Ripped from the comments section of GTP

Okay, fess up:  how many of you people are sending emails to the AJ-C‘s Bill King?

Georgia’s receivers group: big hopes, some changes

Wide receiver is Georgia’s land of opportunity this preseason camp.  There’s Malcolm Mitchell and a lot of questions behind him (and, if you think about Mitchell’s health, even about him).  There’s also a lot of young talent coming in.

But one thing that hasn’t gotten much attention yet is the change at position coach.  Tony Ball may not have been a great recruiter, but he was strong on teaching fundamentals, particularly downfield blocking.  So this comment from Brian Schottenheimer caught my eye:

The first-year offensive coordinator sounded upbeat about the players Bryan McClendon will work with after moving from running backs coach to wide receivers coach.

“We’ve got good players, we’ve just got to continue to coach them up,” Schottenheimer said. “With coach B-Mac moving into that room, they’re being taught some different not just system stuff, but fundamental stuff.”

Just another detail to tuck away in the back of your head for when preseason practice rolls around.  Not to mention regular season play…

Advertisement

Money for nothing.

An Ohio State blogger looks at what Big Ten expansion hath wrought and concludes, outside of jacking up revenues, not a whole lot.

Which, when you think about it, is a conclusion you can draw for all of the P5 conferences.  Not that any of the folks running them could care about what you conclude.

Greyson Lambert’s accidental journey

I doubt we’ll ever know what really happened behind the scenes regarding the quarterback shuffle that’s taken place over the last couple of weeks.  For one thing, it doesn’t sound like the coaches were out there actively courting Greyson Lambert. Instead, he kind of fell into their laps.

The problem with the local-boy-goes-home story? Lambert was actually born in Mobile, and although his family moved to Jesup when he was 2, and he grew up there, he stayed an Alabama fan. He never even attended a game at Sanford Stadium until high school, when he was being recruited. The campuses of Florida and Florida State are closer to Jesup than Athens.

When he decided to leave Virginia, at first Colorado State was near the top of the list. Mike Bobo had recruited him at Georgia. (When Brice Ramsey, a year behind Lambert, committed to Georgia, Lambert ended up looking elsewhere, ending up at Virginia.)

This time around, the way it happened with Georgia was almost accidental: Mike Ekeler, the Bulldogs’ inside linebackers coach, was at Wayne County recruiting another player. Lambert was there on a break, talking to his former coach, and ran into Ekeler.

“That’s kinda where the ball got rolling,” Lambert said. “It was just a weird moment that he would be there whenever I went to talk to my coach. I guess that’s the first time that Georgia crossed my mind.”

Ekeler got the quarterback in touch with offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and head coach Mark Richt, and it went from there. Lambert connected right away with Schottenheimer, who he found “easy to talk to.”

Makes you wonder if Park would still be in Athens had Ekeler not bumped into Lambert.

Huntley Johnson is a wizard.

As a University of Florida running back, Chris Rainey was named a suspect in five crimes in Gainesville. He faced charges once.

Rainey’s experience as a star athlete accused of criminal activity — stalking, fighting, injuring someone with fireworks — but ending up with a mostly clean record is not uncommon: From 2009 to 2014, male basketball and football players at the University of Florida and Florida State University avoided criminal charges or prosecution on average two-thirds of the time when named as suspects in police documents, a result far exceeding that of non-athlete males in the same age range, an Outside the Lines investigation has found.

Last fall, to determine how often crimes involving college athletes are prosecuted and what factors influence them, Outside the Lines requested police reportsinvolving all football and men’s basketball players on rosters from 2009 to 2014 from campus and city police departments covering 10 major programs: Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Michigan State, Missouri, Notre Dame, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Texas A&M and Wisconsin. Some police departments withheld records citing state disclosure laws. (ESPN sued the University of Notre Dame and Michigan State University for not releasing material; both cases are pending on appeal.) And not all information was uniform among jurisdictions.

But available reports showed that Rainey’s alma mater, Florida, had the most athletes — 80 — named as suspects in more than 100 crimes at Florida. Yet the athletes either never faced charges, had charges against them dropped or were not prosecuted 56 percent of the time. When Outside the Lines examined a comparison set of cases involving college-age males in Gainesville, 28 percent of the crimes ended either without a record of charges being filed or by charges eventually being dropped.

At this point, my only question is whether they use Johnson as a sales point on the recruiting trail.