matthews has shown enough to merit that quote, strange as that may sound.
Filed under Georgia Football
“We are going to do so I think in a very tasteful manner.”
Ear of the beholder, Greg. We’ll be listening.
Filed under Georgia Football
“I’ve got a lot of faith in Jeremy…”
Otherwise known as “It’s a good time to be a young DB at Georgia.”
We sure hope it is. As Estes points out, Georgia’s secondary is in much the same rough shape it was in going into last season’s opener against Clemson. With two exceptions: Boyd and Watkins won’t be wearing orange this year and Jeremy Pruitt is coaching Georgia’s secondary.
While the latter is cause for optimism, there are plenty of good reasons to temper that. Like this one:
Sensing that he needed DBs immediately, Pruitt had a leading role in signing two of these four, landing late commitments from Jones and Sanders to join others that pre-dated his arrival. But the Bulldogs’ new coordinator admits he doesn’t know any of the signees very well yet.
“I wasn’t recruiting them when I was at Florida State,” Pruitt said. “So there was no previous relationship. I was getting to know them in a two-week period of time. So I’m still getting to know them, figuring them out. I think all four of them have really good ball skills, which is important. When you watch their high school tape, they showed toughness. They all showed the ability to play some man to man, and they all were willing tacklers.
“The criteria you look for in a defensive back, they have them. To me, there’s more to it than that. You’ve got to have intangibles, and that’s something you learn over the course of time.”
New backs. In a new system. With a new position coach who doesn’t know what he’s got in them yet. Man, August is shaping up to be one very hairy month. Faith will be tested.
Filed under Georgia Football
“You just can’t call people up and schedule a game.”
I mentioned in passing in this morning’s buffet that even though the SEC has locked down its conference schedule for the next decade, there was still a debate in Destin yesterday about football scheduling. It’s worth understanding what that signifies.
In discussing the national title hunt, Mark Richt used to insist that all he focused on was winning the SEC. That’s all he could control and he’d let matters take care of themselves after that. The last eight years of the BCS title game bore that wisdom out.
But that’s not the world Richt and his conference peers operate in any more. With a four-team playoff that doesn’t restrict the number of teams from a single conference, there’s more than one way to skin a national title cat now. Enter scheduling debate.
Something that is making coaches jittery is the new College Football Playoff that starts this upcoming season. A 13-member selection committee chooses four teams to play for the national championship and eight other teams to play in the four non-playoff New Year’s Day bowls.
But unlike the BCS that used computers and polls to ultimately determine who played in the national championship game, the CFP is subjective. Coaches around the nation want to know what it will take for their teams to get in the final four.
“Coaches all over are interested in the criteria and I don’t blame them,” said CFP executive director Bill Hancock, who spoke to the SEC coaches Tuesday afternoon. “The core criteria is very much common sense – strength of schedule, head-to-head, common opponents.”
Notice what’s missing from that list of criteria?
Now the reality is that, barring an upset of ginormous proportions in the SECCG, the conference champ will make it into the national semi-finals. But if you’re a coach or athletic director of a powerhouse, you also have to think seriously about plotting a narrow course that will make your program attractive enough for the selection committee to choose in the event you don’t win the conference championship. In other words, for the first time, Mark Richt has to entertain the notion that he needs to factor a Plan B into the equation for achieving a shot at a national title.
That’s a subtle distinction at the moment, I’ll grant you. Nobody knows how the process is going to play out and won’t until the first postseason pool is filled. And that’s reflected in the SEC’s conservative approach to scheduling, skipping the ninth conference game in favor of a Big 5 opponent mandate. Will that be the case down the road? Who knows? But because of the nature of the selection process, it will always be a factor in scheduling from now on.
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that winning the conference isn’t the be all, end all goal anymore for that national title chance. And it’ll never be again as long as subjective criteria are used to pick the national semi-finalists. If you’re asking me to point to something about the new playoffs that affects the regular season, there you go.
Filed under BCS/Playoffs, SEC Football
“They’re recruiting our guys anyway.”
It’s a credit to Mark Richt’s sanity that he finds the time off more valuable than a conference rule change that would allow him to reciprocate James Franklin’s “guest coach” appearance at a Georgia State camp this summer, but I bet this is one rule the SEC thinks hard about revising. Either that, or the SEC pushes to have everyone play by the same set of rules. Not every coach is as understanding as Richt.
And in a related note… competitive disadvantage, bitchez!
Filed under Recruiting
Wednesday morning buffet
Lots of specials from Destin today…
- Mr. Conventional Wisdom’s Q&A with Mike Slive is every bit the exercise in first-rate, hard-nosed journalism you’d expect it to be.
- With all the focus on having to replace both lines, it’s easy to overlook how dire the quarterback situation at Tennessee is.
- Mike Slive is looking for a few good agent rules. Why do amateurs need agents?
- They still wound up debating scheduling yesterday.
- Meet Dyshon Sims, incoming offensive line candidate.
- According to this list, we may be seeing a lot of the Dawgs on CBS this season.
- College football playoff tickets as a form of IPO. As you might expect, the “model also captures revenue for the College Football Playoff that might otherwise go to ticket brokers and resellers.”
- Here’s a little legal discussion about the likelihood of a college football player strike.
- Les Miles claimed it was “unanimous” that the SEC coaches want an early signing date on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Somebody should have told Steve Spurrier: “I like what we’re doing now…” Slive wasn’t impressed, either.
- Marc Weiszer checked around the ACC and the SEC and found that Georgia’s transfer policy was the most liberal.
The surest sign of bracket creep
Ladies and gentlemen, how do you know when Bill Hancock is talking out of his ass?
Why, when his lips are moving.
Filed under BCS/Playoffs
Get The Picture 