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.