Sweet home Alabama

The stupid, it burns.

A University of Alabama student allegedly called in a bomb threat against Louisiana State University’s stadium during a football game because of a bet.

News outlets report 19-year-old Alabama freshman Connor Croll of Crozet, Virginia, is charged with making the threat during LSU’s 42-28 win Saturday over the University of Florida.

Officials in Baton Rouge contacted University of Alabama police after getting the call, and Croll was arrested. Police say he acknowledged making the threat in an attempt to interrupt the game because a friend was in danger of losing a “large bet.”

I wonder if the friend helped post his bail.

Advertisement

Why not?

Just because a Tennessee beat writer’s interview with Kevin “That High School Coach Who Never Punts” Kelley ($$) was inevitable after Jeremy Pruitt’s joking presser about “they always onside kick, they never punt” doesn’t make it any less awesome.

“He knows that playing regular football, lining up and running the ball and playing good defense, unless Alabama makes a lot of mistakes, they really don’t have a good chance to win. The Vegas line (which favors Alabama by 35.5 points), which is made by some of the smartest people in the world, shows that,” Kelley said. “So if that’s the case, and you’re trying to give your team the best chance to win, it’s not by lining up and playing regular football. So I would for sure do it. But of course, I believe in this system. I do it. But I’d be doing a lot of those things and a lot of different things than I’ve done in the past just to give us a better chance to win.”

I’d love to see Pruitt do it, if for no other reason than it would be guaranteed to make Fulmer shit a brick.

Early thoughts on Georgia-Kentucky

Another week of lopsided position group comparisons, which served the Dawgs so well last Saturday.

Look, Kentucky trailed Arkansas midway through the fourth quarter before pulling out the game.  The ‘Cats currently stand sixth in the East.  If you’re asking me whether Georgia has to play a perfect game to win this weekend, no, of course not.  If you’re asking me whether Georgia is a mortal lock to win, no, of course not.

The big issue won’t be personnel, although I will say this gives me a little pause:

Kentucky slot receiver Lynn Bowden played quarterback last week against Arkansas and turned in a stellar performance. Bowden ran for 196 yards and two touchdowns and went 7-of-11 passing for 78 yards and a score. Does UK Coach Mark Stoops stay with the 6-foot-1, 206-pound Bowden against a Georgia defense that is far more accomplished against the run (allowing 73.3 yards a game) than the pass (allowing 208.3 yards)? Or is Sawyer Smith, a conventional drop-back passing QB, healthy enough to give UK its best shot?

Smith has been terrible this year, so if I’m Stoops, I’ll keep the air of mystery as to who my starter is until kickoff and then start Bowden.

What shouldn’t be a mystery is Kentucky’s defensive strategy.  Stoops made his bones as an excellent defensive coordinator.  Watching tape of the Georgia-South Carolina game, you’d have to be an idiot not to adopt wholesale what the ‘Cocks did on defense to slow Georgia down, and Stoops isn’t an idiot.  Admittedly, it’ll take more than that to convince me the ‘Cats can take down Georgia, but as we saw last week, it’s not like the Dawgs aren’t up to the challenge.

Which is why the big issue Saturday night is what’s between the collective ears of this Georgia team.  Can they turn the page, put an embarrassing loss behind them and get their shit together?  I wish I could say I knew for sure, but if there’s one thing about a loss like that, it’s that you can’t trust their focus until you see it.

“He’s a great person and a great guy to have in your organization.”

Booch, the five-star offensive analyst.

“Most of the stuff he does is behind the scenes, like film study and administrative-type work,” Saban said Wednesday. “He always does a ‘What do we need to do on offense?’ for me, and offering his opinion in terms of improving based on film study and things like that. His role has always sort of been that, and he’s done a really, really good job of it.

Bet he makes a mean cup of coffee, too.  How long before he’s redeemed sufficiently by his time in Tuscaloosa to get another head coaching offer?

The quote, the funk

Here is our story from Monday.. I asked Kirby what he saw pregame that led him to share his feelings with Chuck pic.twitter.com/dcNQOaToAG

— Zach Klein (@ZachKleinWSB) October 16, 2019

As Emerson fleshed it out ($$):

Kirby Smart is being criticized for a lot of things this week, but give him this, he sure has a pulse on his team. Minutes before kickoff last Saturday, Smart used his customary pregame interview with Chuck Dowdle to vent.

“We’ve got to get our ass ready to play. Our team’s not ready to play right now,” Smart said.

That wasn’t just normal pregame coachspeak and worry. Dowdle told me he’d never had a coach tell him that prior to kickoff. And then we know what happened.

Smart wasn’t the only one sensing something was amiss pre-game.

“Some people said they didn’t feel… They just felt Saturday was… They didn’t feel normal,” Swift said. “Some people felt weird during pre-game. I’m not sure what was going on but we just weren’t on the same page Saturday.”

Smart is getting some criticism for not doing anything to motivate his team despite his awareness of their mental state at kickoff, but I’m not sure exactly what he could have done then.  Now, once the game was underway and it became apparent that some things weren’t working and tactical changes might be in order is another thing, although sometimes you gotta hope your team wakes up in the heat of battle and gets things going.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, either.

Another red flag for Georgia: something felt off.

“It felt off because we didn’t come out as a fast-tempo team,” defensive lineman David Marshall said, who noticed the effects progressively. “We came out a little sluggish. It’s one of those games where we didn’t play hard in the first half and got out-physicaled.”

Smart’s reaction?  Double down on manball.

Offensively, those behind the line-of-scrimmage had trouble mustering rhythm. Georgia’s offense had its Plan A: pound the football and break an opponent’s will. Georgia tried it in repetitive fashion with power run plays on first-and-second down. Throughout regulation, the sequence occurred nine times and continued on into overtime. Even when the Bulldogs were down by one score, they opted for two consecutive up-the-middle runs by D’Andre Swift — one for five yards, the other for one.

Smart said “you try to rely on your strength” when it is the run game and offensive line.

I wouldn’t say “when in doubt, play to your strength” was the worst possible take there, but the predictability of the playcalling played into South Carolina’s defensive tactics perfectly.

Three strikes?

Well now, this is interesting.

The number of enforced targeting penalties is down 32% in the Football Bowl Subdivision compared with the first seven weeks of the 2018 season, the NCAA said Wednesday.

Targeting, the act of striking a defenseless opponent above the shoulders or using the crown of the helmet to contact an opponent, has been one of the college game’s biggest player-safety concerns for a decade.

There have been 132 targeting penalties called in the FBS. Of those, 83 were enforced and 49 were overturned on video review. There were 171 targeting penalties called at this point in 2018. Of those, 122 were enforced and 49 were overturned.

“It is hard to know how precisely to attribute the decline, but it is a significant drop,” national coordinator of football officials Rogers Redding said. Redding pointed to three possible factors: players using better tackling technique, the removal of “stands as called on the field” as a review option and the threat of a one-game suspension for three targeting fouls in the same season.

Overall, calls are down by 39, yet overturned calls haven’t dropped at all?  Sounds to me like there might be a fourth factor in play — officials may be more reluctant to drop a flag.  Whether that’s out of fear of being wrong, or simply from exercising better judgment is an interesting question that Redding elides.

A sign the Apocalypse is near

Another crazed Left Coast commie pinko politico threatens the NCAA:

.@MittRomney on college sports: "You know something is seriously awry. … The reality is Congress is going to act. We’re coming for you. We’re coming to help these athletes." #ncaa

— Brian Murphy (@MurphinDC) October 16, 2019

Wait… Mitt Romney?  Mitt Freakin’ Romney?

Y’know, if you really think you’re facing an existential crisis and Mitt Romney’s coming for you, maybe it’s time to make a deal.  Just a thought…

Today, in strategery

Another you won’t believe it until you see it stat about Georgia’s offense:

#UGA has run 1 play without a TE this year.

To get your best playmakers on the field, might need to consider something they’ve not done a single time – 20 personnel.

Swift & Cook on the field with Pickens, Blaylock and Robertson.

— Brent Rollins (@PFF_Brent) October 17, 2019

Here’s how Georgia’s receiving corps stats shape up:

Take out Wolf’s four-catch, 73-yard effort against Murray State, and he and Woerner have combined for 9 receptions and 58 yards.  Perhaps not the best use of resources, in other words.

Of course, there’s no stat to measure will imposition, so there’s that, at least.

Musical palate cleanser, the lady plays edition

I confess to knowing little about Beverly Watkins, which is a shame.

Beverly Watkins, a rare woman among blues guitarists, who cleaned homes when music did not pay her enough and did not record her first solo album until she was 60, died on Oct. 1 in Atlanta. She was 80.

Her son and only immediate survivor, Stanley Watkins, said the cause was a heart attack that had been preceded by a stroke.

Ms. Watkins called her music lowdown, stomping blues and complemented it with crowd-pleasing antics into her 70s — playing her electric guitar on her back and behind her head, sliding across the stage. When she sang, it was often with a growl.

“She’d been doing all that since the late 1950s, but she wasn’t a star because she’d been a sideman most of her career, playing with bands that didn’t have hits,” Brett J. Bonner, editor of Living Blues magazine, said by phone. “She was a fabulous guitar player.”

Judging by this clip, she sure was.

You gotta love it.  RIP, Ms. Watkins.