The NCAA again expands the number of hours per week of “virtual nonphysical countable activities like film review, chalk talks and team meetings” coaches can have with players, to eight.
Eh, why not? Coaches gotta be antsy as hell these days.
Daily Archives: April 16, 2020
Beast mode, beasting
Damn, Ben Cleveland. Just damn.
If that wasn’t at the goal line he kept going straight, Ben could have driven that hapless defender another ten yards down the field easy.
Filed under Georgia Football
Not out of the woods yet
Damn it, this was not the answer I wanted to hear, Kirbs.
“Players, not plays” was Coley’s mantra. I was kinda hoping we were moving past that.
Please let this be misdirection.
Filed under Georgia Football, Strategery And Mechanics
Sure, Kirby. Whatever you say.
I know he’s got to say this, but does he really think they’re buying it?
Kirby Smart has provided more clarity to the quarterback competition he announced last week, explaining Jamie Newman’s position on the roster.
“He (Newman) knows that it’s a competition,” Smart said on Atlanta’s 680 The Fan on Thursday morning. “He knows he has to beat guys out. That’s the way it has always been.”
Newman, a 6-foot-4, 230-pound graduate transfer from Wake Forest, was at the top of Smart’s list when Jake Fromm announced he was forgoing his senior season.
“We had researched the entire year with a thought that Jake would have the opportunity to come out early,” Smart said. “So we had a pool of 30 to 40 of guys that we thought would be potential. Whether they were transfers or whether they were grad transfers, whatever they may be, we knew we could possibly be in the quarterback market.
“Once Jamie went into the portal and we knew he was going to be a graduate transfer, we started communication immediately. And it was a process of finding out whether what he wanted aligned with what we wanted.”
You don’t invest that much time and, more relevantly, convince Newman not to look elsewhere, without a pretty strong feeling he’s your guy. If you’re defining competition as it’s his job to lose, sure, I can see that, but an open contest among equals? Nah…
Filed under Georgia Football
Always cool
The Hargrett Library, doing Hargrett Library things, that is.
Filed under Georgia Football
Spring is sprung and your spring gets sprung.
You know that version of gallows humor we like to indulge in, the one where we look at a hypothetical downside to a situation and figure it’s bound to affect our football program — “leave it to Georgia to win a national championship in a coronavirus-shortened season”?
Tell me this wouldn’t be so Georgia.
You know it would.
Filed under Georgia Football, The Body Is A Temple
Watching and waiting
Lo and behold, Greg Sankey actually said something thoughtful yesterday ($$).
On Wednesday, the words of a statistician Sankey met with via video conference earlier this week felt especially wise. “Her observation was ‘For the really big decisions, wait as long as you can. Because if you think about what we knew 30 days ago compared to today, you’re going to know much more than that by comparison 30 days from now,’ ” Sankey said. “So we’re all in this information gathering/learning experience that is uncertain, but if we can understand there will be answers like ‘I don’t know’ that maybe have to linger. We’re going to deal with that discomfort. But we’re going to have to do the job of preparing to provide the real answers at the right time.”
We simply don’t know enough right now to make the momentous decisions about bringing back college football with any certainty about the consequences. Will we know more in a month? Who’s to say, but it’s damned certain the decision makers won’t know less.
Which leaves us Georgia fans in the same boat.
Season ticket holder Brian Sugrue, also from Peachtree Corners, said there’s “no way” he would go to games in the current situation, but renewed his tickets in large part to ensure “holding our place basically.”
That was also a motivation for McKemie.
“I have confidence that we will be back in the stadium in some point in the future and I wanted to hold onto my tickets,” he said.
Sugrue runs the Georgia fan blog Dawgsonline.com and his Twitter profile was updated for these times to includes a photo of Uga with a face mask.
He and his wife have two pair of lower level tickets that they didn’t want to risk losing—two on the 50-yard line and two in the east end zone that Sugrue likes also because of the familiar fans that surround him there.
“We’re assuming there are certain things that will happen by the time they decide to hold games,” said Sugrue, a 46-year old software developer who became a season ticket holder in 1996 and his wife since the late 1980s. “We definitely have apprehension about going unless some pretty specific conditions are met.”
Knowing that a refund would be coming if the season was cancelled “eases the decision a little bit. The only hard part would be if they decided to hold games and we still weren’t comfortable with 90,000 random people.”
Georgia fans like McKemie and Sugrue now have the months ahead to see what a Bulldogs football season might look like in 2020.
“It looks like a tough call right now,” McKemie said. “It’s easy to see this going into early or mid-June before the disease is no longer a concern for anyone. I believe there’s a reasonably good chance it will impact the season in some way. …Decisions will be made to continue it in some form or fashion. I’m game for whatever they can come up with that keeps it going.”
If there’s one thing you can say about Dawgnation, it’s that we’ve long known patience is a virtue.
Filed under Georgia Football, The Body Is A Temple
On the bright side, Jamie Newman edition
PFF ranks the Wake Forest graduate transfer as its top such player in 2020, but that’s not what I want to discuss here. This is:
Wake Forest ran the second-most RPO (run-pass option) plays in 2019 in order to help its QB with easy reads. Newman wasn’t particularly adept at them, though, and his passing grade of only 72.1 on RPO throws shows this. Where Newman was great, and this is good news for Georgia, was on straight dropbacks, as he compiled a 90.0 overall grade on these plays over the course of the season.
Meeting Newman at Georgia is new offensive coordinator Todd Monken and his vertical passing attack. All Jamie Newman did on deep throws last season was put up the second-highest grade in the country at 96.5.
Newman isn’t the second coming of Cam Newton, but if he allows Monken to present a legit deep threat in the passing game, I suspect that’s going to be a bigger deal than we might think. I’m also guessing Newman is thrilled about the potential trade off between what he was asked to do last year and what Georgia will be running in 2020. Should be fun to watch for all concerned.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
“We exist to serve storytellers, and right now, that happens to be athletes.”
Tennessee football is spending somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000 a year for players to promote themselves and the Vols on social media channels ($$). If you think they’re doing that out of sheer kindness, well, bless your little heart.
As of 2020, the monetary value of building players’ brands is mostly aimed toward the future, whether players move on from their time at Tennessee by playing in the NFL or selling insurance or cars. That could change soon, and the potential opportunity for players to monetize their name, image and likeness is closely aligned with the company’s founding in late 2017.
“I focused on the college space because I was a big believer that the tides were going to turn in name, image and likeness,” said Cavale, who played baseball at Montevallo and is based in the Birmingham area.
Some day soon, they’ll be monetizing the shit of this. With the school’s blessing.
Boy, you got to carry that weight.
As little attention as I pay to recruiting stories about offseason commitments to Georgia, you can imagine how much less I do when it comes to Georgia Tech. So, largely out of ignorance, I was intrigued by this Mike Cunningham story. I mean, “The latest recruiting rankings are positive for Tech and Georgia.”? What’s Mr. Waffle House been up to while we’re socially distancing ourselves? Is he keeping up with his neighbor to the northeast?
Wayul, here’s Georgia:
Georgia’s current class ranking of No. 11 is strong considering it includes only six recruits. Each of the teams ranked above Georgia have more commitments. The average rating of Georgia’s recruits is third highest behind Ohio State and Clemson.
Georgia’s 2021 class includes one composite five-star recruit, Prince Avenue Christian quarterback Brock Vandagriff (ranked No. 12 nationally). He’s an important recruit for the Bulldogs because graduate-transfer quarterback Jamie Newman is a stop-gap for 2020. The 247Sports experts unanimously predict that three other five-star recruits will pick Georgia.
If so, the Bulldogs would challenge for the top-ranked class again for 2021.
Wow. Impressive stuff, Kirbs. Now it’s your turn, Geoff.
Tech has just three commitments in the 2021 class. That’s how it goes for those programs that make offers and then wait for the talent to trickle down from the top. But Collins’ track record as a recruiter, first as an assistant and now as Tech’s head coach, suggests the Jackets will move up in the rankings.
Collins did well to just to keep Tech’s 2019 class mostly intact when he was hired in December 2018. His 2020 class ranked 26th nationally in the 247Sports Composite. That’s Tech’s highest ranking since its famed 2007 class that included Derrick Morgan, Joshua Nesbitt, Morgan Burnett and Jonathan Dwyer (Collins was a Tech assistant back then).
Not so equal, it seems, although if you set the bar low enough, I suppose anything counts as progress. Well played, AJ-C.
Filed under Georgia Football, Georgia Tech Football, Recruiting
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