“I’ll take the responsibility for maybe poor messaging…”

If Greg McGarity spent as much effort pursuing athletic excellence as he apparently does ass covering, things might be a lot cheerier at Butts-Mehre than they are these days.

“Do you really care about Antonio Callaway?”

Boy, this is some article about the pros and cons of suspending the Florida player in the wake of being cited for marijuana possession.  I laughed; I cried.

No, really.  After reading this, I was laughing so hard it brought tears.

He also has shown lapses in judgment previously. The most prominent of these was the Title IX hearing where Callaway defended himself against sexual assault allegations. His excuse? That he was, “so stoned I had no interest in having sex with anyone.”

Let he who is without judgment lapse cast the first stoner.

By the way, anybody who believes Jim McElwain is going to suspend his best wide receiver against Michigan is probably as high as Callaway was.

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So near, yet (maybe not) so far

As frustrated as we all were watching Georgia’s offense last season, it’s worth remembering that somehow, some way, Nick Chubb and Sony Michel (who probably count in the ranks of the frustrated) managed respectable production.

… Assuming everybody stays healthy – a risky assumption but one we must make – then we predict Chubb sets the program record for rushing yards by a senior, and reaching nearly 1,600 rushing yards. Michel also breaks the 1,000-yard rushing mark, while reaching nearly 500 receiving yards. Herrien ends up around 500 yards. Does this speak to some great optimism about the offense? Perhaps, but Chubb still managed 1,130 rushing yards and Michel managed 840 in a very down year for the offense and the offensive line. Even a slight improvement can lead to big numbers for the talented duo.

Seth’s conclusion really isn’t that much of a stretch, at all, presuming the injury bug doesn’t jump up and bite them in the arse.  (We’re looking at you, Knoxville.)  If that pair manages to generate 3,000 yards of offense between them, I’m liking the offense’s chances of making a go of things.

“Even honorable men sometimes make a mistake.”

And we all know that college athletic departments are teeming with honorable men.

University of New Mexico Athletic Director Paul Krebs has been keeping a secret under wraps for two years and it involves that ill-fated golf trip to Scotland.

“I think looking back on it two years later I understand why people might question it,” Krebs told KRQE News 13 earlier this month.

Well, gosh, as long as you learn from your mistakes, that’s okay.

Amateurism strikes again.  Although, now that I think about it, the golfing was amateur, right?

(h/t)

Georgia football is like a box of chocolates.

At least, writes Patrick Garbin, that’s the case when it comes to meeting preseason expectations.

… I decided to see how strong of a positive relationship—if positive at all—there has been between the preseason AP poll and the final AP rankings in regard to Georgia, and several neighboring schools of interest. Beginning in 1950, the initial year of the preseason AP poll, through 2016, the preseason and final rankings of Georgia and eight other often nationally-ranked teams from the South were correlated annually to reveal their correlation coefficient, or r. Simply, think of “r” as how efficient the Associated Press has been at preseason ranking each team in association to where it finishes in the AP’s final poll (whereby if r is between 0 and .200, there is a very weak positive relationship between the AP’s preseason and final polls; .200 and .400 is weak; .400 and .600 is moderate; .600 and .800 is strong; and .800 and 1 is very strong).

Ranked according to r, each team is also listed with the number of 67 seasons (63 seasons for Florida State) whereby it appeared in the AP’s preseason poll (followed by, of those appearances, the number of seasons ranked and not ranked in final poll), and number of seasons appearing in the AP’s final poll (followed by, of those, number of seasons ranked and not ranked in preseason poll).

(For example, Georgia, although borderline moderate, has had a weak relationship at .395 since 1950 in regards to what the AP ranks the Bulldogs in the preseason as it relates to where they finish in the final poll. In the last 67 years, Georgia has been preseason ranked on 35 occasions: 22 times it finished in the final poll, 13 times it finished unranked. In the last 67 years, the Bulldogs finished ranked on 30 occasions: 22 times they had been preseason ranked, 8 times they had not.

Of the nine schools he looked at, only Auburn had a worse correlation than Georgia’s, which, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense.  In fact, if you shorten the term under analysis to the last ten seasons, the effect is consistent, and, with regard to Auburn, even more intensified.

I next figured the exact same as above, but for just the last 10 seasons (2007-2016) and, interestingly, found somewhat similar results with Clemson, Alabama, and Florida State all having strong relationships, Tennessee at nearly strong (.587), and Georgia (.313) and Auburn (minus-.263) again in the weak zone. This should be no surprise considering the Bulldogs were preseason ranked each of the last eight years (with an average ranking of approximately No. 13), yet finished ranked in the final poll just three times.

In Georgia’s case, I’m not too sure what that says about 2017.  The Dawgs are ranked in most preseason discussions I’ve seen, but the consensus seems to relegate Georgia to somewhere in the high teens to low twenties, which is lower than the average from the past ten years, but still means the Dawgs are ranked.  It’s not exactly a traditional vote of confidence, so you can draw all sorts of conclusions about what sort of omen that might be for how things turn out this season.  On the other hand, we’ve seen that Vegas has shown a stronger degree of confidence in Georgia’s chances than the pundits have, so who knows where the AP goes?  Take your chances, in other words.

Now that I think about it, that randomness is pretty much Patrick’s point.

(Now what that says about Auburn’s chances this season… well…)

A little more GATA is needed.

Not sure how I missed Pete Fiutak’s Georgia 2017 preview, but digging back through the CFN site, I saw he posted it a week or so ago.  While it’s hard to argue with his conclusion…

The Georgia Season Will Be A Success If …

It wins the East. There’s absolutely no excuse. There’s too much talent, too much depth, and too much upside and potential not to get to the SEC title game. Whether or not the Dawgs are good enough beat Alabama – or whoever gets by the Crimson Tide to get to Atlanta – is going to be up in the air, but the East isn’t going to be that great. Don’t win it, and the season is a disaster.

… I’d rather focus on something else he wrote.  Fiutak dug up one stat from last season that maybe hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should:  “they came up with just 62 tackles for loss, by far the lowest total in a long, long time”.  cfbstats.com confirms his observation.

• 2016:  62
• 2015:  76
• 2014:  71
• 2013:  81
• 2012:  91
• 2011:  100
• 2010:  79
• 2009:  90
• 2008:  74

That’s beyond anemic.  When you can’t even meet Willie Martinez’ standards, you’ve got a serious problem.

Now, we all know that Smart, like any other defense-minded coach, wants players on that side of the ball who are disruptive.  As I discussed in this post from last year, Smart comes straight out of the Saban school of dominant run defense.  A nine-year low mark in tackles for loss isn’t something he wanted, but it may have been the inevitable result of a very green defensive line and installing a new system (Smart and Pruitt may both come out of the Saban system, but that doesn’t mean they share identical approaches on defense.)

Then again, it may have simply been the result of shitty coaching.  (If you think I’m kind of blown away comparing 2016 to 2008 and 2009, well… you’re right.)

In any event, the youth and transitional excuses are gone for 2017.  It’s the second year in the system for everyone and the defense returns every starter from the front seven, plus a bunch of the two deep.  Coming back to one of yesterday’s posts, this is an area where you hope Bellamy and Carter can elevate their games.  All told, if the Georgia defense can’t return to its traditional level of TFLs this season, that would raise some real questions about how it’s being directed.

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UPDATE:  For those of you in the comments writing off Lorenzo Carter, have a look at something from the bowl game.

Is #UGA's Lorenzo Carter primed for his big moment in 2017? @AnthonyDasher1 on his expectations this year:https://t.co/LaPMeGorKj pic.twitter.com/a90JGcnEgO

— Jake Reuse (@ReuseRecruiting) May 23, 2017

No, that wasn’t a tackle for loss, but it was one helluva play.