Teasing out a little Dawg porn

Now, fellas, you shouldn’t do this unless you mean it.

… During some periods a select group of receivers, tight ends and tailbacks have been together, running routes under the direction of receivers coach James Coley.

They start in the middle of the field, and run the same route, whatever their position: Terry Godwin (receiver), Mecole Hardman (receiver), Isaac Nauta (tight end), Sony Michel (tailback), Brian Herrien (tailback), and others.

It all reflects one of those tweaks that Georgia offensive coordinator Jim Chaney is making to this year’s offense: Putting their players in the best position to make plays, and that includes putting certain players in the slot, where they would create either a size or speed mismatch for a defender.

“It’s been a change. Guys like Sony being in the slot,” inside linebacker Natrez Patrick said this week. “It’s a nightmare looking across and having to check Sony in an open field.”

No shit.

I’ll believe it when I see it.  But I’d really like to see it.

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“Make traffic bad.”

I guess Kirby’s finally come up with his hashtag for this year’s G-Day game.

Using Boom to troll the Georgia fan base doesn’t strike me as the greatest motivator in the world, but at least it’ll take our minds off condoms.

This’ll teach ’em!

Hell hath no fury like a North Carolina legislator forced to back down from political pandering.

North Carolina lawmakers file bill that would pull #UNC + #NCState from @theACC if #ACC boycotts the state again after #HB2 fallout. @myfox8 pic.twitter.com/6xDhUZGFvz

— Alex Rose (@AlexRoseNews) April 12, 2017

One, I can only begin to imagine the howling in the state that would ensue from North Carolina withdrawing from the ACC.  Two, what makes these guys think there’s another P5 conference that would respond any differently if they chose to show their asses again in the future?  Just ask Arkansas how that went…

Talent vs. grind

Over at The Power Rank, Ed Feng ranks the top 25 college football programs in order of the talent they’ve accumulated over the past four seasons, based on Rivals’ recruiting rankings.  Georgia comes out fifth.

5. Georgia

Kirby Smart has shown he can recruit, as he got the 9th and 3rd ranked class in 2016 and 2017 respectively. But can he turn this talent into a SEC champion? The offense declined dramatically in his first year as coach, perhaps because he played a true freshman at quarterback.

I’m not sure I’d describe the offensive decline from ’15 to ’16 as dramatic, but that’s a subject for another post.

What I do find interesting about Feng’s post is first what DawgNation’s Brandon Adams concludes from it.  Calling it a crucial advantage over everyone on its 2017 schedule, Adams notes that “Georgia has a more talented roster than any of its opponents this season, and a higher ranking based on recruiting ratings than all but four teams in the country.”

That’s fine as far as it goes, but the other thing I caught from Feng’s rankings is grounds for some caution.  Georgia plays six teams in the regular season that appear in Feng’s top 25.  They’ll be facing plenty of talent themselves, in other words.

It’s nice to have more talent than the other guys on any given Saturday, but over the course of the season, with injuries and the ups and downs that are inevitable as the season progresses, there are going to be plenty of times when a talent advantage — and that’s even before we get to analyzing how big that advantage may be against a particular opponent — means less.  Georgia’s track record from last season had more examples of that than we liked.

It’s a long slog, in other words, and talent won’t always get you where you need to go.  Can Smart’s team step it up and carry through in games when it isn’t out-talenting someone?

Doing it for the high school coaches

Wow, Gus, this sounds dire.  Grave, even.

“This rule will in essence be a death sentence to any high school coach wanting to coach college (football),” Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said. “It’s putting an end to it, and it’s not fair.”

What’s the rule?

The proposal, part of a comprehensive recruiting reform package to be considered this week by the NCAA’s Division I Council, is an attempt to prevent hires made in hopes of gaining an edge with recruits who are associated with the new employee. It applies to “individuals associated with a prospect” (IAWP); along with high school coaches, it would apply to junior college coaches, as well as others such as family members of recruits. It would mirror a rule already in place for NCAA basketball…

A college would be prevented from hiring a high school coach for a support role if it had recruited a player from his school in the previous two years and would be prohibited from recruiting players from that high school for two years after the hire.

Gosh, how inconvenient that must be for you.

The IAWP rule proposal does not prohibit hiring high school coaches for an on-field assistant coaching position — which was the path of Morris and Malzahn — or limit recruiting from the coach’s former high school in that instance. But such direct moves aren’t the norm…  [Emphasis added.]

Said Malzahn: “The goal is they learn college football for a year or two and then they get a job (as an on-field assistant).”

Well, the goal for everyone else, apparently.

Malzahn, who was a high school coach before moving into college coaching in 2006 as an assistant at Arkansas, has hired nine high school coaches, including Drinkwitz.

“Not one time did I recruit any of their players,” he said. “I’m trying to put good high school coaches and people into college football. We’re not hiring them to get players here. If that rule passes, it’s gonna hurt. Every one of those (nine coaches), I wouldn’t have been able to hire.”

If you weren’t recruiting their players, why couldn’t you have hired them?  And if you’re not hiring them to get their players, how is the rule going to hurt?

It’s tough being a control freak, I guess.  The only thing missing from his whine is a half-assed insistence that the rule is somehow going to hurt the players, too.

Feel the magic

From the battle of the offensive and defensive fronts in spring practice comes this gem of a quote:

As for his counterparts on offense, Patrick said offensive line coach Sam Pittman clearly has his unit fired up for each practice.

“It’s gotta be something (Pittman’s) doing,” Patrick said. “I don’t know, I’m not in the film room with them. I don’t know what he’s telling them. But he’s telling them something.”

Clearly, Pittman is a wizard.  There is no other explanation.

“And you can’t be the starter if you can’t snap.”

Sometimes it’s the little things that make me love college football.  Especially when it’s player-driven, like this:

That crude simplicity is the dead snap’s most attractive feature. Once the ball is spotted, the center places the back point of the ball in his palm rather than gripping it like a quarterback arming a spiral. The nose is then placed into the ground so the ball is at a 45-degree angle with an inch of the ball grazing the turf. The fingers are spread, usually with one across the laces or seam to help with grip. Then with the wrist locked, the center swings his arm back like a pendulum and releases.

“Life changing,” Cushing said.

It was the same for former Vanderbilt center Joe Townsend.

Small hands, sweaty palms — that’s how he characterizes his mitts, which were at the core of his issues with the Commodores. His hands weren’t big enough to fully grip the football, and when the SEC swelter forced perspiration to slide down his arm, greasing the ball, he struggled to secure it.

Commodores guard Wesley Johnson suggested at a 2012 practice that he try a primitive sandlot method popular across backyards and barbecues. “Bear claw it,” Johnson said. Stick the nose into your palm and shuffle it back, he said. “Trust me, just try it.”

In the pre-practice walk-through, Townsend gave it an attempt. He didn’t tell then-position coach Herb Hand, but quickly Townsend was snapping perfect chest-high changeups the quarterbacks could easily gather. “Coach Hand said, ‘Joe, what the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m trying something out,’ and he said, ‘Well, come to me before changing s— up!'” Townsend remembered. “But it worked, and I did it throughout my career.”

Whatever works, brother.

The case for a good season

… is made by ESPN’s Alex Scarborough, as follows.

I can’t believe I’m counting wins right now. This is the one thing you should never do. But here I am wondering whether Georgia can get to 9-10 wins. And I think, very tepidly, that it’s possible. With Jacob Eason, Nick Chubb and Sony Michel, the offense should be in great shape. The defense should be better, too. But the real reason I like Georgia is the schedule. The East is ripe for the taking, and the nonconference schedule isn’t that bad. Appalachian State should be a relatively easy win, Georgia Tech isn’t unsurmountable because of its mediocre defense and Notre Dame is an utter mess right now with Brian Kelly on the hot seat. With Mississippi State and Auburn — which Georgia has owned for a decade now — out of the West, I think things set up nicely for coach Kirby Smart and Co.

I can’t argue with a single thing he says, including the fact that he’s tepid about going there.  Which is kind of sad, when you think about it, but certainly justifiable, given what we’ve seen from the program over the past four seasons.

Golden showers

In something straight out of Derek Dooley’s Personal Hygiene 101, evidently this is a real thing for Texas football.

Went to take a leak in Moncrief and this was hanging above the toilet. Tom Herman's attention to detail is real 😳 pic.twitter.com/FoAMbkf56K

— Anwar Richardson (@AnwarRichardson) April 11, 2017

How would you like to be called out for being a bad guy about the color of your urine?  My only remaining question is whether Herman’s got support staffers going around checking the hue of his players’ pee.