FOTB Henry did a little skulking around 247Sports’ recruiting rankings and dug up something worth sharing:
247Sports has an interesting feature at the bottom of their list of each school’s commitments. It shows the top commitments for each school since modern recruiting rankings were first started in 2001.
During that time, Tech has only one — one — five star recruitment. That was Calvin Johnson in 2004. Only four of their Top 25 recruits have been recruited since 2016 (including one for the 2020 class).
By comparison, in the same time period Georgia has recruited 48 five stars. Of their Top 25 all-time recruits, Georgia has recruited 11 since 2016 (including 2020 class). Some of those, like Justin Fields and Jacob Eason, are no longer with the program.
48 to 1. That’s a pretty big gap.
Five-star recruits for some top schools in the same period:
Southern Cal — 58Florida State — 56Alabama — 53Georgia — 48
Ohio State — 42Florida — 41
LSU — 35
Miami — 27Clemson — 26Oklahoma — 26Tennessee — 25
Michigan — 20Texas A&M — 18
Auburn — 17
Notre Dame — 15South Carolina — 5
Georgia Tech — 1
As he goes on to note, Georgia sure looks out of place there in the context of national championships. You have to slide all the way down to Tennessee before you find the next goose egg. (No, 247Sports doesn’t track five-star hearts.) Hopefully, Kirby is about to right that.
The other thing that jumps out at me is how far Florida has fallen. From sixth overall to zero five-stars on the current roster is a long way down.
Your thoughts?
Get The Picture 
Richt Roster Management, for the underachievement award of the century. Literally.
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Now, for the rest of the story:
“As he goes on to note, Georgia sure looks out of place there in the context of national championships.”
National Championships aren’t given out based on recruiting tropies, despite the wishes of the Dawg Vent
No doubt CKS is improving on what CMR did, but the bottom-line results so far are the same. Will be interesting to see what the Nation does if that’s still the case after 4-5 seasons
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What is UF’s 2019 ranking down to now with 3 of their 4 star recruits out? 17ish? Black just announced he is going the JUCO route.
It been damn good to be a dawg the last 7 days. There is lots of rumbling that we are going to haul in one of the best classes ever as well. Kirby gets it.
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To me, this is as damning as the list of most players drafted into the NFL from 2001-2015, of which Georgia also was fourth and the only one on that list to never even play for a national title.
This just proves, again, how greatly Mark Richt truly underachieved as our head coach. It makes me angry, nothing more.
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less of a chance for Richt to get in back then (4 vs 2). That changes things dramatically, right??
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No. Are you being sarcastic? All of those teams on the list won a national title when it was just two teams who had a chance. Meaning Georgia is the only team that didn’t even PLAY for one.
No more excuses for Richt, the biggest underachiever in CFB history.
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” It shows the top commitments for each school since modern recruiting rankings were first started in 2001.”
The 4 team playoff started in ’14, only 2 could be invited prior to that. I can think of at least two of Richt teams that would have made the final four back then.
“No more excuses for Richt, the biggest underachiever in CFB history”
BAH!!….Quit being a hater Irvin, not good for your heart.
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You need to work on your reading comprehension. I’ll shout so you can understand:
NONE OF THOSE OTHER TEAMS NEEDED A FOUR TEAM PLAYOFF TO WIN A NATIONAL TITLE. THEY ALL WON WHEN IT WAS JUST TWO TEAMS.
SO STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR MARK RICHT.
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Let the past be where it is. It’s a new day and CMR is gone. No sense getting worked up about it. I totally agree that he hugely underachieved. I just don’t want to take the resentment poison anymore.
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It’s not resentment. It’s just stating reality for what it is. Dealing with reality is important. It helps you learn and grow and not keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
A great many people still can’t deal with this reality, as Greg shows.
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In the article, it shows 5 star players beginning ’01. I mean, we are talking about the article, right?
The 4 team playoff started in the “14-’15 season. Could have been a different story if there were 4 teams invited prior to that (’01-“14). Richt had some pretty good teams, teams that I would have given a good shot in a 4 team playoff.
Sorry that Richt cheated you out of a MNC, guess he should made more “butter”, hey??
Besides, when did any of these teams (article) win a national title beginning ’01?
USC, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Michigan, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech and South Carolina.
,
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Again… your excuses for Richt hold no water when the other teams with that much talent were able to win under the rules of the time.
Your excuses for Richt are like an asshole. They stink.
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Come on, Corch….it shouldn’t matter to you what I think, you taking it too
personal…relax.
God bless you!
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Also Greg, staring facts isn’t “hating.” By any measure, by any list, Mark Richt is the biggest underachiever in CFB history. No coach did less with more talent than Mark Richt. That is literally a fact you can see here or in the list of schools who had the most players drafted into the NFL during his time as head coach at Georgia.
It’s not even a subjective opinion. It’s objective fact. It’s not hate, apologist, so stop making excuses for him and face the reality of his 15 underachieving years at Georgia.
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“Bless your heart”
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Aww. That all you got, sweetie?
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Under the system in place in 2002, 2007 and 2012 neither UGA in 2017 or Alabama in 2017 would have played for the Championship. You would have called Smart “underachieving ” in 2017 according to your standard.
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If it were year seven or eight, yeah, I would say Kirby underachieved.
Richt underachieved relative to the talent he had and the number of years he was Georgia’s coach, along with going 10 years without even a conference title.
If Kirby gets to that point, he will have underachieved.
But nice try at a “gotcha.” Too bad your logic doesn’t hold. What does hold is Richt apologists will leap to his defense regardless of how little sense it makes or how little logic they actually have. 🤷🏻♂️
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you just fall to pieces when someone sees it a different way, don’t you.
Relax Corch, beginning to worry about you…we all can’t think a like, right??
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Says the guy with the obsessive need to defend Mark Richt. I’d recommend professional help, but I honestly think you’re too far gone. 😂
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You don’t even have to go to National Championship to show the Richt under achieved, his declining record against Top 25 teams proved under achievement.
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Someone is “obsessed” in this thread, all right…but I don’t think you understand who it is.
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Yep… responding to the responses of others. That makes me obsessed. As Otto said, the topic was breached not by me, but by the Senator. So I made a comment, and was immediately set-upon by a Richt apologist. So again… who exactly is obsessed again? 🤷🏻♂️
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Dead horse, I get it…”that ship has already sailed”. But when you see crap like this:
“No more excuses for Richt, the biggest underachiever in CFB history” ….you just gotta shake your head, hard to ignore it.
Richt was a helluva coach, I am glad we had him….but it was time for him to move on imo.
BTW, good points that you made.
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It is not beating a dead horse. The Senator wrote “Georgia sure looks out of place there in the context of national championships.” IMHO, that opens the floor for discussion as to why they underachieved.
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2002, 2007, 2012 one could argue that Richt’s teams were every bit as successful as Kirby has been so far. I am firmly convinced that the 2002-2005 teams would have most likely made a 4 team playoff with ‘02,’04, and ‘05 having a very real chance to win it all. No doubt ‘07 would have won a 4 team playoff.
Winning a MNC is as much timing and luck as it is anything else. Saban’s first championship was a 13-1 LSU, Meyer’s first was a 13-1 UF that backdoored their way in to play tOSU.
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Haters gonna hate…..much easier.
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Richt, to date, has achieved as much as Smart.
We can hope that changes.
I’m always struck by how Ray Goff and Jim Donnan aren’t lambasted by UGA fans as gross mismanagers or poor recruiters. Save 1992, Goff never got a sniff of the ultimate success.
The same could be said for Donnan, who outside of 1997, rarely had us in the conversation.
And yet Richt remains the target. He had us a tipped pass from what would have been a likely NC and would have certainly had playoff births during his tenure were there such a thing in those days.
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I’m of the opinion it’s now not “if but when” for the 3rd national championship banner to go up in Sanford. With all of the money poured into the program to attract recruits, if Kirby doesn’t win a national title in the next 5 years, will the fan base want to “lather, rinse & repeat”?
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It’s amazing how many of these types of lists you’ve posted over the last 5-6 years or so where the top group includes us……and a group of teams who have recently won national titles. Like you said, hopefully that gets fixed soon.
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We might look out of place but that’s mainly because a healthy chunk of ours 20+, are still on campus, I think 11-12, are underclassmen.
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SMH that Tech has beaten the Dawgs at all over the last 19 seasons.
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It was surprising to me to see USC at the top still. I just magnifies how far and how fast they have fallen. They used to be in the conversation for the NC every year. Now they are hardly even mentioned as a factor in the PAC-12 race. FSU is in danger of joining them in that category if they don’t put out their dumpster fire in a hurry. Much to my heart’s delight, Florida seems bound and determined to duplicate USC’s face plant.
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Nothing lasts forever. That’s why you must grab the brass ring during your window. If you don’t, well, look at Mark Richt. Or the Falcons.
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In fairness, they did finish in the top five in 2016 and won the Pac-12 in 2017. It’s still been a pretty steep decline since the run Carroll went on.
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About ten years ago I did a little informal thing adding up five years worth of recruiting rankings vs. the actual on-field rankings that followed after about a two-year lag for classes to move up. Schools like Oklahoma, LSU, and USC were dominating in both areas. I don’t think the point can be argued any more, but it was then.
One of the other things it showed was that of the schools I tracked, Notre Dame- totally unsurprisingly- was the biggest underachiever vs. talent (or at least perceived talent- their classes were over-ranked).
The biggest overachiever I tracked, usually many places in actual results above their average recruiting finishes- was Auburn. They’ve crashed (2008) and risen (2010) and crashed (2011-12) and risen (2013) and sagged again since then through three coaches. They win big or lose bigger with the same slightly sub-elite talent.
You just can’t quantify those jokers.
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I think Andy Staples talked about this. Notre Dame recruits used to get bumps in ratings just because they were recruited by Notre Dame, much like Duke basketball recruits.
Somewhere around the mid aughts, this stopped happening at 247 and Rivals refined recruiting rankings.
Now you see Notre Dame recruits ranked where they should be.
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Some of that’s because trends and technology have allowed it. There are far more camps and other training venues for players to prepare and demonstrate abilities, and that information along with game footage has been more widely disseminated.
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Of course! But that Notre Dame bump was real, just as the Duke bump was. It’s that idea that because Notre Dame only recruits the “best” players, the players they recruit must be the best. Circular logic always finds a way to shown false (see Greg above), and this was as bad as it gets, recruiting wise.
Unfortunately, Notre Dame still gets a bump for what they’ve done in the past even when their more recent history is that of a team that always craps the bed when given the opportunity to compete for titles or big bowls at the end of the year. We can see the pattern now: Notre Dame has “good” years when the teams on their schedule have bad years, leading to overinflated rankings. Hopefully soon, they’ll stop being handing these chances they don’t deserve.
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Oh, yeah it was real. Recruits used to occasionally get an extra star from some sources for listing Notre Dame, and then see it revoked when they committed elsewhere.
The biggest proof of the over-ranking of Notre Dame on the field is their bowl record. They’re nearly always placed a level above their ability, and then exposed.
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The Peter Principle is undefeated.
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It’s time.
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My thought exactly, someone is “due”…
That said, maybe Dooley really did sell his Soul to the Devil for that 80 season. 🙂
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I was there…it may have been worth it! 🙂
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Everyone of these types of “national title teams look like this” lists always had UGA in there are as a top team without a national title.
To be honest I am not sure anyone else could have pulled it off. Doing everything possible to win a title, but just not getting there.
And piling up even more 5 star players still hasnt actually won a national title, but a lot of UGA fans seem to feel better about getting really close now.
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It’s been three years. Let’s give Kirby some time. Not 15 years. But some time.
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“Win now” fans sure did make the pivot to “lets give it some time” pretty quickly.
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No. Mark Richt got 15 years. Kirby is entering year 4. Mark Richt had more than enough time to prove what he could do. No one is saying Kirby deserves that much time, but 7 or 8 years? That’s fair. That’s REASONABLE. The Mark Richt apologists keep inventing these strawman arguments none of us have used.
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How many seasons was Saban a HC before his first Natty? CUM? CDS? CLM? Kirby’s coming into year 4. I think the average of all those other coaches was around 7-8 years? What had CMR accomplished by his 7th or 8th year?
I’d say that as long as recruiting remains top 5 and UGA is in the hunt for the SECC and playoffs each year, CKS has another 4-5 years grace period to catch that lightning in the bottle.
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My favorite argument/pitiful excuse is that Richt did not get the same support from the administration as Smart; had to pay his coaches out of his pocket….yada yada. If someone could actually explain WHY Smart gets the support that they were not willing to give Richt, I would be willing to listen, but I am yet to hear anyone offer up a reason that makes sense. It’s just excuse making.
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Oh, FFS.
I know I’m wasting my time, but did you possibly consider that it might make a difference that McGarity is invested in Smart in a way he never was with Richt?
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Wait, was McGarity in charge the whole time? He came on in 2010 right? So his 5 years of supposed non-support for Richt is the reason we underachieved from 2001 (using the date from the article posted) until Richt was fired? If you want this “no support” theory to take wings, then please explain it to include all three AD’s that Richt worked under.
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You asked for “a reason” and I gave you one. If you don’t like it, that’s on you, not me.
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Nope, I don’t. I think it is a poor excuse, and I think my simple argument shows why.
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I understand what you think. Your simple argument shows what you think.
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Oh FFS!
Can’t you admit it when you lose an argument. You are getting worse than Greg. I half way expect you to now tell me to not take it personal and to relax.
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What argument have I lost? You are apparently comfortable denying that Richt received less support from the administration than has Smart, despite all kinds of information to the contrary. And that’s hardly just my impression, either. You are more than welcome to maintain your state of denial, as it doesn’t change anything.
And I really don’t GAS how you take it.
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LOL! …what argument did I lose??
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Will always support whoever the coach is, until they are not. All of the coaches that I remember were DGD, even Goff (5 points away from being undefeated ‘92). It was time for a change, just like most all of them. Richt did a lot for UGA, glad we had him …he is one of the best we had IMO.
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Dang man, what are you arguing….or who are you arguing with??
Is it this?
“NONE OF THOSE OTHER TEAMS NEEDED A FOUR TEAM PLAYOFF TO WIN A NATIONAL TITLE. THEY ALL WON WHEN IT WAS JUST TWO TEAMS”
If so, ironically….it is your “reading and comprehension” (article). Cause not all of those teams in the article won a MNC.
or is it this?
“ No more excuses for Richt, the biggest underachiever in CFB history”
I mean, how in the wide world of sports is that??
Personally, me thinks you are so blinded by hate, that you don’t know what you are arguing or who you are arguing with…::but please, take the time to reflect and answer. Inquiring minds wanna know.
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The only people blinded by hate are the Richt Apologists. Blinded by hatred of seeing Richt fires after “only” 15 years.
All I’ve done is made germane comments. Then you come in with your obsessive b.s. to defend Richt.
It’s okay, Greg. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Greg. It’s not your fault. Greg, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Greg. It’s not your fault.
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What I thought, you don’t know who you are arguing with or about….and you can’t even answer the two simple questions I gave you….geez. How old are you??
Carry on, entertaining….
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7-10 years is now the reasonable timeline for a coach to win a national title when they wake a “sleeping giant” program. Gotcha.
Saban won a title in his 3rd season @ LSU, also his 3rd season @ Bama was a title.
Les Miles won a national title in his 3rd season @ LSU.
Urban won a national title in his 2nd season @ UF.
Took Jimbo 4 seasons.
When these coaches got opportunities at places with the resources to win a title, they won titles. Smart took over a program that was in better shape than any program that these coaches took over and they all won a title quicker than Smart, save Jimbo unless Smart wins this year.
Smarts a great coach, it’s been super fun, but you guys twisting yourselves into knots to defend not winning a title after all the certainty that any ole knucklehead coach could win a title @ UGA has been a lot of fun as well.
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The circular logic of you Richt Apologists is seriously demented. HE GOT FIFTEEN YEARS. Why wasn’t that long enough? None of us have advocated a “win immediately,” that’s always been YOU apologists, butt hurt as you were about Richt getting fired after only 15 years.
Dabo took 8 years to win a title. According to you, that’s a failure?
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I have even mentioned Richt today, much less defended him.
And you wont be along pointing to Dabo. I suspect a lot of fans of coaches that havent won a title will be pointing in his direction.
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Just when I think I’m out…
There’s been quite a bit of turnover in the comment section around here, so I don’t know if any of the most idiotic anti-Richt guys are still around. I know most of the Richtophiles are gone. I think you’re misrepresenting the argument most of us made. For myself, I attested that someone could do better than Richt had done after his first five years. And Kirby has already done that. I also think he’s done better from a program management standpoint than Richt did even in those first five years, but purely on record, they’re essentially identical. It’s also worth noting that Richt didn’t have another one-loss regular season after his second year until 2012. Smart’s done it back-to-back years. The question is whether or not Smart will decline over time with staff turnover and what not. I doubt it, but you never know.
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This is perfectly reasonable. You can praise Richt for the good things he did (winning 2 SEC titles in 5 years, ruining Tennessee’s football program by shutting down Fat Phil’s Atlanta Pipeline, Owning the Bugs), but the second you get real about the overall underachievement of his time in Athens relative to the talent he had on hand over 15 years, the apologists come out of hiding.
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Count me as a Richtophile who is still around. Kirby’s success is just added on to Richt’s in my heart and I have no complaints about either. They both are really good coaches and Kirby is showing thus far that he is better. When thinking of them as one of us fans, I think of them as two different men who both have greatness of character; one who practices the Christianity that he preaches and the other as a great Dawg living each of our Dawg dreams.
Neither are worthy of disdain or derogation by opinionated fans such as we are. They both have added great joy and worth to our alma mater and our alma mater has reciprocated. Many of us will always think well of Richt and will cheer Kirby on into the future notwithstanding the “I told you so”s.
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I never disliked Richt or belittled his accomplishments. I just didn’t want him to be Georgia’s head coach anymore.
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I won’t reveal which side I’m on, because everyone who disagrees with me in any way is a totally demented, anti-logical, hate-filled crackbrain who would be left twisting him or herself into pathetic knots to evade the irresistible juggernaut of my soul-crushing would-be oratory, and I don’t wanna rub it in. Go Dawgs.
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There has been a seismic change in top player recruitment by UGA and it keeps increasing in numbers each year. These figures posted will have even more disparity between FU/GT as compared to UGA over the next two years. I will never tire of that increased number and what it portends for our football future, but it is even more warming to my cochleae cordis to see last week’s taunters getting the heel of Kirby’s hand and not only getting shoved downward more and more to recruiting rankings of irrelevance and then towards historical recruiting oblivion.
Sic’em Dawgs! Sic’em Kirby!
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Guys, guys, guys. Look. We’re losing sight of what REALLY matters today:
Sideshow Dan lost ANOTHER player from his “vaunted, closing the gap” 2019 class today.
At this point, they’re barely handing on to a top-25 class ranking.
Let that be the last word. 🙂
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^^^^ this!…. no reason to belittle or dislike. Can understand why some wanted him gone.
Nonetheless, glad he was at UGA & appreciative for what he did. Kirby appears to be on the right track, glad we have him.
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