Special teams and the offensive line may not be working well…

… but that effing Open Records law is hitting on all cylinders.

The University of Georgia is taking full advantage of the new open records law for athletics passed by state legislators after football coach Kirby Smart discussed with them the “difference” in play at his new program with competitors…

Among information requested the school’s Division of Marketing & Communications has not responded to yet under the new law except to acknowledge receipt of the request:

• A Sept. 5 request for the latest multimedia rights deal for Georgia athletics with IMG College and JMI Sports. The Sports Business Journal reported the school signed a 10-year contract. Georgia would not provide the financial arrangement of the deal that runs through 2026 without going through open records. The school made an average of $11 million a year under the previous contract.

• An Aug. 13 request for any communication about Alabama football graduate transfer Maurice Smith with the Southeastern Conference, Alabama or Smith and/or his family. In a much-publicized case, the SEC granted a waiver for Smith to play immediately for Georgia. He is a starting defensive back.

• A July 5 request for the amount of money Georgia spent to recruit College of Southern Idaho basketball transfer Pape Diatta who signed with the school. Assistant coach Jonas Hayes travelled to Senegal to visit the player’s mother. Asked in October if he could estimate how much a trip like that cost, head men’s basketball coach Mark Fox said: “I’m going to guess it probably cost $1,500. He just flew there. I think he did get a hotel room just to take a shower but he was only there, not even for 24 hours.”

My only question is where is the national championship Casey Cagle promised us when the bill passed.  I mean, they’re winning, aren’t they?

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“… I’m here to play, I’m not here to go to school.”

So, Ben Simmons says the obvious…

“The NCAA is really f—ed up,” Simmons said on “One and Done,” a film that will air on Showtime on Friday night. “Everybody’s making money except the players. We’re the ones waking up early as hell to be the best teams and do everything they want us to do and then the players get nothing. They say education, but if I’m there for a year, I can’t get much education.”

“The NCAA is messed up,” Simmons said. “I don’t have a voice. … I don’t get paid to do it. Don’t say I’m an amateur and make me take pictures and sign stuff and go make hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars off one person. … I’m going off on the NCAA. Just wait, just wait. I can be a voice for everybody in college. I’m here because I have to be here [at LSU]. … I can’t get a degree in two semesters, so it’s kind of pointless. I feel like I’m wasting time.”

… and Mark Emmert interprets that as an attack on the NBA.  No, really.

“I was reading today where someone who played basketball at LSU was very unhappy with the one-and-done rule,” said Emmert, speaking Wednesday at LSU’s inaugural Sports Communication Summit at the Manship School of Mass Communication. “That’s not our rule. That’s the NBA’s rule. But (he says) it’s another stupid NCAA rule.”

Emmert said he agrees with Simmons, who was quoted in a documentary about him airing Friday on Showtime saying he felt he wasted his time in college because he didn’t have any time to work toward a degree, to a point.

“The one-and-done rule is something I’ve made no secret about how much I dislike it,” Emmert said. “It makes a farce of going to school. But if you just want to play in the NBA, you can do that. You can go to Europe or play at a prep school until you’re 19.

“I’d love nothing more than for the NBA to get rid of that rule. We’ve made it really clear to the (NBA) players union and the leadership of the NBA that we very much would like it changed.”

I’m sure you would, boss.  But the NBA isn’t in the business of managing your labor standards for you.

“If someone wants to be a pro basketball player and doesn’t want to go to college, don’t go to college,” he said. “We don’t put a gun to your head. First and foremost, it’s about being a student at a university. We’re in the human development business.

“If I wanted to hire someone to play football, why would I hire a 17-year-old (out of high school)?” Emmert asked. “Why wouldn’t I hire someone who just finished playing in the NFL or the CFL? If you want to hire a team, hire a team.

“Those kids have to be students. Philosophically, they have to be representatives of the university, so what we can and should be doing, which what we are doing today, is provide them with everything they possibly need to make them successful students and athletes.”

Well, plus put them in position to make lots of money for schools and Emmert’s organization.

Mark Emmert references Ben Simmons' comments on one-and-done:

"That's not our rule. It's the NBA's. We don't care if you go play ball" #LSU

— James Moran (@SmartestMoran) November 2, 2016

You don’t care?  Then why was Simmons offered a scholarship at LSU in the first place?

Every time Mark Emmert speaks, an angel throws up.

Name that caption, pump you up edition

Something’s about to emerge here…

Joshua L. Jones/AJC

Or maybe he has to inflate his head to keep his visor in place.

My work is done here.

One of my posts is linked at Stingtalk.  It’s the highlight of my ten-year stint in blogging.

What a Dwag, man.

The untalented Georgia Bulldogs

After a few recent comments about the program’s current level of talent, I went digging around for some measure of quality as to Georgia’s current roster and found that 247Sports is positively scathing in that regard.

That is, if you consider sixth-best nationally to be scathing.

Look, I’d be the last one to argue that there aren’t some obvious shortcomings in how that talent is distributed, or that this team isn’t very young in places where that’s not a good thing to be.  (Yeah, let’s not forget the consequences of the vaporization of the class of 2013, ever.)  But when you’re sixth on that list and seventieth on this one, there’s a certain disconnect that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

It’s a transitional year and as such I’ve come to grips with not making any major pronouncements about the program’s direction.  However, dichotomies like these should be a sobering reminder that talent accumulation will only take a team so far.  At some point, player development and sound coaching have to play a part, too.

While it’s too soon to tell in 2016, the question we have to ask — more importantly, that Greg McGarity has to ask — is when it becomes appropriate to insist that Georgia football should be reaping the rewards of what’s been brought to Athens.

Pay to not play?

One thing that gets me about big time college football is that, with so much money floating around, why do schools and the NCAA have such a hard time settling matters early enough to keep embarrassments out of the public eye?

I’m looking at you, Baylor.

Former Baylor Title IX coordinator Patty Crawford told Outside the Lines on Wednesday that ex-Bears athletic director Ian McCaw asked her for immunity for the school’s football players when she started investigating allegations of sexual assault at the school…

“I don’t know anything about the athletic culture or anything,” Crawford said. “Instead of [Alejandro] necessarily helping me, he went and told his boss, who then called the board of regents chairman … and then he called Reagan Ramsower, and they called me into this emergency meeting on February 4.”

During the meeting, Crawford said she told the men that she needed to investigate the gang rape allegations and the dating violence allegation against another player.

“The athletic director asked if I could give immunity to the football players that still were at the university,” Crawford said. “I looked around the room and everyone had their heads down. I said, ‘No, I don’t know [if] they were an accomplice. I don’t know if they were part of this culture.”

Crawford said she refused to give the Baylor players immunity and told McCaw and the others that she didn’t even have a Title IX policy in place because she had started her job only a few months earlier.

It’s not like this is all Crawford’s had to say since she left Baylor.  Reportedly, she wanted something like a couple of million in return for keeping her mouth shut, but the school didn’t want to pay.  Penny wise, pound foolish.

“And then things have gone downhill. It’s disappointing.”

I never thought I’d see the day when Nick Chubb and Sony Michel would join the “run the damned ball, Chaney” club.  But here we are:

Nick Chubb and Sony Michel walked into offensive coordinator Jim Chaney’s office Monday morning hoping to make sense of what happened during Georgia’s 24-10 loss to Florida.

Chubb only got nine carries for 20 yards, and Michel was handed the ball three times for 2 yards.

Those aren’t the numbers the two star running backs are accustomed to.

Georgia has long been known as a downhill, physical run-first team. After a dominating performance against North Carolina in the season opener, which saw Georgia rush for 289 yards in a 33-24 win, the Bulldogs have been hit or miss in the ground game since.

With Chaney going away from running the ball against the Gators, Chubb and Michel met with Chaney to find out why and what the plan would be moving forward.

“I talked to Coach Chaney, but what he said was true,” Chubb said. “We weren’t good at running the ball that game. They outplayed us so we had to try something new.”

For the few 5- to 7-yard runs Chubb had, it seemed there were many more where he, or another ballcarrier, was stuffed at the line of scrimmage. That’s why Chaney switched it up in the second half and went predominantly with the pass.

Even so, Chubb said he asked Chaney if the run game would be a focal point moving forward. With a player as talented as Chubb, it would be wise in most situations to make the effort to get him more than nine carries in a game, even if the run game is struggling.

“I don’t think I’ll get nine carries again,” Chubb said in a joking tone.

The impromptu meeting the players had with Chaney lasted a few minutes and came with Chubb and Michel knowing Chaney has an open-door policy.

I guess we can’t blame Bobo for this one.

Really, this feels unprecedented — not just two stars going to the offensive coordinator to ask what’s going on, but that it plays out publicly in the press.  Has there been a stranger stretch in Georgia football than what we’ve witnessed over the past two years?  I can’t think of one.

Here’s betting on tons of power running sets against Kentucky Saturday night.  The ‘Cats are almost as bad defensively against the run as South Carolina, so perhaps that’s not a bad strategy, except remember that SC did a better job shutting down Georgia’s running game in the second half when Boom committed more men to the box.  Were I Stoops, I wouldn’t wait that long to make Jacob Eason beat me.