Currently, Georgia stands 67th in Bill’s S&P+ rankings. You know that gets you? According to Bill’s statistical profile, a 5-7 regular season, as the Dawgs go 1-4 down the stretch.
I can hear the siren sounds of Greg McGarity already: nowhere to go but up, Dawgnation! Renew those season tickets today!
Get The Picture 
5-7 would be absolutely awful with this joke of a schedule that we had this year. Get ready for a loooooong winter of discontent if Connelly’s projection plays out.
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Look at next season’s schedule. Things get worse in ’17.
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The GA Tech and Kentucky games are basically toss-ups right now. That is why despite the 5-7 projection, the probability of finishing 6-6 or better is still 69.7%. The offense and special teams are killing us. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise considering the lack of talent on the O-Line, WR, a freshman QB, a freshman punter and the no-show on the kicking game.
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I am surprised. Yes, the O-line is no great shakes. But Chubb has proven that he doesn’t need huge holes to run through. Smart/Chaney simply seem to have intentionally sabotaged the offense with stubborn play calling.
Also, Ramsey averaged 42 yard/punt last year with better hang time than Long is getting. Why go with the freshman who is shorter, with worse hang time?
Blankenship is a total mystery to me. He was bad to start the year. Hopefully the Vandy game marks a new beginning for him.
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Blankenship has never looked awful, that was Hamm. RB missed kicked but he hit them solidly, end over end with good trajectory….you can work with that. Pull hooking one toward the goal line pylon and knuckling one on a low trajectory on short FGs and XPTS is a bad sign, really bad.
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Why Ham kicked a single time this year is a mystery to me. Blankenship misplaced the kick (according to Kirby) that UNC returned for a TD. The one he missed in Oxford was solidly struck … It looked like he just lined it up incorrectly.
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UGA has to turn get some good practice in this weekend and start getting better.
If Smart breaks the bowl streak in his first season(we might get saved by UGA’s APR score) that would be a tough pill to swallow.
I know the games last year were not great, but winning is damn sure better than losing. Looking back I feel like CMR did a pretty solid coaching job getting 10 wins last year…They might not have been the sexiest wins in the world, but at least they were wins.
Of course someone will come along and tell me that last year we were really 7-5 and those wins are the same as loses.
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I had someone respond to me exactly like that yesterday. I responded that using that logic, we’re currently 2-5 rather than 4-3.
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We’ve only had 5 losing seasons since 1963, and only one since 1996. Surely Kirby can do better than that.
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If he went 5-7, I would can him, plain and simple. There would be absolutely no excuse. But it aint happening.
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Kirby would kill any goodwill / excitement he built in one fell swoop if that’s the case. Man – this will be one long winter of discontent if 5-7 is the outcome. And honestly – I don’t give a shit whether the roster is or isn’t as talented as some believed it was. There’s ZERO excuse for having a losing record against this cake schedule.
All that said – if Bill C.’s projections are right, it’s gonna be super fun watching McGarity pretzel himself into justifying the donation / ticket price increases.
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Maybe I can improve my seats before ND’s visit to Sanford.
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If you look at the “Record Probability” section of the statistical profile, Bill gives us only a 31% chance of finishing 5-7 or worse. (Intuitively, the chances of BOTH near-coin-flip games, Kentucky and Ga Tech, going against us are only about 25%.) Still, this situation is not what we were hoping for going into the season. Even 7-5 would be a disappointment compared to preseason expectations.
Even so, I will judge Smart as a head coach after season 3, not after season 1.
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Just curious, what record after season 3 would indicate to you that Kirby is a success?
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For me personally, I think he probably needs to win an SEC East title in the first 3 years to make me feel good about things. If it’s apparent after the third year that he’s constructing a powerhouse through recruiting and good coaching, I would be happy to be more patient.
But admittedly, I don’t attend many games, if any, so if I were shelling out for season tickets, I might be less patient!
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It’s gonna be a long cold winter.
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I thought 8-4 with a possibility of a game difference in either direction. Of course, I didn’t think we’d lose to Vandy. Then again, I didn’t hunk we’d beat UNC, so maybe we’re back where I thought.
We’ll see. I do think the D is playing well enough to keep us in the game with everyone left on the schedule. It’s going to be a matter of the offense finding someway to get in the end zone and special teams not sinking the whole ship.
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Agree with everything except I thought 9-3
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Yeah, I could see 8-4 as well, but just didn’t expect the absolute duds we’ve seen against Nicholls, Ole Miss and Vandy. Not sure what I thought we’d look like, but I wasn’t expecting this. I was thinking 8-4 could come after tough losses to UNC, Ole Miss, Florida and then another one (Tech? Auburn?). We’ve kind of used of all the runway, though.
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“…used up all the runway”
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Thought we’d lose to UNC, OM, UT, & UF, with Auburn/Tech being toss ups that we won at home.
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I’m chalking both UF and AU up as losses. They’ve both got really good DLs which leads one to figure we’re going to just run our all-world RB into a wall of man flesh over and over and over again until we lose.
I’m chalking UL-L up as a win because we’re Georgia.
That leaves UK and Tech as toss-ups because UK is away and they seem to be winning the battle of the bottom rung at this point (God, am I really going to watch UK-MSU instead of Ole Miss-LSU?) and Tech is, as much as we all hate to admit it, almost always a toss. Either the triple option can’t be stopped or Tech derps itself all over the field. I expect COFH to go about like it has the last 3 go ’rounds where we both act like we don’t want to win.
I think we end up 6-6 and go to Memphis or Nashville.
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We lose to UF, not big unless we help them, because their D is too good for us running the O we are running. We lose to Auburn big because they owe us a major butt whipping. We might beat UK but that’s going to be a close one, think Vandy. We might beat ULL unless the team and coaches pull another Nichols. Tech going to be a killer. Kirby and Tucker couldn’t stop Georgia Southerns Triple Option. We might actually have a shoot out with them. I can guarantee that if Kirby assumes the much loved role of Mark as Field Goal Jesus, we will lose. In short I’m not going to have to be checking a lot of the boxes when the AD send it’s post season order form.
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we’re 4-1 as a favorite this year, 0-2 as an underdog.
we gonna lose to UF folks.
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You are not interpreting that profile correctly, Senator. If each game were decided by a coin flip that came up heads 49% of the time, by your interpretation we would finish the season 0-12. By his model, an L is more probable in each one of those individual games, but all of them being Ls is not the most likely case. The ‘projected wins’ column reflects the real projection, which is 6-6.
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I started with an 8-4 or 9-3 projection based on talent and schedule. I stayed with that until I saw the 2nd half of Nicholls and then I knew. If you stunk up the joint in the 1st half you would have come back and stomped them flat in the 2nd, we didn’t/couldn’t. Thankfully the soft schedule will make us able to compete with everyone but Auburn, but dominate no one. I think we go 2-3 and all games ugly, but close. If there is a split among the team, we could lose a couple really badly…and lose some verbal commits.
Hope we can go 3-2 and not get blown out of any games because I have watched others lose their momentum and fall off badly for several years. I don’t think we have the type of fan base to tolerate that, not at all.
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5-7 looks right. Will easily win the La Laf game.
I’d put these 2 as 40-60:
Ky- edge to KY because it’s a KY home game
GT- edge to GT using common opponent analysis–GT beat Vandy 38-7, UGA lost to Vandy.
I’d put these 2 as 25-75:
1- UF- 17 fpi ranking vs 42 for UGA
2- Aub – 10 fpi ranking vs 42 for UGA
http://www.espn.com/college-football/statistics/teamratings
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