It seems that Paul Myerberg’s no longer doing his team-by-team preseason previews, which is a shame, so it’s in this conference preview that we find he’s got Georgia ranked 17th going into the season.
What’s interesting about his ranking is that it comes in the face of a very undistinguished evaluation of Georgia’s players — only one is listed on his All-conference team (guess who) and nobody makes his national awards candidate list. Also, none of Georgia’s position units makes his top list.
Juxtaposed against that backdrop is the news that Kirby is moving this year’s class into the two-deep.
The beginning of the season brings new names to the football roster, and those names belong to athletes who are challenging the more experienced players for starting positions.
“We’re sitting out there, I’m going, ‘On every two-deep there’s a [freshman] guy here, and he’s surpassing guys that are sophomores and juniors quickly,’” Smart said.
Youth is being served, which means there’s plenty of room to be nervous about Georgia’s 2016 prospects. But there’s also this:
We won’t know until we see him against North Carolina, but indications are that Nick Chubb will be Nick Chubb this year, or something very close to it. He was incredible for the Dawgs when healthy, and more importantly, he hid a lot of weaknesses.
Even with iffy quarterback play (not to mention smaller, unproven receivers) and a Schottenheimer at offensive coordinator, Georgia averaged 8.3 yards per play over the first month of last season. If Chubb is 100%, QB might not be much of an issue.
You think Kirby’s crossing his fingers as much as we are?
Get The Picture 
I doubt it, the entire DawgNation is breathlessly awaiting his 2016 first carry and to see him bounce back up. With Michel appearing to be making a better recovery than earlier thought, the calculus for one Gene Chizik’s Gameplan just got a Hell of a lot more involved.
If Chubb is reborn in full Beast Mode, I’m less apprehensive about how this season plays out. Four Games are the benchmarks and a healthy Dynamic Duo makes every one a tossup.
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1) Lambert
2) Ramsey
3) Eason
15 & 0 from where I am sitting. Gonna be some “ugly wins”, reminicent of ’80. Gonna have a “3 headed monster in Chubb, Michel & Holifield. Ball control, defense and special teams…..”junkyard dawgs” will be playing again in Sanford. Play the odds and go bet the house….year of the Dawgs.
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Man I like your thinking!
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I’m all in favor but when in history has a first year head coach taken the team he inherited to an undefeated season? T he only one I can think of is Urban Meyer at tOSU and he had already won the BCS title twice and been HC at 3 different schools before that. Kirby has never been a HC before.
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Larry Coker in 2001
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Everyone in the know seems to agree that the talent just isn’t there. We all need to take a deep breath. It’s going to take Kirby a while to get to the level he wants to be at with the overall talent and depth on the roster.
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All relative (talent)…..If we averaged winning 10 a year for the past 15, surely we can do at least that good with a better staff. Talent wise, I feel we are better than a year ago….
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I can’t agree with this. 2013 was an absolute train wreck in recruiting for us. The majority of those kids are gone or never panned out. 8 of the 21 we signed in 2014 are no longer with the program, there are some studs in that class but not enough. Those would be our seniors and juniors. Our overall numbers are ok right now but we whiffed pretty bad in some crucial years. It’s going to be a couple of years to get our talent and experience level where we want it. I am encouraged so far by where we are heading in recruiting in what we signed last year and what our commitments look like for 2017. But who knows how they pan out?
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We have talent, it’s just not 2-deep caliber talent and in some areas its young/inexperienced. That means we have to be extremely fortunate in avoiding major injuries at thin positions. No , Kirby does not have the talent he is accustomed to at ‘Bama, so maybe that means we get an early indication of how good he and his staff are at coaching these kids up. We just gotta take it a week at a time.
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“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard”. We were 6 & 5 the year befor the ’80 season, anything can happen. I feel that the roster is loaded with “blue chippers”, the new staff walked into a great situation. A change was not made to take a step back, if we do……McGarity can step out.
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No offense, Greg but there is a very slim chance we even win the SEC next year. Kirby was not brought in to step back, but neither was he brought in to win it all in his first year. He was brought in, IMHO, to change the overall direction of the program and lead us to a championship. He has long been favored by some powerful influences and he was going to be hired by someone else if we did not snag him. I like where we’re at, but it ain’t the promised land just yet.
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All tongue & cheek…..thank you for your reply.
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Who else has recruited as well as Bama? They still lose and get challenged regularly. We have talent. Coach it up.
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I find it ridiculous that the pundits pick team preseason rankings and yet can only name 3-4 players when doing so while making the players’ positions the most important for the team. You don’t see the names of high profile recruits who are quite capable of playing positions well where we may have suffered problems before. The writers keep going over the results of the last few years without ever expecting players to improve from year-to-year. Productive 5-star players and new athletes hardly get mentioned in those oracle-writer articles. Ask them who Davis and Mac are and why they are important and they scratch their crotch in reply. Ask them to name one TE beside Nauta and the writers show why they have short necks and sloping foreheads. Ask them “How many LBs can we count on since we lost the best there ever was two years in a row?” and they will name the two or three playing in the NFL and haven’t a clue that we are filled with capable replacements with experience who have talent and lights-out speed.
Yet, these clueless, and most times, lazy people place words in front of fans that take their emotions in every direction when you compare their writings. The truth is that we (the fans) have a much better and realistic idea of what we have than many we read and hang onto their every word. I’ll stick to reading those who post here and really don’t want to see some ignorant asshole’s evaluation of that which we already know from our close attention to details. Btw, how is the love life of our QBs getting along? We need to know and to include that into our very erudite and informed opinions about our team and layers….um….players. Otherwise, I’m going to bake cookies early this season and flip coins when picking every game, especially since you can’t even buy a QBR stat that an unmentioned writer trolls us with often.
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Right on, brother!
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“they have short necks and sloping foreheads”…I had to laugh at that. I hate writers too. Most of them are lazy and just repeat what they read from another lazy journalist…who got his info from a short-necked slope head. LOL
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You’re right…..that’s why I won’t spend 8$ on uninformed sports mags every pre-season.
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