This is getting ridiculous. Almost.
Christmas came early this year, Dawg fans. Savor it.
Daily Archives: June 1, 2021
Back in the portal again
Georgia has again reached into the transfer portal this offseason and it has landed another defensive back. Dawgs247 has learned that former Clemson cornerback Derion Kendrick is now on his way to Athens and then will join the team officially at some point in the next 24 hours.
So today, Mullen gets a raise and Smart gets a starting cornerback. I’ll take that trade all day long.
Filed under Georgia Football, Transfers Are For Coaches.
Getting in bed with The Portal Master™
What love has joined together, don’t let no college football season take it apart.
Yeppers, that’s more than Kirby Smart’s banking. Those 8-4 seasons are getting expensive as hell.
Filed under Gators, Gators..., It's Just Bidness
Jeremy Pruitt’s proud legacy
David Ubben looks over UT’s 2021 schedule in order of importance ($$) and has this to say about the Georgia game:
Three of Tennessee’s proudest moments under Pruitt came against Georgia, despite being rolled in all three games. A third-quarter rally in 2018 left Pruitt choked up in the postgame press conference as he recounted it. In 2019, Brian Maurer hit Marquez Callaway for a 73-yard touchdown pass in his first career start to ignite Neyland Stadium and make Maurer feel like the future. And in 2020, the Vols trotted into halftime after a goal-line stand preserved their lead and felt like they might be turning a corner before the bottom fell out on the season and the Pruitt era. This is not a game Tennessee can win, but can it produce another memorable moment? I wouldn’t rule it out.
Just a reminder: Georgia’s average margin of victory in those three games was 26 points. Proud!
If Ubben’s being sarcastic, that’s pretty funny. Hell, even if he isn’t, it’s pretty funny.
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UPDATE: He wasn’t being sarcastic.
Filed under Because Nothing Sucks Like A Big Orange
“It will be the worst month in the history of college football coaching.”
June, 2021: college football roster management’s perfect storm ($$).
After a dead period that spanned more than a year, the college football recruiting world is returning to normal. And it’s not a small step toward normalcy — it’s a cannonball into the pool of official visits, evaluation camps and a new NCAA rule that allows for head coaches and their assistants to evaluate prospects one-on-one on campus. At the same time, coaches are having to formulate recruiting plans while considering the impact of the new one-time transfer rule and the looming name, image and likeness legislation. It’s all happening at the same time.
Toss in how programs have to figure out how to sell NIL compensation to recruits, and, as Kirby Smart put it, “It’s about to go crazy.”
Some programs — the organized ones, the ones with enough resources to manage the craziness — will embrace the challenge and do just fine. The rest? Kinda cranky about it, would be my guess.
“Anybody that tells you they’ve got all this figured out is bullshitting you,” said one SEC assistant. “Kids want to come in (to your facilities), but they don’t want to work out. I don’t want to sound like the old cranky man, but all of the power has shifted to the player now. Why would they want to come to (a certain school) and work out, when you have some of these other programs saying, ‘Why don’t you come here and just hang out.’
Oh, and speaking of the transfer rule, check out this strategy that sounds like it’s gaining momentum: “Question: Why would you not sign the entire class with (transfer) portal kids because at least you know that they have used their one-time transfer and you will have them without threat of going in portal?” The answer to that will come in two or three years down the road, methinks.
It’s gonna be quite a ride for a while, that’s for sure. Crazy, even.
Filed under Recruiting, Transfers Are For Coaches.
Kirby Smart and the art of scoring
I don’t buy everything Dean Legge’s is selling in this piece — for one thing, if Smart’s had an epiphany about offense, it came after the 2019 SECCG blowout, not by the 2016 season — but I can’t argue with some of the stats he’s assembled.
The classic that was the 2018 National Title Game between Alabama and Georgia is a mark in the evolution of college football. That game was a defensive fight – for now it looks like the last defensive fight we are going to see for a while. It is the only game in the history of the College Football Playoff National Championship Game were the winner has failed to score 30 points.
Only four games in the history of the College Football Playoff have concluded with the winner failing to score 30 points or more (2016 Alabama 24-7 vs. Washington; 2017 Alabama 24-6 vs. Clemson; 2020 Clemson 29-23 vs. Ohio State).
The winning team in the 24 games of the entire College Football Playoff (since 2014) is averaging 40.1 points per game in in their wins.
Over that period, Georgia has only averaged better than forty points a game over a season once, in 2014. And that, of course, was compiled in the regular season against a bunch of teams that weren’t anywhere near playoff caliber in quality.
Consider that Fromm had two 300-yard games in 42 starts; Daniels has had two in four starts.
Legge takes that to mean Georgia has already successfully translated to the level of the sport’s offensive powerhouses over the past couple of seasons. I see that as merely a good start towards that. For one thing, as exciting as the offense was to watch in those four games with Daniels at the helm, it averaged 37.25 points per game. By Legge’s own analysis, that ain’t enough.
The good news is there’s a lot of returning talent, Monken is in his second season of installing his scheme and they all got the benefit of a full spring practice working with each other.
Still, that all falls under the category of giving hope. There will be plenty to keep an eye on in the opener, but seeing how well oiled Georgia’s offense looks against Clemson’s defense will tell us whether that hope was realistic.
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!, Strategery And Mechanics
Today, in betting factoids
Take this nugget about Georgia’s opener for what it’s worth:
Clemson hasn’t been a favorite of three points or fewer since it faced Ohio State in the 2019 CFP semifinals.
It’s not exactly end of story, is it?
Returning talent and the portal
I thought I’d compare Parker Fleming’s Returning Talent Index from March 23rd…
… with where it stands now.
Overall, things have tightened noticeably — check out how Alabama’s standing has improved, although its index number has barely changed. Notice also that Georgia’s standing and index number has dropped more significantly. All of this I would think can be chalked up to the transfer portal to date. As needed and talented as Tykee Smith may be, overall, Georgia’s lost more talent to the portal than it’s gained this spring.
That being said, it will be quite interesting to see where Georgia stands if Parker updates his Index once more before the season starts, especially if the rumors about Kendrick and Gilbert come to fruition.
By the way, the next highest rated team in the SEC in terms of RTI is Florida, at 41st. Gappin’, baby!
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!, Transfers Are For Coaches.
One more thing about HB 617
Steve Berkowitz wrote a handy summary of the various state NIL compensation laws due to come into effect in the near future. Here’s what he wrote about Georgia’s:
The law has a provision under which schools can require athletes who have NIL deals to put some of that money into a pool that would be distributed to all athletes. The money from the pool would be distributed to athletes after they graduate or after they have been out of school for at least a year, with the amount to each athlete being based on the number of months in which they were an athlete for the school. Athletics department officials at Georgia and Georgia Tech say they do not intend to have such a pool, and it is possible this would conflict with the NCAA’s prohibitions on pay for play, since any athlete would be getting money.
Under another provision, no “officer, director, employee, or agent” of a booster club can provide an athlete with NIL compensation. The NCAA’s proposals do not squarely address this, but in a statement that addresses the rationale and intent of one proposal, the NCAA notes that “boosters may be the most likely sources of opportunities” for athletes to engage in NIL activities.
However, Georgia’s law also says it will be “rendered null and without effect” upon the effective date of “any policy, rule or regulation” that lets college athletes be compensated for NIL use. So if the NCAA passes a new set of permissive rules that take effect July 1, this law could get wiped off the books.
As much focus as has been paid to the part referenced in the first paragraph, not as much attention has been paid to what he mentions in his last. Here’s the relevant language from HB 617:
In other words, if the NCAA enacts anything that could be considered a rule allowing college athletes to receive some form of compensation for their NIL rights, no matter how much more restrictive than Georgia’s law permits, the statute is immediately a dead letter. Berkowitz doesn’t mention a similar provision in any other state’s legislation referenced in his article, so I presume it’s just another unique feature that could come back to bite UGA’s recruiting in the ass.
I’m beginning to wonder if anyone in the Georgia legislature ever reads what they pass. I’m also beginning to wonder if the best outcome for protecting UGA’s recruiting from schools in other states with better drafted NIL laws is a federal preemption. Sheesh.
Filed under Georgia Football, Political Wankery, Recruiting, The NCAA
Alex, I’ll take “Topics I don’t want to revisit” for $200
There are many ways I could describe that class. “Interesting” isn’t one of them.
Filed under Georgia Football, Recruiting
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