Cast your eyes on this game-winning field goal attempt by Rice. You will never see its like again.
Naturally, the Owls lost the game. 2020, man.
Monthly Archives: October 2020
Denial is a river in Knoxville.
Shot.
Chaser ($$).
If Pruitt is right about the gap closing between Tennessee and the teams it envies the most, he’s yet to prove it. He’s coached eight games at Tennessee against its three biggest rivals: Georgia, Florida and Alabama. He’s never come within 22 points of any of them, and three times, his teams have lost by more than 30. His average margin of defeat in those eight games is more than 28 points.
Leave the damned bottle on the bar and go away.
He’s now lost 12 games by at least 21 points, the same number as Butch Jones and Derek Dooley combined.
You know, maybe Fulmer is trying to engineer a return to being UT’s head coach.
Filed under Because Nothing Sucks Like A Big Orange
Your 10.24 game day post
Totally non-Dawg, of course.
Who ‘ya like today?
Filed under College Football
“I’m telling you. It ain’t that way anymore.”
The master has advice for the grasshopper.
Alabama coach Nick Saban has finally relented, albeit reluctantly. He said college football has officially become an offensive game.
“It used to be that good defense beats good offense. Good defense doesn’t beat good offense anymore,” Saban told ESPN on Friday. “It’s just like last week. Georgia has as good a defense as we do an offense, and we scored 41 points on them [in a 41-24 Alabama win]. That’s not the way it used to be. It used to be if you had a good defense, other people weren’t going to score. You were always going to be in the game.
Considering the source… well, I mean, that’s the question now, innit? Do these words carry any weight for Kirby Smart, coming from his mentor? Or does Smart take a different lesson from that 17-point loss?
That’s what Graham Coffey pondered in this post.
Nick Saban built Alabama into a dynasty with Smart as his right-hand man by pulling in as much talent as possible. He took that talent and built strong defenses designed to stuff the run without bringing help from the secondary, and brought in corners and safeties who could cover wide-receivers in man coverage. On offense, he bulked up the line and made sure the Tide were immovable up front. He stuck stud running-backs behind those big lines, and played a ball-control style of football.
14.3, 12.6, 14.1, 7.7, 11.6, 15.1, 18.8, 13.9, 13.7 – That’s how many points the Alabama defense surrendered per a game from 2008 to 2015, Kirby Smart’s last year as the Crimson Tide defensive coordinator. At no point did the Tide rank lower than 5th in the nation in points surrendered per a game, and they won four national titles during that nine year span.
When you know your defense is going to shutdown the opposition’s offense you don’t have to take very many risks on offense, and Alabama didn’t. During that same span from 2008 to 2015 Alabama fielded plenty of very good offenses, but they never played offense at an elite level.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s been the blueprint in Athens since Smart’s arrival and up to a point, it’s served the Georgia program well.
Graham makes a good point reflecting on how the two teams in the 2015 Georgia-Alabama game looked versus the way they looked last Saturday.
There have been people comparing Smart to Mark Richt after Georgia lost to Alabama again last weekend. Anyone who is honestly considering the idea that Georgia’s program is in the same place now as it was then should simply go back and watch the 2015 Georgia vs Alabama game.
In that game Georgia fielded a team that looked like a bunch of high-schoolers next to the Tide. Alabama had superior athletes. Go back and watch the game from last Saturday and you will see two teams that look like equals in almost every way.
The difference last Saturday boiled down to one area.
When the two teams met on Saturday night one had a quarterback who was capable of reading the field quickly and wide-receivers with the ability to take the top off of a defense. One did not.
Mac Jones and his receivers versus Stetson Bennett IV and his receivers was the only lopsided matchup on the field, and it swung the game in the Tide’s favor in the second-half.
I think Kirby already knew what Saban was articulating after he was on the receiving end of the LSU offense in the SECCG. That’s why he made the hard decision to replace a valuable recruiter in James Coley with Todd Monken. And even in the eyes of a tyro like me, it’s obvious that the move is a success.
Smart’s problem in the short run is that he doesn’t have the personnel to keep up with the Joneses (pun intended). Whether that’s because of Bennett’s skill set limitations, the pandemic-related limits on preparation for a new scheme this season, or, more likely, a combination of the two, he’s got to calibrate an approach from here that both gets Georgia back to the SECCG and gives the offense a legitimate chance to trade punches for a full sixty minutes.
That’s one helluva balancing act, if you ask me. And it won’t be made any easier by Smart’s natural instinct to fall back on what he called “our brand of football“. Ironically, I feel better about where things are headed in the longer term, assuming Monken sticks around, than I do about the next six weeks. We shall see.
Filed under Georgia Football, Strategery And Mechanics
Feast or famine
Interesting note from the Alabama game:
Alabama had five touchdown drives in the game.
The first four of those touchdown drives featured a play of 35 yards or more.
Excluding the drive where Alabama had it to end the game, UGA held Alabama to 3 punts, 2 Field Goals, and 1 TD when it didn’t allow a play of 20 yards or more.
Explosive plays and turnovers killed the Dawgs. How easy is that for Smart to clean up?
Filed under Georgia Football
A Cocktail Party in name only
The Georgia-Florida game day experience is just a business trip now.
Can’t help but wonder what Munson’s take would be on it during the broadcast.
Filed under Gators, Gators..., Georgia Football
Unpredictable You
Did anybody tell you Georgia Tech is like a box of chocolates this season?
Georgia Tech is the runaway most unpredictable team so far.
The Yellow Jackets were blown out 73-7 over the weekend by Clemson. That’s just slightly more than the spread of 26 points. But this team has been completely unpredictable. In fact, it is just one point away from having been three scores outside the Vegas spread in each of its games. Georgia Tech has had one blowout victory against the spread (beating Louisville by 19 as an underdog of 5 points) and two blowout spread losses (UCF and Syracuse). Such is life with a freshman quarterback like Jeff Sims and an inconsistent defense. The only game in which Georgia Tech stayed within two scores of the spread was the opener at Florida State, in which it won by a field goal as a 13-point favorite.
This weekend the Yellow Jackets are field goal underdogs at Boston College. Would it really surprise anyone if that game was won by 20 in either direction? It shouldn’t.
You never know what you’re gonna get.
TFW I’m not seeing what they’re seeing
Gotta admit I’m puzzled by something Rennie Curran told Seth Emerson ($$):
Last year former All-SEC defender Rennie Curran said something that struck me, that as a linebacker he could look at the offense before the play and have a good chance of predicting what was coming. So I went back to Curran this week and asked what he thought of Monken’s offense so far:
“I’m loving it a lot more this year. You can tell that Todd Monken is a chess player and not just a coach. He knows how’s to put players in the position to expose a defense’s weaknesses. It still all comes down to execution and not doing things to shoot ourselves in the foot, but I like where we’re headed.”
But …
“My only fear is that we become too overly complex to the point where we get too far away from the basic things like being able to run the ball effectively.”
Does anybody think the problem with the offense this year is that it’s too complex? Maybe Curran is speaking relative to what Coley ran; I don’t know. The only thing I’ve seen so far that’s more involved than the scheme in 2019 is what Luke is asking the offensive line to do now.
What are y’all seeing in that regard?
Filed under Georgia Football, Strategery And Mechanics
Third down blues
Thought I’d share a Twitter thread I was involved in yesterday…
Here’s the conference breakdown on third down attempts. The Dawgs are averaging 16.5 attempts per game. The league’s two best offenses, Alabama and Florida, are averaging 10.5 and 9.3, respectively.
I told Josh (DawgStats) yesterday my biggest preseason misread so far is underestimating the impact of continuity on SEC offenses this season. Monken has a lot on his plate integrating the personnel and scheme changes and it’s showing, more than I expected.
I bitched about the bye week change, but now I’m crossing my fingers that it’s the best thing that could happen at this point in the season. Hope I’m right.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
Get The Picture 
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