“The University of Georgia has a good name nationally.”

If you’re looking for a rebuttal to yesterday’s fluffing of Urban Meyer, this’ll do:

“They are in a situation where the state of Georgia is so heavily contested that you don’t always get the cream of the crop from the state completely. You have to go out of state, and Georgia has done a good job of that. They’ve gone to Florida to get guys and to the Carolinas to get guys.

“They do a good job of finding guys in adjacent states and back-filling for sort of the players they inevitably lose from the Atlanta area, which is just so hotly contested now. It’s impossible for them to get all of them.”

Georgia and Southern California are the only programs to land Rivals top-15 recruiting classes annually since the inception of the recruiting service in 2002. This would mark the 11th top-10 class for the Bulldogs in 14 years.

The Bulldogs have raked in most of the in-state talent this year, receiving commitments from seven of Rivals’ top-100 prospects: Albany defensive end Trenton Thompson (No. 7), Hogansville athlete Terry Godwin (No. 10), Atlanta defensive end Natrez Patrick (No. 42), Evans safety Rashad Roundtree (No. 56), Tucker defensive end Jonathan Ledbetter (No. 68), Fairburn defensive end D’Andre Walker (No. 85) and Stone Mountain defensive end Chauncey Rivers (No. 87). Patrick and Ledbetter enrolled earlier this month.

Georgia also is considered the school to beat for Roquan Smith (No. 77), a linebacker from Montezuma.

Reality can be a bitch sometimes.  Even at Creekside High School.

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Making us believe you care

In a piece reminiscent of something I posted after last year’s G-Day game, the AJ-C’s Bill King lays into the administration for the subpar state of affairs at Sanford Stadium.

The walk out of Sanford Stadium after the last home game of the season would have been bad enough because of the Dawgs’ disappointing overtime loss. But it was made worse by having to gingerly step through a pool of fetid water in middle of the concourse of the north side’s lower level, apparently the result of some sort of overflow from one of the outdated and overwhelmed restrooms sitting adjacent.

To my left, someone wearing Georgia Tech colors looked down at what we were walking through and sneered, “Ah, the stench of Sanford Stadium!”

There was nothing I could say. It was embarrassing, but, unfortunately, all too typical of a facility that frequently fails to live up to the standards of the football program that calls it home.

Nice.

I’ll say it again – if you want to offer fans a good enough gameday experience to make them spend their time and their hard-earned dollars getting in the car and traveling to Athens in the fall, the first step is convincing them that you really care about offering them “the best gameday experiences in the country”.  And that doesn’t happen with online surveys, better stadium wi-fi or more piped-in music.

It comes with recognizing the strains put on the gameday infrastructure that have resulted from expanding the stadium capacity to 92,000+.  It comes with recognizing that people prefer clean bathrooms.  It comes with using professionals to staff concession stands so that delivery is more efficient allowing fans to spend more time in their seats watching the game.

It comes from making people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth every Saturday by being treated like their interest in Georgia football is the most important thing to the athletic department, instead of feeling like their interest in Georgia football is something that can be taken for granted.

In other words, even though we’re wallets, it doesn’t mean we have to be made to feel like that’s all that matters.  Because eventually we’ll all come to realize there are plenty of other places we can go to be treated like that. With nicer bathrooms.

Destined for greatness

Let’s just say that the committee appointed by UAB President Ray Watts to cover his ass determine if football has any future at the school is off to a fabulous start, even if its members have no clue who would pay for any study of the issue it orders.  But rest assured progress is already being made – the committee has already figured out that there won’t be any UAB football this year.  Well done, folks.

They’ve also figured out that they’re independent.  No, really.

They also wanted students to know they aren’t here to rubber stamp any decision the university has already made. Smith said the entire committee is in agreement on their independence. They want to gather as much information as possible from those concerned to put together a proposal.

With confidence in the administration at a low level, smith believes the committee will be taken seriously.

“I can tell you that the members of this committee would not be serving and using their valuable time if we didn’t believe whatever the outcome of this process shows would not be seriously considered,” said Smith.

Heavy, dude. But if you really believe that, you’re the only one who doesn’t see the real purpose for your committee’s existence.  You’re there to sell Conference USA on the chance of football at UAB.

Conference USA is holding a previously scheduled winter retreat next week. UAB Interim Athletic Director Shannon Ealy says that’s when he and Watts will make their case to conference commissioners and the other university presidents. They are asking for more time to complete the new study and determine what type of department the university will have.

Good luck with that, Shannon Ealy.  I can hear your sales pitch to the conference now:  You don’t want to rush President Watts into a hasty decision, now, do you?  Look what happened the last time he made one of those. Sure, we know CUSA requires its member schools to maintain football programs, but if you could just see your way into letting UAB have a temporary exemption from that – say, for five or six years as a starter – I’m sure we could come up with a thoughtful way out of the problem it created with Watts’ lack of thought.  Hey, if we weren’t serious about this, would Watts have appointed a committee to look into his decision?  Er… why are you all smiling at me like that?

‘Man, this kid knows football. This kid knows coverages.’

While obviously it would be a wonderful thing for Hutson Mason if it were to happen, let me just say that if he makes an NFL roster, it would be the greatest feather in the caps of Mike Bobo and Mark Richt as developers of quarterbacks evah.

If they couldn’t sell that on the recruiting trail, they’re not trying.

“It’s part of the budget, part of life at this level.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this bit of information disturbing:

Athletic fees contribute mightily to the $1.3 trillion in college debt that students face. USC Upstate business professor Jeff Smith, who has studied and written about the issue, estimates that students across the country borrow almost $4 billion per year to pay for college athletics on their campuses.

That is one screwed up sense of priorities there – schools can’t live within their athletic budgets, so they force students to do the same with their personal budgets.  To make matters worse, “… student athletic fees are often difficult to uncover and don’t often appear on school’s websites or student’s bills.”  That is some heavy bullshit there.

Read the whole thing.  See if you don’t get irritated, too.

Musical palate cleanser, at least they’re not dead yet edition

I thought I’d get off the R.I.P. kick I’ve been on lately, and turn to the merely old.

From 1965, here are the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

This is why even men of the cloth fall in love with rock ‘n’ roll.

The clip is from a documentary DVD called Charlie Is My Darling.  Per Wikipedia,

The 64 minutes documentary follows the group from their car trip out of London to Heathrow Airport, and from there to Dublin where they had two concerts at the Adelphi Theatre on 3 September. The next day they take a train up to Belfast for two concerts at the ABC Theatre, before returning to London by plane the following day.

Besides stage shots from the concerts (where the second Dublin concert ends in total chaos as fans storm the stage), the film contains scenes from a hotel room in Dublin (where Keith and Mick for fun do a few Beatles songs as well as a couple of their own), scenes from their train trip to Belfast, another impromptu song session by a piano (with both Keith and Andrew Oldham playing the piano while Mick impersonates Elvis Presley and sings Fats Domino’s version of “Blueberry Hill“), and finally their flight back to London. Intermixed with this are interviews with the band members where they talk about fame, fans and future.

Like the clip?  Okay, here’s another one – “The Last Time”.

Jagger’s move with the jacket is classic.