When clear plastic bags aren’t enough…
Better budget more time to get into Sanford Stadium. I figure by 2025, they’ll be requiring frisks and strip searches.
Daily Archives: June 1, 2018
Liberation, SEC style
Should we call this the Maurice Smith Rule?
I look forward to Nick Saban and Roll Bama Roll telling the rest of the conference we’ve been warned.
Filed under SEC Football
“So who’s standing in the way (of beer sales) in the SEC?”
Kentucky and Georgia are the strongest advocates to keep the policy as is.
Filed under Georgia Football, I'll Drink To That, SEC Football
Testing the limits of Greg Sankey’s patience
Alrighty, then.
Sounds like somebody doesn’t have time for Saban’s shit.
Filed under SEC Football
Lock of the year
Man, this is confident.
Georgia is one of only seven college football programs with a 2018 regular-season win total of at least 10 at the South Point sports book, which posted numbers Monday on 129 teams.
Clemson leads the way with 11, followed by the Bulldogs, Alabama, Ohio State and Washington at 10½. Oklahoma and Boise State are at 10.
Despite the great expectations for Georgia, handicapper Brian Edwards expects South Carolina to easily cover the spread as a 14-point home underdog to the Bulldogs in Week 2. He also loves the Gamecocks to go over their win total of 7.
When the South Point posted lines on its college football games of the year Friday, it opened Georgia as an 11-point favorite in the Sept. 8 matchup at South Carolina.
“I thought Georgia would be 7, but my line is 4½. When I saw it at 11, I would be all over that if I was in line at the South Point in Vegas,” said Edwards, who is based in Florida. “Then it moved to 14. Are you kidding me? I think South Carolina has got a great chance to win that game. I’m calling for an upset.”
He goes on to say that the ‘Cocks only have one guaranteed loss on their schedule, at Clemson, and could be looking at a 10-2 regular season record.
For context, here’s a reminder of what some of the advanced stats gurus are projecting:
- Projected 2018 S&P+ rankings (as of Feb. 9): Georgia 22.1 (6th); South Carolina 7.2 (35th)
- ESPN’s FPI: Georgia 23.1 (3rd); South Carolina 9.6 (28th)
FPI also projects that Georgia has a 79.1% chance of winning in Columbia, which is slightly more favorable than the odds the Dawgs face against Missouri.
None of this is to say that South Carolina can’t win that game — hell, even FPI says there’s a one-in-five chance of that happening — but I simply don’t get Edwards’ level of confidence there. The only things he cites in support are Jake Bentley being back, a big wide receiver and the usual “Muschamp is always going to have a solid defense and a great plan every Saturday”. It’s funny, but those are all things Kirby Smart can match, in spades.
From where I sit months before the start of the season, Muschamp had better hope that going hurry up is going to pump some real life into an offense that managed only 24.5 points per game in conference play last season (not to mention only managed 43 rushing yards in Athens last year) and that his team wins the turnover margin battle.
Maybe all that happens, but maybe is a long way from “are you kidding me?”.
Filed under 'Cock Envy, Georgia Football
All’s fair in love and negative recruiting.
Kirby Smart wants Alabama fans to know he’s not a monster, er… negative recruiter.
Some call it call it badmouthing, some call it negative recruiting, and others simply call it recruiting, but it’s very much a real thing in College Football.
Whether a coach tells a prospect that the traffic is bad in rival school’s town or that its university’s academics aren’t as strong as his own, recruiters sometimes do what they can to nudge a target their way.
Georgia’s Kirby Smart, however, says that he isn’t one of those guys. He even says that the kind of kids who might fall for those tactics isn’t the kind of player he wants to recruit.
“Negative recruiting, to me, never works on the kind of kids and people you want in your program,” Smart said on Tuesday during SEC Spring Meetings at the Sandestin Hilton Hotel. “Because if they’re listening to that and they’re buying in to that, they’re probably a little gullible where I would much rather be very honest and open because you attract better quality people who respect the fact that you respect the other people in your league.”
Aw, that’s kind of sweet, actually.
Not sure I’m buying it, though. First of all, who says you can’t be open and honest when discussing the shortcomings of a rival program? In fact, isn’t honest, accurate negative recruiting the best kind of negative recruiting?
Second, if you’re doing it right, you don’t recruit negatively to coax a kid to sign with you; you do so to convince a kid not to sign with that other coach. Anybody really think that a sharp coach who’s been through the SEC recruiting wars as long as Kirby has doesn’t know that?
He’s just trying to he’p kids make an informed decision. Seems to be working well, too.
Filed under Georgia Football, Recruiting
“We’ve got nothing but really positive feedback across the board.”
This one sentence ought to tell you everything you need to know about how radical the coming changes in the college football transfer rules are likely to be.
The changes will not be quite as extensive as some had hoped and the work is not complete, but considering previous failed attempts, getting anything accomplished on transfers can be counted as a success.
Not exactly worth popping any champagne corks for, eh?
As far as I can tell, this is the extent of the reform.
Currently, an athlete must ask a coach for permission to contact other schools when choosing to transfer. A school interested in recruiting a transferring player also must ask the athlete’s current school for permission to recruit the athlete. Without permission from the athlete’s original school, the athlete cannot get financial aid from another school.
The new model would free athletes to be contacted when they notify their current coaches. The athletes’ names would go into a database created and managed by the NCAA, alerting schools of who can be recruited. The changes will come with stricter tampering rules to help appease coaches who worry illegal recruiting could rise.
So, you won’t have to go ask Nick for his permission to look around anymore. That’s a decent start, but it’s also as far as it goes.
“We aren’t going to get as far down the path on transfers as I think most people hoped we would,” Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said this week during the conference’s meetings in Dallas. “But the permission to transfer is gone, we think it will be gone, and the notification of transfers coming in. What that does at a practical level is it switches the control from the coach or the institution to the student-athlete. We think that’s the right way to go.”
Well, whether control is really being switched is something we’ll have to wait to see how it plays out, but note that the current requirement that players have to sit out a year at their new school remains in place. There’s also this:
Transfer rules also vary from conference to conference and those rules are being reconsidered at league-level meetings as well. Most notably, what to do about transfers within conference. Some leagues are stricter than others.
At the Southeastern Conference meetings in Destin, Florida, this week, the league is considering whether players who transfer from a school under NCAA sanctions should be allowed to go to another SEC school. There is also a debate about whether graduate transfers, who are not required to sit out a season by NCAA rules, should be allowed to transfer within the SEC and play immediately. The SEC requires grad transfers to sit out a season if they want to stay in conference.
The one thing I’m curious about is how strong those new tampering rules are. It seems to me that if you make those sufficiently effective, then maybe it frees up the decision makers to focus on what’s really best for the student-athlete, rather than coaches’ fears about free agency.
Along those lines, check out what’s been left in the feedback stage:
The transfer working group is hoping to have feedback from conferences on two other ideas:
—Allowing incoming recruits to transfer without sitting out if there is a coaching change after they sign a national letter of intent.
—Making schools commit a scholarship to a graduate transfer for the length of the graduate program, no matter how long the athlete stays in school.
Looks like there’s a ways to go.
You got played.
As the old cliché goes, Jimmy Sexton plays eleven-dimensional chess while Greg McGarity plays checkers.
In fact, there’s always been the thought in some circles that Georgia accelerated its search to hire Smart before the Gamecocks could make an offer. Smart was announced as the Bulldogs new coach on Dec. 6, 2015. Muschamp was introduced as South Carolina’s coach on the same day.
This week at the SEC’s annual spring meeting, Gamecocks athletics director Ray Tanner addressed the idea that Georgia “stole” Smart from South Carolina.
“I don’t think that’s exactly how it played out,” he said. “I think we had zeroed in on all the best coaches we could at that time. He was a guy that everybody thought highly of, but he was one of many who was on our list at the time.”
Yeah, it all worked out, once again proving the adage about it’s better being lucky than good, but let’s not kid ourselves. Letting Sexton drive the hiring train wasn’t the way a well-run program with the top job offering in college football should have gone about its business.
Jimmy’s probably good with McGarity getting a contract extension now, though. So there’s that.
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