The final word on this year’s G-Day QBR

Kirby Smart’s perspective:

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.

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“Obviously Chaney’s a good coach or else he wouldn’t still wouldn’t be getting jobs.”

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?

Still sleeping

Jim Delany, in case you need further confirmation, is FOS.

Delany: ACC expansion made B10 feel "cramped." "More risk in staying where we were." Maryland, Rutgers "sleeping giants."

— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) July 29, 2017

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.

Name that caption, if you ain’t cheatin’ edition

Come for the retina burning, stay for the snarky comments.

Pat Dye: Auburn’s O-Line has potential to be program’s best in decades https://t.co/toQXgzcCMa

— Michael Carvell (@Michael_Carvell) July 29, 2017

Boy, the stories they could tell, eh?