Gentlemen, place your bets.

Georgia opens as a 15.5-point favorite against South Carolina.

Easy money not to cover, right?

PAWWWLLL, don’t these people watch Georgia football?

Georgia moves up one slot in the Coaches Poll and three in the AP.  And before you say it’s just a superficial vote for getting the win without looking deeper, make sure you check out where Auburn’s sitting.

It’s like nobody understands the meaning of a seventeen-point road conference win except us.

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Okay, okay… so it wasn’t pretty.

Here’s part of Bill Connelly’s Five Factors Box Score:

Date	Offense	Defense	Pts	Plays	Yds	Yds/ Play	Drives	Scor. Opps	Pts/ Opp	FP	Succ. Rate
9/12/2015	Georgia	Vanderbilt	31	70	397	5.67	12	5	3.4	24.5	0.37
9/12/2015	Vanderbilt	Georgia	14	94	433	4.61	15	9	1.44	31.1	0.32

You want to know what the real problem with the offense and special teams was yesterday? Leaving the defense on the field for 94 plays. By Vanderbilt.  The ‘Dores had three more drives and almost twice as many scoring opportunities, but were still held to 14 points.  That’s pretty good bend but don’t break stuff there.

But it’s asking a lot from a young team in the second game of the season.  And that was on the offense, primarily.  (Although a couple of shitty penalty calls and a botched onside kick played their parts, too.)

Add in Morgan wasting some of Georgia’s seventy offensive plays by shanking two field goal attempts, and it’s little wonder the game felt as close as it did.

So… about that SEC East

We saw yesterday that Derek Mason can coach a little defense and that Georgia’s got some holes, but what about the rest of the division?

You still got Georgia in the SEC East?The Dawgs won a solid if less than spectacular win against Vanderbilt. The other top-tier SEC East candidates were not exactly playing the part of behemoths; Tennessee utterly collapsed against Oklahoma after seeming to have the game in hand relatively early, while Missouri kept things too close for too long against Arkansas State. Elsewhere, Florida scuffled with ECU and Kentucky walloped South Carolina early before holding on late. Can anyone really hope to compete with UGA?

Yes, it’s still early.  But it’s not like we’ve seen any early surprises, either.  Have your preseason expectations changed much after Week 2?

“So many things that went well and so many things that didn’t go so well.”

Hard to argue with Coach Richt’s postmortem reaction to yesterday’s game.  And judging from the outpouring of angst I see in the comments here and elsewhere, it sounds like nobody’s in the mood to do so.

The angst, to be honest with you, seems a little overdone for a seventeen-point conference win on the road, especially in a place where weird things happen to Georgia.  And Richt, while certainly frustrated over some of yesterday’s low points, doesn’t sound like a man who’s ready to panic.

Richt on the onsides pooch kick that Vanderbilt recovered at the Georgia 18. “I didn’t say anything out loud but if anybody could like record my thoughts, my pastor wouldn’t have been happy.”

His thoughts on what happened: “They took advantage of the alignment. There’s a lot of guys that have a responsibility on that hands unit and that is to block the defenders coming down the field. They’ve got to block and give that guy time to gather that ball in. I’m going to spend some time just seeing what everybody else in the country does in this situation and find out if there’s a better way. If everybody did what they’re supposed to do, there would have been a lot more time for him to get on it safely without that much drama. Absolutely that was one of the things that could have cost us. We’ve got to make sure we’re doing the right things first of all and then make sure we can execute it.”

And we shouldn’t, either.  Yeah, I know who’s coming to town this week.  That would be this team:

The streak that Kentucky snapped on Saturday night that everyone is going to talk about is a 22-game road skid and a six-year drought in SEC wins on the road. But here’s another mark of how different the Wildcats appear to be in Mark Stoops’ third season: For the first time in 16 years, Kentucky has beaten South Carolina in back-to-back seasons after topping the Gamecocks, 26-22, on Saturday.

That’s the kind of incremental success that allows a team to move up in the pecking order in its division. At times, the game against South Carolina was harrowing; were it not for a South Carolina fumble on a two-point conversion that was returned for a safety, or a Chris Westry interception with the Gamecocks driving in Kentucky territory, this game could be quite different. But it was a win, and the South Carolina program that now seems to be on the decline reached its height earlier in the decade by consistently defeating programs that were once ahead of it.

I know Georgia’s gonna get his best shot.  But Spurrier isn’t dealing with the loaded deck he’s been accustomed to playing with over the past few seasons.  And unlike last year’s game in Columbia, he’s coming into Athens having to deal with a lot of questions and doubts about this South Carolina team.  No, that doesn’t mean Georgia is a mortal lock to win.  But it sure doesn’t mean Spurrier’s coaching from a psychological position of strength.  And right now, I’d rather be dealing with Mark Richt’s problems than Steve Spurrier’s.

It’s a long season and while Georgia certainly isn’t a perfect team, it’s a young one with a lot of talent.  That takes time to develop.  Patience, grasshoppers.

Booch sweats the small stuff.

Watching his team blow the largest lead at home in Tennessee history, you’d think Coach Jones would be focused in the immediate aftermath of a shocking overtime loss on the task rallying his young team’s composure.

Nah.

Oklahoma's Eric Striker talks trash to the Tennessee crowd after win https://t.co/I8uyObdZ2w

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) September 13, 2015

Eric Striker to Tennessee fans: "Tell your recruits to come to OU"

— Jason Kersey (@jasonkersey) September 13, 2015

Eric Striker said Butch Jones approached him during the post game celebration and said, "You're a helluva player, but have some damn class."

— Jason Kersey (@jasonkersey) September 13, 2015

Tennessee spends a lot of time on the little things – shower hygiene, sleep coaches – but that winning stuff?  Crap, that’s kinda hard.

By the way, those of you out there who pointed to the Knoxville game as being a real problem for Georgia because of its likely mindset after playing Alabama – how’s the Vols’ season playing out for you now?