FPI, reshuffled

We may not have G-Day QBR to chew on this year, but Mickey’s crack statisticians have been busy recalculating the Football Power Index.

Back in February, Georgia sat in tenth place, one spot ahead of Florida and behind Texas and Texas A&M.

FPI paints a very different picture now (h/t).  The Dawgs sit fifth overall and second in the conference, behind ‘Bama.  Both Texas schools are outside the top ten… and Florida has dropped another spot, to twelfth.

Per Kipp Adams, here’s where Georgia’s percentage chances to win lie in the 2020 regular season:

• Virginia:  95.3
• ETSU:  99.9
• Alabama:  27.5
• Louisiana-Monroe:  99.2
• Vanderbilt:  98.3
• Auburn:  66.4
• Missouri:  90.2
• Florida:  62.7
• South Carolina:  85.2
• Tennessee:  91.2
• Kentucky:  82.6
• Georgia Tech:  94.2

A pretty lopsided schedule, for the most part.  I guess ESPN’s computers aren’t all that swayed by all the pundits’ “but muh spring practice” wisdom.

Misty water-colored memories

Kirby Smart has some thoughts about his current quarterback situation.

“If we had Jake back in this situation, you’d be thinking, ‘Man, I’m at a huge advantage,’ “ Smart said during his interview with the Georgia Bulldogs Radio Network on Saturday. “It’s just the opposite for us, because we don’t really know what we have.

“You evaluate our quarterbacks, and you look at it and you say ‘I’ve got a guy who had a major surgery, I got a guy that just came out of high school, I’ve got a guy that’s been a No. 2 last year, Stetson, and then I have a transfer from Wake that we don’t know a lot about, as far as in our system, so we have a lot of unknowns at that positions.”

I wonder how many times he’s already said to himself, “that’s not the way Jake would have done it.”  Probably not as many times as he will, once practice is back.

A.B.C. Always.

Gotta love Kirbs for this.

As he has mentioned several times since that night, when a state-record crowd of 93,246 attended the game, Smart reiterated how important the whole affair was to Georgia’s recruiting efforts. The Bulldogs would go on to sign the nation’s No. 1-ranked class in 2020.

“It impacted recruiting probably more than any other one thing,” Smart said. “Everybody who was there that night fell in love with the place.”

Georgia football, where winning big games is a means to an end.

Observations from the armchair, virtual rerun edition

I’ve always wanted to outsource to myself.