Message to the people

It’s time for us to move on from Notre Dame, obviously, but I wanna give Brooks Tilley the last word.

Felt a couple seismic ripples from all the nega-dawg take quakes over the past two weeks. Some of you have been hurt badly by the Dawgs and it shows. We did not play our best possible game against the #7 team in the country, but the amount of disappointment and conclusion jumping was a little much. It brought me great joy that just one week later, the “far more elite” programs of Alabama and Clemson were in dog fights with horrendous opponents. Bama’s game was close in the first quarter before convincingly pulling away but any Bama fan that tells you they aren’t worried about the middle of that defense hasn’t been paying attention. Clemson looked atrocious against a low tier ACC team and Trevor Lawrence looked very human as he has for much of this season. The moral of the story here is that you don’t have to look your best every week especially at the beginning of the season. If you beat the 7^th ranked team in the country without playing your best, that’s pretty damn impressive in itself and gives you the opportunity to live for another week. It’s a different age in Georgia football, don’t be so damn negative. A bunch to work on, but we could not be in any better position to start the season.

Words to live by, Dawgnation.  It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Dabo goes full asshole.

You know, I thought college football’s 93 million dollar man had finally figured out that the smartest thing he could do was not to speak out about player compensation anymore.

Turns out I was wrong about that.  Like, really, really wrong.

“The collegiate model is a beautiful thing. And it’s been a great thing. The scholarship for a long time was archaic, and it needed to be changed and addressed. Nobody wants to acknowledge that. Right? Because that doesn’t fit the story. You know, they’re supposed to be starving. These guys ain’t starving. These guys got money. They got cars, they got tattoos, because they’ve got money. It’s a different situation than when I was in school.”

All he left out were the hoes and weed.  Lawd.

Mumme Poll logistics update

Well, I’ve never been one to stand in the way of technology making my life easier, so there’s going to be a change in the voting process from what I described earlier this week.

As you might recall, being the tyro that I am, I was planning on having you submit your vote via email.  I would then spend time manually compiling your votes into the weekly MP results.  What’s happened is that two readers here, peytoned and mragin83, took pity on me — and again, if I may digress for a sec, I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate GTP readership — and offered a ballot process that would run through a Google form and automatically tally by spreadsheet.

So that’s what we’ll be doing.

Here’s how it will work.  I will put up a post every Sunday morning with a link to the week’s ballot.  (You can check out Week 6 now, as it’s set up.  Just don’t cast a vote!)

As you can see, the ballot contains 25 slots with drop down menus containing the names of all D-1 programs, in case you want to select that many teams on your ballot.  That, of course, doesn’t mean you have to select that many.  Whatever number of teams you include will be all that counts.  Also, you’ll need to answer the question at the end of the ballot for security purposes.  Give me a valid email address where indicated and you’re good to go.

The rest of the process remains in place.  You have two days to vote.  We’ll chew on individual ballots on Tuesday and the poll results will post on Wednesday.

Any questions?  Hit me up in the comments.

Swallowed whole

“Alexa, can you show me graphs comparing advanced stats for Georgia and Tennessee?”

Good Lord.  I’ve seen Sun Belt teams with messier diagrams than that.

When an edge looks like a cliff

I mentioned yesterday that in a Georgia-Tennessee comparison, I couldn’t find a position group where the Vols had an advantage over the Dawgs.  It turns out Jake Rowe can’t, either.

This sounds as bad for UT as I think it is:

Quarterback

We’ve mentioned the word lopsided already, haven’t we? Jake Fromm is coming off a really strong showing against Notre Dame, one where he could have put up much bigger numbers than he did. He has been efficient and careful with the football this season and has started to pick up steam on third downs. Tennessee is struggling mightily at the game’s most important position. Jarrett Guarantano has been out of sync for the first four games and the Volunteers turned to Brian Maurer in the blowout at Florida. J.T. Shrout could also see the field against the Bulldogs according to Jeremy Pruitt. Edge: Georgia

Passer ratings (via cfbstats.com) if anything, look even worse in comparison:

• Fromm:  180.48
• Bennett:  183.35
• Guarantano:  147.24
• Maurer:  43.82
• Shrout:  54.8

But Rowe does see a push at special teams, so at least Pruitt’s got that going for him, which is nice.

Another player compensation round up

It seems like the only thing this week that’s been more fast and furious than reactions to the new California law is the impeachment inquiry.  (NOTE:  that’s a colorful analogy, not an invitation to a special Playpen edition, so don’t even think about going there in the comments.)

Anyway, some bullet points for you today:

• Per College Football Talk, Seton Hall University released a poll on Thursday that found 60 percent of the 714 American adults polled agreed that college athletes should be allowed to market their own names, compared to only 32 percent opposed.
• The New York Times has a background piece on what went on leading up to the Fair Play for Pay Act’s passage.  Bottom line:  the schools and NCAA did a poor lobbying job.
• The Onion has a take.
• Noted socialist David French has a piece in a left wing journal supporting player compensation.
• It’s the same old song.
• You will no doubt be surprised to discover Barry Alvarez is “very concerned”.
• And Nick Aliotti, former Oregon Ducks defensive coordinator, wants to throw players a teeny bone:  a small monthly stipend ($300-a-month limit) for all NCAA football players that could be loaded on a debit card.
• Speaking of surprises, “This is just a new form of professionalism and a different way of converting students into employees,” Emmert said. “(They may be) paid in a fashion different than a paycheck, but that doesn’t make them not paid.”

Let the good times roll

If you’re overly concerned about style points, you run the risk of missing this:

Georgia will travel to Knoxville seeking a 15th straight overall victory over an SEC East foe, that streak having started with Rodrigo Blankenship’s 25-yard field goal as time expired that gave the Bulldogs a 27-24 topping of Kentucky in Lexington late in the 2016 season. Georgia’s current tally of 14 in a row trails the 25 straight SEC East games Florida won under Steve Spurrier from 1992 to 1997 and the 16 straight the Gators attained under Urban Meyer from 2007 to 2010.

Before sweeping the East in 2017 and again last year under coach Kirby Smart, the Bulldogs never had gone through divisional play unscathed since the SEC split into two six-team divisions in 1992, when Arkansas and South Carolina joined the league. They became seven-team divisions in 2012 after the additions of Texas A&M and Missouri.

If the Dawgs manage wins in their next three games, they’ll arrive in Jacksonville having wiped out Corch’s divisional victory streak and can take another step towards Spurrier’s mark by beating the Gators.  Would I enjoy that?  Why, yes, I believe I would.