Moar explosion

Worried about this year’s offense needing to carry the defense, at least a little bit?  So is Kirby Smart.

“Right now, that’s all people talk about: five first-rounders on defense. That’s an unbelievable stat. That’s great, but what’s overshadowed is we were one of the most explosive teams in college football last year,” Smart told Finebaum. “Now, we won a lot of games by a margin that we didn’t get to continually pound people with explosive plays and numbers, but when you look at passes over 10-12 yards, we were top-5, top-10 in the country. So, nobody even acknowledges that because they’re overshadowed by this really good defense.”

“We’ll have to be even better and even more explosive on offense this year because we probably don’t have five first-rounders on our defense next year. But we’ve got some really explosive offensive players. We’ve got a great offensive staff,” Smart said. “They did some wonderful things as far as being explosive [last season], but we probably didn’t get the fourth-quarter stats that some people had because early in our season we had some runs there where the games were out of hand.”

If nothing else, it sounds like fourth quarters may not as sleepy as they were during the ’21 regular season.

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“But progress — money being another word for it — almost always trumps tradition…”

So, the 1+7 vs. 3+6 battle for the soul of the SEC’s future scheduling format continues on.  If I’m reading Seth Emerson’s piece ($$) correctly, acceptance of the 3+6 remains more a question of when, not if.  What’s going to take some time are two factors:  (1) renegotiating the terms of the TV deal with ESPN and (2) the future shape of CFP expansion.

In other words, Sankey needs to be able to show the holdouts more money in return for getting past their scruples over going to a nine-game conference schedule.

The short term doesn’t look promising, unfortunately.  Seth sounds he thinks we may be looking at a transitional period that’s gonna be a little… well, less than satisfying.

In the meantime, though, Georgia and Auburn may be on the brink. It may have to take a breather as an every-year game, as a trade-off for finally getting a more diverse schedule.

Is that a trade-off most Georgia fans would take? Or will Georgia, which already made the sacrifice in 2012 by playing at Auburn twice in a row, stand on the table and demand to keep its rivalry?

If only that were up to us.  But it’s not.

“Those things are important, but again, we’re one-16th (of the SEC), right,” athletic director Josh Brooks said last month, before Destin.