You’d think by now Hugh Freeze would have learned to quit writing checks with his mouth that his… ah, hell, forget that.
Not likely this year, brother.
**************************************************************************
UPDATE: Check out who (almost) brings up the rear at this year’s SEC Media Days.
I guess they’re hoping Boom leaves ’em on a high note.
Filed under Freeze!
Last week I mentioned that Smart hired another analyst, former Minnesota offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Jay Johnson. Marc Weiszer flushes out Johnson’s background a little, with a couple of quotes.
In one season at Minnesota, the Golden Gophers improved from 22.5 points per game in 2015 to 29.3 but ranked 107th in the nation in total offense, with a 357.2 yard average. Johnson and the Minnesota staff were fired after a 9-4 season.
The Lakeville, Minn., native and former Northern Iowa quarterback spent five seasons as offensive coordinator at Louisiana-Lafayette where his teams ranked in the top 35 nationally in rushing from 2012-14 and 10th in the nation in red zone offense in 2014 at 91.2 percent.
Georgia last year was 64th in red zone offense (84.4) while Minnesota was 36th (87.5).
“I was told by everybody who’s coached with Coach Johnson before that he does a tremendous job of taking advantage of weaknesses and how people have to defend him,” then Minnesota coach Tracy Claeys said last August. “I have to think in the red zone everybody has certain ways they like to play, and I have to think that he made good decisions on how to attack what they were doing.”
Penn State coach James Franklin, before his team beat Minnesota 29-26 in overtime last season, described Johnson as running an “efficient, balanced offense, uses multiple looks, formations, personnel groups, mainly two personnel groups, 11 personnel, one back, one tight end, three wide receivers, and 12 personnel, one back, two tight ends and two wide receivers. Big, physical line.”
Taking Franklin at face value, it sounds like Minnesota was running a lot of the same stuff last season Georgia was. Minus the big, physical line, of course.
That being said, if Johnson’s got a few insights into successful red zone offensive play calls he’ll share with the class, it certainly can’t hurt.
Filed under Georgia Football
For instance, last year there were 19 teams that returned 16 starters or more, including their QB. Of those 19 teams, 12 had a better record in 2016 than they did in 2015. Four had the same record, and only 3 of the 19 had a weaker record.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there were 14 teams that returned 11 or fewer starters that did not have a returning starter at QB. Of those 14 teams, 0 had a better record. Of the 14 least experienced teams, 13 had a weaker record in 2016 than they did in 2015 and one had the same.
And here’s why that matters to us.
SEC RK TEAM TOTAL OFF QB DEF T3 Georgia 17 7 1 10 T3 Kentucky 17 8 1 9 T9 South Carolina 16 10 1 6 T9 Vanderbilt 16 9 1 7 T25 Auburn 15 8 1 7 T25 Missouri 15 10 1 5 T48 Florida 14 9 1 5 T48 Tennessee 14 7 0 7 T71 Arkansas 13 7 1 6 T71 Mississippi St 13 7 1 6 T86 Texas A&M 12 5 0 7 T103 Alabama 11 6 1 5 T103 LSU 11 6 1 5 T103 Ole Miss 11 5 0 6
That’s right. Georgia is tied for first in the conference and third nationally. This will also mark Georgia’s first season with a returning starter at quarterback since 2013. (I don’t count Lambert last year, because we all knew he was just holding down the fort temporarily until the coaches moved Eason in.) I don’t see how that can hurt.
As for the rest of the SEC, a few notes…
… then it’s time for Roquan Smith to be nicked up.
Georgia inside linebacker Roquan Smith could miss spring practice due to a recent surgical procedure on his pectoral muscle.
If the injury forces Smith to sit out the spring, it would be the second year in a row he has been limited during this time of the year. Smith was originally deemed out of last year’s spring practice following wrist surgery but was able to participate in a limited fashion while wearing a black non-contact jersey.
Last year turned out fine for Roquan, so I’m not exactly sweating this one. Still, it’s a shame that it looks like we’ll be missing a few familiar faces on the defense at G-Day.
Filed under Georgia Football
A good friend of mine alerted me to this sordid tale of crime in my fair city.
Rock ’n’ roller Rick Derringer is 40-some years past his 1970s’ All American Boy phase. His flowing golden locks and shiny silver jacket is replaced by a short-cropped cut and a conservative business suit.
Derringer was dressed like that last week because he was appearing at the federal courthouse in Atlanta to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of trying to bring a loaded gun through airport security…
The aptly named Derringer got caught last month at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport after returning from Cancun, Mexico. Transportation Security Administration officials found his Kel-Tec pistol in his carry bag after he left Customs and he went back through security to fly home to Florida.
Yeah, Derringer, gun, I get it. But that’s not the best part of the story. This is.
I asked Derringer, a diminutive and pleasant fellow, how he found Bruce Harvey to be his attorney.
“The FBI recommended him,” Derringer said. “The FBI agent was a fan.”
Sometimes you really gotta love this country. Anyway, here’s a slice of seventies magic — live, with Edgar Winter, it’s “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo”.
Lawdy mama, light my fuse, indeed.
Filed under Uncategorized
What’s happened with Thompson at the time he was taken to the hospital last week and what may be in store for him down the road is pretty interesting, not so much for what it says about Thompson, but for what it might indicate about how the bureaucracy now interacts with the football program.
Read what Chip Towers now reports about how the police handled the incident.
The new report – notably described as “sick person” under “Investigative Type” — is from Sgt. Seth Robinson. He is introduced as “a drug recognition expert and emergency medical responder.”
Robinson was on the scene and is represented on body-cam footage viewed by DawgNation. Initially, Robinson reports that he believes they’re dealing with a person under the influence of drugs. He cites Thompson’s “dazed state,” “red eyes” and non-reactive pupils.
“Based on my training (Thompson’s behavior) could be caused by drug use,” specifically, “narcotic analgesics,” Robinson writes.
Then Robinson stipulates, and the body cam footage corroborates, that Thompson doesn’t actually say that he took “OxyContin,” as was stated in the initial report. He’s asked if he has taken “any pain pills” and Thompson answers yes. Asked how many he says”two.” Asked what kind, he responds “yeah” only after Robinson mentions “Oxies.”
But it’s also important to realize that Thompson was virtually incoherent at this point and largely unresponsive. After determining that Thompson is a football player, Robinson and other officers are concerned that he may be suffering from a possible head injury incurred during practice or in a fight.
Eventually, though, Robinson got around to taking Thompson’s pulse. When he does he is “surprised” to find it at 120 beats a minute, which is “not consistent with narcotic analgesics.” And they learn from a call to Bryant Gantt of UGA athletics that Thompson is “on some medication” prescribed by team doctors.
Finally, Robinson makes a very significant conclusion at the end of his supplemental report:
“I advised Lt. Gregory that even though he admitted to having taken OxyContin that I believed at this point something else was also taking place and causing the medical emergency. … Based on the information we obtained from athletics staff and what was observed, I believed there to be multiple issues and without knowing exactly what he was taking a determination of exactly what was going on would not be possible.”
Again, this is from an employee of the same UGAPD that once arrested a player for refusing to give his middle name. Has somebody kidnapped Jimmy Williamson and replaced him with a pod person? Compared with past approaches we’ve seen with interaction between football players and the local cops, the humanity and professionalism on display there is jarring. Don’t tell me that if this had happened two or three years ago, we wouldn’t be looking at a mug shot instead of learning that Thompson was struggling with a medical problem.
So, it’s worth considering what’s going on here.
Add to that what Thompson faces when he’s ready to rejoin the team.
One key component to all this will be whether Thompson can maintain his academic eligibility in the meantime. As we all know, student-athletes are required to complete a minimum amount of class credits toward their degree each year in order to remain eligible to compete in athletics. Thompson having to sit out spring semester has to be detrimental in that regard.
However, NCAA rules and regulations allow for schools to pursue a “progress-toward-degree” waiver to restore eligibility for competition. According to the NCAA’s official website, To qualify for such a waiver, “institutions must document the mitigating circumstances that caused the deficiency. A common circumstance is a student-athlete facing a serious medical issue or other personal hardship.”
Yeah, I know — UGA and NCAA consideration have not always been a winning combination. But I will say there is some precedent for the school supporting its players in a medical context with the NCAA, as Ron Courson was dogged in his pursuit of getting Kolton Houston reinstated. It will be interesting to see how purposefully organized the school is with Thompson’s waiver effort.
Maybe things really are getting better. It’s not like stranger things haven’t happened.
Filed under Georgia Football
Word must have made it out to Montana that the Southeastern Conference ain’t all it’s cracked up to be lately, ’cause Stewart Mandel is on the mother.
I’ve got to say a couple of the reasons he cites, like a new crop of head coaches he labels “overmatched”, come off as a bit leaky.
More recently, the SEC since 2015 has lost four head coaches — South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, Georgia’s Richt, Missouri’s Gary Pinkel and LSU’s Miles — who had all at been at their schools for more than a decade.
Admittedly none of them went out on top, and perhaps that’s part of the problem. “LSU held on to Les Miles way too long. He was a dinosaur,” said Sallee. “Spurrier was living off Jadeveon Clowney and Marcus Lattimore at the end.”
Your point being what, exactly?
The intriguing argument Mandel makes is that Nick Saban has managed to pull off the neat trick that Bear Bryant used to accomplish in the days of 100-man rosters — sign your kids and also the kids the other schools would’ve signed.
Kiffin can recite old Rivals.com recruiting rankings. He knows that his 2010 USC class and his buddy Steve Sarkisian’s 2015 class both finished No. 1 — and that every other year between and after, Saban claimed the top spot.
“It’s just complete domination in recruiting — no one has ever worked harder at it,” Kiffin said of his former boss. “Defensive players, they all want to go to Alabama. Even if you have to wait a year or two to play, you know you’re going to go out and have a chance to play in the NFL.”
He cites the example of 2017 defensive end Jarez Parks, a consensus Top 100 recruit nationally who opted to sign with Alabama despite the fact he’ll have to grayshirt for a semester. Guys like that used to be suiting up for the other teams.
“We’d go to play last year, and we knew that no matter what, when we walked onto that field, our roster was more talented than every team we played,” said Kiffin. “If you accumulate all of the (best recruits), now you’re not playing against them.”
That might explain Alabama’s dominance, but it hardly explains why the rest of the conference may have taken a slide against the rest of college football. As Mandel himself notes, it’s not as if SEC recruiting has collapsed of late.
The SEC has hardly surrendered its longstanding recruiting dominance. From 2009-12, SEC schools signed 16 Rivals.com Top 10 classes. From 2013-16 that number rose to 22.
If Saban robbed the SEC, then the SEC robbed somebody else. So much for that narrative.
Wade through the noise, and you get to the one reason that makes some sense. It’s the quarterbacks, stupid.
In 2013, the SEC enjoyed a modern high point at the quarterback position. Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, LSU’s Zach Mettenberger, Alabama’s AJ McCarron, South Carolina’s Connor Shaw and Georgia’s Aaron Murray all finished among the top 12 nationally in pass efficiency. Manziel won a Heisman. McCarron was a finalist.
Three years later, Tennessee’s Josh Dobbs was the conference’s highest-ranked passer … at No. 20. Only two others, Ole Miss’ Chad Kelly and Arkansas’ Austin Allen, finished in the top 30 last season.
“Last year was a lot of QB ineffectiveness, injuries and inexperience,” said Sallee.
Gosh, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
SEC quarterback play in 2016 blew chunks, to put it mildly. Mandel kind of glosses past it, but lost in that passage is that Jalen Hurts, despite all the advantages that come with playing for Alabama — including being coached by Lane Kiffin — finished a middling 44th in passer rating. I don’t mean that as a knock; shoot, Hurts was a true freshman playing in the SEC. But it’s clear that the conference had a ton of talent and experience at the position just a few seasons ago that it lacked in 2016 (nor did it help that Kelly ran into injury problems). File that under shit happens and watch to see if the next round of new blood at the position manages a better showing in the next couple of seasons.
Filed under SEC Football
For those of you who believe that college football playoff expansion will do nothing but enhance the regular season experience by making it more meaningful, tell me how well you think the experience of this year’s Georgia basketball season would translate in that regard.
In other words, last year, if you were told the football team’s postseason hopes were still on life support before the Tech game, would that have been sufficient to keep your interest level higher than it would have been ordinarily?
Filed under BCS/Playoffs, Georgia Football
Former Georgia linebacker coach returns to the SEC (h/t):
Former Vanderbilt linebackers coach Warren Belin has been hired in his old position, debuting at spring practice Monday.
Belin was the Commodores’ linebacker coach from 2002-09 under head coach Bobby Johnson. He will serve as the new outside linebackers coach under current head coach Derek Mason…
I thought he was a good position coach in Athens, but where I really thought he shined was with his special teams work. Too bad Smart didn’t grab him as an analyst last season.
Filed under Georgia Football, SEC Football
Give Bill King some credit. He followed up last week’s piece exploring the fallout from the fans about the west end expansion project with another.
Still, last week’s Blawg about UGA fans feeling taken for granted as the athletic administration asks them for more money to fund improvements for players and recruits certainly prompted a lot of discussion over long-simmering frustrations about the game day experience.
Butts-Mehre provides the comic relief with its response.
Anxious to point out that the planned renovations to the west end of Sanford aren’t strictly about the comfort of players and recruits, the athletic department sent me more details about the fan-friendly aspects, with special emphasis on a significant increase in the number of toilets for women that will be available in that end of the stadium come the 2018 season, going from 34 in the existing restrooms to 88 after the work is done. (For men, the number of toilets will increase from 47 to 50, and there will be two considered “unisex”).
It also pointed out that there will be more “points of sale” for concessions (both fixed and portable). And, of course, the new scoreboard will be 33 percent larger and there’ll be that new upper plaza for mingling, or whatever fans do in plazas.
33 percent larger! And you think Greg McGarity doesn’t care.
What he should care about is the steady drumbeat of responses King got from his first column that sounded like these.
Quite a few fans also expressed frustration with UGA’s athletic administration viewing them mainly as potential donors. Said Charles Hill: “UGA has a large fan base but they don’t treat them as an asset.”
Jay Unger, who gave up his season tickets in 2014 after 32 years of contributing, said he did so because he felt that “the fans had become low priority in the game day experience equation and my decision has been validated by a continuation of this disregard in the years since. I’m as big a fan as ever but I do it on my terms now. StubHub for a couple games and the rest from my easy chair.”
And I heard from another devoted super fan who didn’t donate to the Hartman Fund this year because of “growing frustration and dismay with the athletic department and how they don’t even care about our opinions or experiences. … I definitely still care about UGA and the athletics programs, but I’m just not emotionally invested like I used to be … and that comes from UGA not caring.”
It’s not what you want to hear as an AD, but, again, I remain skeptical there’s any real impact to this sort of apathy unless the bottom line starts to take a real hit.
That being said, for better or worse, the AJ-C isn’t a backwater, like a certain Georgia fan blog I could mention by name. It’s got a significantly sized readership, one large enough that the athletic department felt compelled to respond to King’s article. I don’t think McGarity can be shamed into making any improvements to the game day experience that he’s not inclined to pursue on his own in the first place, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Unfortunately, I think Bill’s conclusion is an accurate summation of where most of the fan base lies.
What a wonderful part of my life the University of Georgia and its sports teams have been!
As my brother Jon, a former Redcoat, likes to say, “Once a Dawg, always a Dawg … how sweet it is!”
But, that doesn’t change the fact that I’d like to feel that we fans mean as much to the folks who run UGA’s athletic programs as pulling for the Dawgs means to us.
Sadly, I remain unconvinced on that point.
But not so unconvinced that the Hartman Fund contribution checks won’t continue to be stroked. And therein lies the key to Butts-Mehre’s success.
Filed under Georgia Football, It's Just Bidness
Get The Picture 
You must be logged in to post a comment.