Nick Chubb knows Georgia Tech is a rival, damn it.
As the saying goes, revenge is a dish best served cold. Here’s hoping it’s downright chilly in Bobby Dodd Stadium next November.
Daily Archives: December 15, 2016
This is what “buying in” looks like.
Holy cow.
To repeat: holy cow.
All I can say is I hope every one of those four has the senior season he deserves. Especially Nick Chubb.
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UPDATE:
Filed under Georgia Football
Off to the roster management races
Here we go.
Is “looking to transfer” the same thing as “fixin’ to transfer”, or is that more of a preliminary stage? My Southern may getting be a little rusty.
Filed under Georgia Football
The cost of doing business
The checks will no longer be in the mail for Derek Dooley.
The University of Tennessee was scheduled to make its final payment to its former football coach this month as part of his buyout four years ago.
Dooley was fired by Tennessee on Nov. 18, 2012, with one game remaining in the regular season. The university had to pay $5 million to buy out the remainder of Dooley’s contract. The guaranteed payments were due in installments of $102,049 per month through December of this year.
The university owed Dooley’s entire staff nearly $9.36 million in potential buyout money, including $645,000 guaranteed to Jim Chaney, who is now the offensive coordinator at Georgia.
(Chaney’s buyout payments only ran through 2013, so don’t get any ideas about Agent Chaney.)
If you think UT’s learned its lesson, pay attention to this: “Tennessee would owe Jones $10.625 million in buyout money beginning this month if he was fired without cause.” Of course, Booch has almost doubled SOD’s win total, so doubling the buyout kinda makes sense.
Question — if schools had to pay players, would they negotiate clauses like this with coaches?
Generation skipping trust
When it comes to defensive coordinators, Junior likes keeping things all in the family.
Man, does this mean I need to come up with a new nickname? Does Big Bro’ work?
Filed under Don't Mess With Lane Kiffin
The art of the interview
So, Clay Travis asks Colorado coach Mike MacIntyre about other coaching jobs. MacIntyre declines to discuss the topic. Travis does what Travis does, with predictable results:
Travis: “Did you or your agent receive any calls about any jobs after this off-season?”
MacIntyre: “I have no comment on any of that.”
Travis: “So that means ‘yes.’”
MacIntyre: “No, I have no comment. I really didn’t want to get into any of this. So I’ll talk to you later. Appreciate it. Bye, bye.”
Guess who got his fee fees hurt?
Travis: “Wow! Did he just hang up on us?!? That is unprecedented! Was I wrong? Did I do anything wrong there? I thought he was a fairly nice guy… he got rattled. I’m not going to ask him about the Alamo Bowl. Nobody cares about the Alamo bowl.”
MacIntyre’s mistake was assuming he was interviewing with someone who didn’t have a track record like this. Live and learn, brother.
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UPDATE:
Never forget… with Travis, the story is always about Travis.
Filed under General Idiocy
Gin and juice
Boom invites Snoop Dogg to a South Carolina practice.
Filed under Agent Muschamp Goes Boom
Two words… just two simple words
Forget the ups and down of the 2016 season for a minute. Kirby Smart is about to take his first real test on upgrading the Georgia program.
It’s that time of year, with attrition beginning and some recruits beginning to sign, that these two words begin to take center stage: Roster management.
There are always two key numbers to remember, one of them hard, one soft:
The hard number: 85. That’s the NCAA limit on football players who a school can have on scholarship.
The soft number: 25. That’s the SEC signing limit per year, but it doesn’t mean a team is strictly limited to 25. Because the SEC rules allow teams to “back-count” early enrollees – if there’s room the previous year – you can go well over 25 players in one signing class. But that’s only if you under-signed in previous years and have early enrollees. Still confused? OK, think of it this way: You can sign no more than 125 players over a five-year period, and depending on the early enrollee situation, there is a limit each year, which won’t be much over 25. Still confused? That’s OK.
So where does Georgia stand?
… So as of this hour, and with the best information at our disposal, the count is Georgia being committed to 66 scholarships for returning players next year: 19 current freshmen, 5 redshirt freshmen, 19 sophomores, 3 redshirt sophomores and 20 juniors, redshirt or no. (Feel free to go through the roster yourself and check my math. I didn’t count Wilson, or Joseph Ledbetter for that matter. I also didn’t count certain walk-ons who haved play a lot, such as Blankenship, Trent Frix and Christian Payne. I did count Aaron Davis, who’s basically a starter, as well as J.R. Reed, the transfer from Tulsa who sat out this year.)
You’ll notice that 66 + 19 (the current commitments) = 85. So if Georgia wants to sign more than that, assuming the math is correct, there will have to be further attrition. And again, that’s likely to happen.
Roster management. It was Mark Richt’s Achilles heel, the biggest shortcoming of the second half of his Georgia career. And the consequences from it have had a ripple effect all the way into Smart’s first season, as Emerson describes.
For the first time in awhile, the 85 scholarship limit is worth watching at Georgia. It’s not been a problem in past years because of the massive attrition the program experienced from 2010-13, and the program not signing huge classes to make up for it. But when Jeremy Pruitt arrived a few years ago, teaming up with Mike Bobo and the rest of the staff, they helped prod Richt towards more robust recruiting classes, and that, combined with Smart and his staff’s push, means Georgia finally has that roster management problem that most good programs have.
In other words, Kirby’s had to play the hand he was dealt to some extent, but he’s starting to draw new cards to replenish his hand. Can he do the things he needs to do to smooth out the ebb and flow of class numbers from year to year that marked the period from 2010 to 2015? Well, that’s certainly something he should have a good handle on after sitting at the feet of the guru of roster management for almost a decade.
Fixing that problem for good may not cure all of Georgia football’s ills by itself, but if nothing else, at least it won’t be contributing to them anymore. And that would be a terrific place from which to build.
Filed under Georgia Football, Recruiting
Pressure drop
Freshman quarterback Jacob Eason is growing, but he had issues when teams put pressure on him. When he was under duress this season, Eason completed just 27.1 percent of his passes with one touchdown to three interceptions. He was sacked 18 times and lost two fumbles. He threw for just four first downs and had a raw QBR of 1.7 under duress. Eason still has some issues reading defenses at times, but to really throw him off his game, you just have to get some pressure on him without having to blitz.
The response to that is to devise an offensive game plan that keeps Eason out of obvious passing situations. Yeah, I know.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!, Strategery And Mechanics
An alternate theory of the crime
I know there’s a certain portion of the black helicopter crowd that likes to insist the best way to understand Mark Richt’s decision to start Faton Bauta against Florida is that it was a deliberate move to force Greg McGarity to fire him in order to collect a fat buyout (on an unsigned contract, mind you, but, hey, they’re rolling here, so let that pass).
While I don’t claim to have any direct insight into the man’s soul, it seems to me there’s another explanation that’s more realistic. Read this comment Richt made to Paul Finebaum yesterday:
“I was really seriously considering taking a year off and just decide where the landscape was at that time,” Richt said on the show. “Thirty-three years in a row coaching can wear you down. So I was thinking, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll just sit this one out and rejuvenate my body and my spirit and all that.’ But within hours of the thing happening, I had so many former players just call and text and just kind of thank me for all the things that they felt like I did to help them. … I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’m not done doing this.’ And before you know it, I had about six schools wanting me to be their head coach, and one of them was Miami, and I knew Miami wasn’t going to be open a year later.”
I don’t know about you, but to me that very much sounds like a guy struggling with an advanced case of burn out. No, that doesn’t excuse the product on the field we saw in 2015. However, it sure makes it easier for me to understand the context for that. And given that McGarity doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who’s gifted at helping someone recharge his batteries, so to speak, a parting of the ways between Richt and the program he headed for fifteen seasons seems more sensible than ever.
Filed under Georgia Football
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