Really, this says so much about one of Smart’s strengths, roster management.
Nobody knows if Crumpton’s going to work out, obviously, but I’d rather see the staff tackle stuff like this proactively than sit back and wring their hands mid-season if none of the returning options works out.
Filed under Georgia Football
Sometimes necessity is simply the mother of doing what’s needed.
Both of those are indications to me that Smart intends to infuse whatever talent is coming in with the highly rated ’17 class that is SEC ready sooner rather than later. It’s certainly going to make for an intense and interesting camp next month.
**********************************************************************
UPDATE: One other piece to the special teams puzzle isn’t about the players.
“As far as areas of concern for this team, special teams will be No. 1. We’re going to try and change things up from a special teams standpoint, as you guys know, from a quality control. Scott Fountain (formerly at Auburn) us, who I thought did a tremendous job at Auburn. He brought a lot of inside to our program and coaches. He’s going to help us be better in special teams practice, organization, and just the things that we do. We HAVE to improve in that area…”
Filed under Georgia Football
South Carolina quarterback Jake Bentley decided to take a little pride in his team on social media and promptly got the kind of feedback that makes you proud to be a fan of college football.
South Carolina quarterback Jake Bentley made some waves in the offseason, giving a few confident thoughts about how his team stacks up with national champion Clemson. Predictably, this got him a fair share of flack on social media.
And a couple unlikely users led the way.
“It was crazy,” Bentley said. “These two elderly ladies always killing me on it. That’s part of the reason you stay off Twitter.”
Only in America.
If, like me, you are a grizzled veteran of the UGA Internet world, you’ll be more than interested in reading Rob Suggs’ latest opus, Sax Attacks!, which promises “a full and fascinating history of the Dawgvent itself”.
Hmmm. I wonder what the over/under is on Rolo mentions.
Filed under Georgia Football
So does Seth Emerson. So does MaconDawg. So does Jason Butt. And Marc Weiszer. And… well, you get the picture.
Me? Well, I’m kicking back and chillaxing. I know they’ve got this one in the bag. After all, Greg McGarity finally came through on the indoor practice facility (thanks, Jeremy!), which is what was holding back the program from its destined greatness. All those pain in the ass bus rides and weather concerns are a thing of the past. It’s onwards and upwards from now on, peeps.
Thus endeth the morning’s snark.
Filed under Georgia Football
I got an email request over the weekend to put up a mention about Bill Connelly’s May post about nine fixes for college football (“Bill Connelly For College Football Commissioner“) to see what kind of discussion it might generate here.
To kick things off, I have to admit I wasn’t that overwhelmed by the package Bill came up with when I first read his piece. There was nothing wrong with his student-athlete proposals (which is a good thing, because the minute college football names a commissioner, the jobs of every antitrust attorney suing the NCAA get a whole lot easier), and as long as anyone can come up with ways to shorten the games that don’t involve changing the rules, I’ll certainly listen. The relegation stuff, though, is straight out of the fever dreams of soccer fetishists who think it’ll drop easy and clean into a world where schools field other sports besides football, those football teams don’t play round-robin conference schedules and, well, where there are five power conferences.
As for playoff expansion, I’ll say it again: college football’s unique power and greatness lies in its regional appeal and its emphasis on a meaningful regular season. The bigger the postseason, the more both of those factors are undercut. For me, it’s not an improvement.
College football’s problem isn’t that it’s boring or that we’re sated. It’s that the people running it are consumed with how much money they can make from it. The issue with that is the entities writing the checks want things that aren’t necessarily compatible with keeping what’s great about the sport great. Operating in a short attention span world, ESPN craves novelty and selling a national product. The Jim Delanys of the college football world think they’re smart enough to balance their product on the knife’s edge between what Mickey wants to pay for and what we longtime fans want to watch.
Trust me, they’re not that smart. And while Bill’s a damned smart guy, I’m far from certain he’s got all the answers, either. Ultimately, though, it likely doesn’t matter, because I doubt Jim Delany’s listening to him any more than he is the rest of us.
And with that, I’ll open the floor. Hit it in the comments.
Filed under College Football
Georgia has eight returning starters on offense, including sophomore quarterback Jacob Eason, who Smart clearly has stated heads a depth chart that includes touted freshman Jake Fromm.
“We’ll continue down the road that we went through this spring,” said Smart, who was a recent guest of “Press Row” on Chattanooga’s ESPN 105.1 FM. “Both of those guys got reps, with Jacob working with the ones primarily. He had a lot of success moving the ball. Jake Fromm did a good job with the twos, and the good news is we’re going to find out more about Jake, because he is going to be playing against a better No. 2 defense.
“We had no scholarship DBs at the (second-team) corners in the spring after Mecole Hardman moved over to receiver. Now Jake will be going up against four or five really good freshmen in the secondary who should create a better competition there. We’ll see how Jake does with that.”
Considering that he was only a couple of months out of high school, I liked what I saw from Fromm in the D-Day game. But he probably felt pretty comfortable against the opposition that day.
For example, dial this clip up to the 21-minute mark and watch Fromm’s touchdown pass to Simmons.
The announcer is as surprised as anyone that a ball he characterizes as something that Fromm “just threw it up” winds up being a long score. The point is that against a competent SEC defensive back, it never would have been. And against an above-average defender, it would have been picked off.
Filed under Georgia Football
I think the word that best summarizes Jim Chaney’s career as an offensive coordinator is checkered.
Some of that I would honestly say goes with what he had to work with, both pro (Drew Brees) and con (Derek Dooley’s personnel and Georgia’s last season). As I’ve noted before, given the way he resurrected Nathan Peterman’s college career at Pitt, I also tend to think he’s a better quarterback coach than we give him credit for. There’s little question overall, though, that the results have been spotty and a lot of that falls on him.
The frustrating thing about reading Seth’s piece is that we get very little from Chaney himself about what his current offensive philosophy is.
“You’d love to be a downhill team, but you do have a young quarterback that has played in the gun more,” Chaney said last December. “So you have to find some happiness there. As we work through that sometimes it didn’t work out as well as we’d like to. There was a little contradiction with philosophies in regards to that, as we worked through it.”
That sounds like somebody who wasn’t doing things the way he preferred last season.
A few weeks later, on signing day, Chaney said he was looking to “freshen up” the offense. And there were signs of that this spring, using tailbacks, tight ends and receivers alike in the slot, indicating something new.
While that sounds like somebody who did some soul searching about his direction and recognized a need for change. Who knows what Chaney really wants at this point?
Filed under Georgia Football, Strategery And Mechanics
Jim Delany, in case you need further confirmation, is FOS.
Giants, my ass. The only big thing he saw was broadcast markets. If Rutgers were located in New Hampshire, I doubt Delany would have given it a first thought, let alone a second.
Get The Picture 
You must be logged in to post a comment.