Four months after signing day, Hunter Atkinson walks away from college football… hell, walks away from college. [Update: He says he’s staying in school.] More power to him, of course.
But as MaconDawg points out, health at the tight end position just became a very dicey affair this season for Georgia.
Get The Picture 
Tough decision for any person. I wish him the best and hope he never has any regrets.
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My dad woulda thrown me outta the house sans auto, sans furniture and sans any ’emotional support’ … His words would have been ‘I survived beach landings in WWII South Pacific at 18 for you to run away from your beach head at UGA for free education ? Get Out!
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Jay Rome will begin the Jay Roman Empire in Athens this year.
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Wonder what pulled at him hard enough for him to give up college and football?
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really, really, bad choice of words there AHD. Methinks the statement was premeditated.
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All over some local girl, I hear….bad decision to walk from away College.
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Local girl? He is from the Gainesville area, less than 45 minutes away. Needs to marry her and get on with his life. He does realize that at some point in his life he will likely have a job that requires a daily commute further than that from her doesn’t he? Jeez, that is weird, even for an incoming freshman.
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I agree it seems weird, but one of my siblings nearly withdrew from Ga State their first semester due to homesickness, and home was just down the road in Griffin. And it wasn’t even a romantic thing, just pure homesickness. Called home every day crying, begging to come home despite sharing a great little house with her best friends in Virginia Highlands – what 18 yr old wouldn’t love that? My parents forced her to tough it out for a semester, and she ended up loving it, but if my parents hadn’t been resolute about it then she would have been home after just a few weeks too. And if you ever knew her, you never would have thought that would have happened to her, super social, always well adjusted, I was shocked at how hard the transition was on her. Some people just don’t handle it as well as others, that first time being away from home.
I just hope he doesn’t look back and regret it one day. Something tells me he will.
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So this leaves UGA with Jay Rome and Hicks as the TEs. Sure we bring in ole Blazevich (spelled it right before looking it up. ha. ) but just another year where we hope that we can cover a position with freshman and guys switching positions. Jay Rome really needs to stay healthy and have a solid season.
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My God. We lose so many players during the off season, I’m not sure adding another signing day would be nearly enough for us to fill an 85 man roster with recruits. Forget summer camps, we need to hold try-outs all over the state.
I’m not kidding when I say this – the Dawgs need to sign 30+ recruits every dang year. Wake up to the attrition reality!
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Mark Richt had lost control of puppy love?
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I see what you did there…
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Gah!
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He’ll be back just give it some time
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This was my first thought, too. Half of them change their minds within the first 3 days.
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From some of the reports this has been known for a while and everyone was waiting for him to change his mind. the 3 days might have passed, but I do hope he reconsiders. There is nothing in Gainesville worth giving up a UGA scholarship for.
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This year’s class is down to 19 players…lol…
Class size based on Rivals.com
Year UGA Bama
2010 19 26
2011 26 22
2012 19 26
2013 33 25
2014 21 26
Total 118 125
What I see here is that Bama consistently gets 25 players. Which is I believe is the limit per class. UGA is getting 23.6 players. Very close. The difference is the consistency. There are no big swings in the bama classes. UGA undersigns, gets behind the numbers, takes a big swing with 1 class to catch up. wash.rinse.repeat.
That has the effect of the depth never being consistent. You start freshmen, you have to move people between positions to cover the depth.
So your Junior WR might be pretty good, but he only spent 70% of his time getting better as a WR. One summer he spent trying to get better at CB. Where as Alabama’s Junior WR has spent 100% of his time becoming a better WR.
I know that this is a very generalized look at it, it makes sense to me.
And it makes me wonder if CMR has really learned his lesson about the numbers game and if we will ever really get out of the hole we are in. If CMR had followed up the 33 person class (with 3 guys from that class already gone and several switching positions ) with a 25 person class we would be getting out of the hole.
You can not compete in the SEC with your team always on a self imposed probation.
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And the roster attrition continues in some form or the other. Roster management is an issue for Mark Richt. For the past several years this has become a problem. No doubt the AD and staff need to look deep at what is happening in their recruitment.
And he was considering Cincinnatti, and then other offers came in, and the johnny come lately Dawgs make a play.
Recruiting shows up on dawgs sites everyday of the year. That is why I totally discount it. Means nothing lateley.
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Lol, I’m sure the kid gave Richt signs that he wanted to stay home for a girl. Get real man! You can’t blame the man for everything. Bad luck is bad luck, and that is the case here.
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Doesnt matter why they arent there, only matters that they aren’t.
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Doesn’t matter if they spend a year away from D1, they are still thieves troll.
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lulz…
I have my very own troll.
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Do you think Hunter Atkinson would have been accepted for admission to UGA purely on his academic record? Good for him, but that was a pretty sly move.
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Well, it does put us in a numbers crunch, and Jay Rome has never been able to stay healthy. Maybe he’ll be the next Musa Smith, who could never stay healthy, and had he been hurt in 2002, we wouldn’t had no real SEC running back.
I watched some film on Blazevich the other day, expecting to come away impressed that he could step right in and help us. But IDK. He’ll have to try, but unless he has a tremendous summer in S&C, I can’t see him effectively blocking grown SEC players. He has a tremendous opportunity, but the guy that has the most is Jordan Davis.
So OL and TE remain my top two concerns, but TE just creeped closer to the top.
~~~
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P.S. I hate there’s no edit feature here, at least for a few minutes. I’ve been spoiled for so long …
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+1
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You bring up a good point. My guess is Bobo goes a lot more 3WR plus a full back or four WR sets to offset the TE depth problem.
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Yeah, and at least we have other options that are good ones. Just love our system, wouldn’t trade it for any other. We can run virtually anything, and run either fast or slow, effectively.
He may also use Hicks as an H-Back instead of a straight-up TE. I expect we’ll see some of that. It’d be nice, though, to see those TE’s push Bobo for the ball. That would open up our offense even more, and made it tougher to defend.
~~~
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