I’d like to believe that’s karma. It’s the romantic in me.
Daily Archives: November 5, 2021
Adversity comes in waves.
This is turning out to be a fine morning.
Mr. Jones, you’re up, buddy.
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UPDATE: Bad news for Mizzou, too.
Filed under Georgia Football, The Body Is A Temple
Dead money
According to an ESPN analysis of financial records of athletics departments at public universities, FBS programs spent more than $533.6 million in dead money in an 11-year period from Jan. 1, 2010, to Jan. 31, 2021. That’s money those programs owed coaches in football and men’s and women’s basketball who were fired without cause with time left on their contracts. The severance payments were made over several years or, in a few cases, in one lump sum.
Remarkably, the dead money total is actually much more than that. The financial records did not include payments for many of the coaches who were fired during or after the 2020 football and 2020-21 basketball seasons. In football alone, FBS schools committed another $107.6 million in severance pay before mitigation to fired coaches and their staffs in 2020.
I’m sorry, what was that you said about not being able to afford to pay college athletes?
It does mean more in the SEC, so it’s not all that surprising that SEC teams paid more ($123.2M) to dismissed football coaches than the Big Ten ($67.7M) and Big 12 ($50.0M) combined.
BREAKING: Jimmy Sexton is undefeated.
That explains the header to the story. Well played, ESPN.
Filed under College Football, It's Just Bidness
“We still here.”
Nakobe Dean, boss.
There’s a man who knows what the stadium’s supposed to look like in the fourth quarter of a Georgia Cocktail Party blowout.
Filed under Georgia Football
Kirby’s dilemma
Matt Hinton sums it up.
But let’s be real: Nobody’s about to confuse the guy for the second coming of Baker Mayfield in the annals of former walk-ons made good, and if the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the era of the overachieving “game manager” type riding the coattails of an elite defense to a championship are ancient history. (I sincerely try to avoid the game manager cliché here, but sometimes it is what is is.) On that note, Bennett’s outing against Florida, arguably the most athletic defense he’s faced, was telling. All 3 of Georgia’s offensive touchdowns were set up by the defense and special teams handing the offense a short field, and on 2 of them Bennett’s job consisted strictly of handing off the ball. In the meantime, he finished 10/19 for 161 yards and 2 INTs.
There is an argument to be made that Georgia’s defense is playing at a level above elite, that even the Alabamas, Oklahomas and Ohio States of the world are more likely to wilt under its power than they are to score 20 points, and that in that context the distinction between Bennett’s savvy and Daniels’ next-level skill set is largely academic.
If you were Kirby Smart, knowing his history of decision-making at the position, is that a bet you’d be willing to take? Or would you be taking advantage of the next few weeks to get the future NFL Draft pick back up to speed in time to do what you brought him in to do in the postseason? At this point in the year, each week that goes by with Daniels on the bench is one step closer to leaving him there for good. With the stakes as high are they are, Smart’s going to have to decide fast whether he’s really willing to live with that.
It’s a good point: is the defense really good enough to afford Smart the choice of playing Stetson Bennett against teams like Alabama and Ohio State, that have offensive pulses? (Assuming, of course, that Daniels is, at some point soon, comfortably healthy.) I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that in every game in which Bennett has started, he’s either won because Georgia’s defense throttled the opponent or he’s lost because he couldn’t keep up with the opponent’s offense.
Can Georgia win a game on Stetson’s arm if they need to? That’s the question Smart has to answer.
Filed under Georgia Football
“Really, how poor is this Missouri run defense?”
Poor enough for a Mizzou blogger to say, apparently free of snark, “Georgia will almost assuredly run for over 250 yards against Missouri this weekend, but maybe that is not the end of the world.”
When you’re at a point where an asskicking will be a teaching experience, you’re in a bad place, my friends.
Filed under Georgia Football, SEC Football
Pretty, pretty petty
The Colonial Athletic Association isn’t doing this for the kids.
Thursday afternoon, James Madison University athletes received a text notification: mandatory all-sports meeting at 7:30 p.m., in the basketball arena. For many, curiosity turned quickly to dread.
“That had never happened in my time here,” says senior golfer Carly Lyvers. “With the rumors that had been going around, I had a feeling that it probably wasn’t going to be great.”
As teams filed in and sat down together, the JMU coaches watched with what one described as “a pit in your stomach.” They’d had their own meeting earlier in the day and knew what was coming. Soon, athletic director Jeff Bourne stood up and informed the athletes that the rumors Lyvers mentioned were true: The majority of them will not be allowed to compete for a Colonial Athletic Association championship. “It kind of hit everyone in the gut,” Lyvers says.
Realignment met retribution, with the predictable casualties: the athletes themselves. It’s a very 2021 college athletics story, in all the worst ways.
James Madison’s move to the Sun Belt Conference, expected to be finalized Friday, comes at the tail end of a chain-reaction of realignment moves that have shaken college sports yet again. Most of the schools doing the moving are upgrading into enhanced positions, but the greater health of college sports only gets worse. That’s true for many reasons, not the least of which is the pettiness on display in this situation.
JMU’s impending move led to CAA membership invoking a two-decade-old bylaw that banned the Dukes from championship competition. The only teams able to compete are football (where the CAA teams operate outside of league purview) and two whose championships are this week, field hockey and women’s soccer.
Everyone else at the best all-sports school in the conference is out, effective immediately.
That should fix everything. Assholes.
Filed under It's Not Easy Being A Mid-Major
His finest hour
Since a lot of folks are reminiscing about Mark Richt’s time in Athens, I thought I’d add my contribution.
By 2012, my emotional attachment to Mark Richt as Georgia’s head coach had been irretrievably severed, but, damn, if this response to Chuck Oliver, after the most painful loss of Richt’s Georgia tenure, couldn’t make me admire the hell out of the man, nothing ever would.
Filed under Georgia Football
TFW you know they’ve got questions
What a time to be alive, when a college football coach has to address something like this at his weekly presser:
C’mon, man. The only way that story isn’t a distraction is if you’re in a coma.
Filed under Blowing Smoke, Texas Is Just Better Than You Are.
Get The Picture 
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