If I wanted to be snarky, I’d say this is the kind of thing that happens when the money guys have to leave town suddenly. If I wanted to be snarky, that is. Which I don’t. Totally don’t.
Daily Archives: August 2, 2017
“This was, for all intents and purposes, a voluntary rebuild.”
Bill Connelly’s Georgia preview, despite an occasional foray into cheekiness (“I’m not going to lie: I’ve enjoyed needling Georgia fans over the last year and a half.”) reads like it was written by somebody who’s checked out the comments section here once or twice.
Perceptions are an incredible thing. If Georgia were your typical rebuild job — say, a South Carolina situation, in which the product fell off late in a great coach’s tenure, then fell some more — then it would be easy to say Kirby Smart’s efforts are pretty encouraging.
Despite a reset of sorts on both sides of the ball, Smart’s first team won eight games, beat rival Auburn, and won a bowl game, then inked a spectacular recruiting class, the third-best in the country.
This wasn’t a South Carolina situation, though. This was, for all intents and purposes, a voluntary rebuild.
Smart inherited one of the stablest programs in the country, one that fielded one iffy team in 2015 after four straight excellent ones … and had still won 10 games with that iffy team. Georgia declared that it wants all the recruits and all the rivalry wins; Mark Richt’s 10 wins per year weren’t enough.
Richt was more successful than Vince Dooley, and he was regarded to be one of the best men in football. He had bounced back from downturns before in his 15 years as Georgia head coach. A couple of lean classes had created a two-deep less plump than he was used to, but odds were good he’d get past it. But instead of renovating the mansion, UGA athletic director Greg McGarity tore it down to build a new one.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who noticed.
I’m not going to spoil the rest of what he posted and you should read it in its entirety, but there’s one stat he unearthed that is definitely worth a share.
The recipe was pretty easy. When Chubb averaged at least 6 yards per carry in a game, Georgia scored at least 28 points.
At the risk of dredging back up something I posted a few days ago, 28 points would have beaten Vanderbilt and Florida (!) and sent the Tech game to overtime. Sure would have made for a dramatically different 2016, no?
I believe Bill’s touched on this season’s Job One for Jim Chaney and the offensive line.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
How badly does Kirby want to fix special teams?
Forget about the every day competition in fall camp as a measure of that and look here instead.
That was one of the reasons Smart went after Scott Fountain after he was let go at Auburn. Fountain, who coached tight ends and was special teams coordinator with the Tigers, joined the Bulldogs this year in a consultant’s role as a special teams analyst. UGA is paying him $140,000, a high salary for an analyst.[Emphasis added.]
You can’t always get what you want, but if you spend sometimes, you get what you need.
Filed under Georgia Football
Funny, I thought it was a money loser.
Lately, colleges are adding football programs faster than bowl games.
No, not everyone can be the SEC. But how many college presidents think they’re at least as smart as their SEC counterparts?
Filed under College Football, It's Just Bidness
Today, in that’s so Georgia
Matt Melton goes to the AP Poll well once more, looking at the last decade’s underrated and overrated teams based on the final AP Poll rankings. His metric:
To do that I looked at the final AP Poll ranking of every Power 5 team since 2005. I then ran a regression analysis based on their record and final poll position. This regression spit out a formula. I used this formula to reverse-engineer the poll ranking of all the ranked Power 5 teams and determined which teams were the most over or underrated. If you want the results, skip on down, but I wanted to give some background and caveats before delving into them.
I only looked at teams that were in either the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-10/12, or SEC during the season in question. The Big East, with future Power 5 members Louisville, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, and West Virginia, was a BCS conference during this time frame, but I left those teams out when they were Big East members because I thought it would skew the results. Similarly, when Utah and TCU were Mountain West members, their final rankings were not included in this analysis. Other current mid-majors like Boise State, BYU, and Central Michigan were also left out. The regression analysis produced an R squared value of .7868 between winning percentage and final ranking with a regression formula of: -74.675*(win %) +71.347.
The 2007 Georgia squad makes the overrated list. There is no Georgia entry on his underrated list (surprise!), but it’s the last group he comes up with that’s of interest.
And finally here is a list of teams that probably should have finished ranked based on their record, but ultimately did not.
There’s only one team in the last eleven seasons that managed a double-digit season in wins — playing an SEC schedule, mind you! — and didn’t finish ranked. The AP managed to Dawgrade an entire season. Impressive.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
“Maybe I’ll be Cousin Ness or something?”
Brad Nessler hasn’t called his first SEC on CBS game with Gary Danielson yet, but he’s already getting off on the right foot in my book.
Nessler also gets to check a couple boxes on his play-by-play wish list that are still open. He has never announced a Florida-Georgia game, the annual rivalry played in Jacksonville and nicknamed the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
Let’s hope the Dawgs can give him a good game to call.
Filed under Georgia Football, SEC Football
“I’m not used to being fifth in the conference.”
He’s talking about his secondary’s showing in third-down defense last season, but, while we’re on the subject of unfamiliar territory, that’s also about where Kirby Smart’s team finished overall in conference wins and losses.
Don’t make it a habit, brother.
Filed under Georgia Football
“I know we live in a society of negativity…”
If they ever establish a College Football Cliché Hall of Fame, Butch Jones had better be the first inductee.
Get The Picture 
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