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C’mon, dog. Let me reacquaint you with David Greene’s last game between the hedges.
David Greene saw the game slipping away. His left thumb was hurting, but he wanted to go back in.
Good thing for Georgia that he did.
After leading the Bulldogs (No. 7 ESPN/USA Today, No. 8 AP) to an early lead over Georgia Tech, Greene returned at the end with a fractured thumb to make sure Georgia held on for a 19-13 victory Saturday…
With just over seven minutes remaining and the Bulldogs (9-2) struggling to preserve their fourth straight win over the Yellow Jackets, Greene trotted back on the field. He couldn’t make any deep throws, and he worked only out of the shotgun to lessen the pain when taking the snap.
But the mere presence of Greene — the winningest quarterback in major-college history — seemed to have a calming influence on the offense, which struggled through most of the second half with backup D.J. Shockley at the helm.
Greene completed a couple passes on a 40-yard drive that set up Brandon Coutu’s first career field goal, a 44-yarder with 2:22 left…
With temperatures in the 40s, a heavy rain fell through most of the first half, sending many of the fans home at halftime.
No, it wasn’t pretty, but I never heard Greene say anything remotely close to this ($$):
Fromm largely echoed that. Asked if he had any concerns about the passing game, he shrugged and said that of course they want to start faster, but then he mentioned the conditions, and said he was thankful to come out with a win.
“We knew what the conditions were going to be, we just didn’t know how bad they were going to be,” he said. “So those first couple drives, things were OK, things were kind of good. The Later and later it got, the rain never stopped, the ball kept getting wetter and wetter. And you had to say, ‘Hey Coach, some things just ain’t gonna fly,’ some things we felt comfortable with. We just had to go with that. A lot of the passing game kind of had to get scrapped there.”
But with this coming on the heels of the South Carolina debacle, the storyline is that Georgia’s offense is not doing what people expect.
Fromm, that sentiment put to him directly, was unbowed.
“We’re in a good position in a good part of our offense,” Fromm said. “We’re not worried about what the outside noise is saying. We’re worried about the guys on offense, and hey, what can we do to go out there and get better? I think at times we did that tonight. Maybe we wanted to start a little faster. But that was part of the game we were in, and we accepted that.”
With a bad thumb, Greene managed to throw more passes in one late drive than Fromm did the entire second half. Greene did so because he needed to.
I’m not using the comparison to punk Jake. He clearly played the hand his coach dealt him, and Smart shuffled that particular deck well before game day.
“I could have told you two days ago we weren’t going to go out there and throw it for 200 yards in those conditions,” Smart said. “We had to put a plan together to give us the best chance to be successful. I thought we did a good job.”
Yesterday’s weather wasn’t an excuse for the way Georgia’s offense played last night. It was a justification for constructing a game plan that was totally in sync with Kirby’s natural tendencies. That’s the real difference between those two rainy game wins.
Now, if Smart can only dial up a monsoon for Jacksonville…
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