Oy.
SDS, if this is your top five, you ain’t doing it right.
Daily Archives: June 16, 2022
Listing
It’s what you do in the offseason.
From Pro Football Focus’ rankings of 2023 NFL draft offensive tackles: (h/t)
2. Broderick Jones, Georgia (RS Sophomore)
Jones was a former five-star recruit in the 2020 cycle. With Georgia’s veteran-laden offensive line, Jones has never been “the guy” at any position yet. He’s started only four games in his career — all at left tackle last season. On his 463 career snaps, he’s been wildly impressive, earning an 82.0 overall grade for his career. When flipping on his tape, he executes blocks that others on this list simply can’t make. Physically, he looks like the elite NFL tackles. He’ll have every chance to prove that as the Bulldogs starting left tackle next year.
Next comes a somewhat surprising entry in CBSSports’ best college football quarterback rooms.
4. Georgia Bulldogs
Key players: Stetson Bennett IV, Carson Beck, Brock Vandagriff, Gunner Stockton
For all the talk of his limitations, Stetson Bennett ended 2021 ranking No. 2 in the SEC in quarterback rating, No. 4 in passing touchdowns, No. 5 in yards passing and No. 1 in yards per attempt. He was highly efficient and made big-time plays in the national championship game to deliver the ‘Dawgs their first ring since 1980. The room behind him is unproven but supremely talented. Brock Vandagriff was a five-star in the Class of 2021, while Carson Beck is entering his third year with the group. Gunner Stockton, meanwhile, is another blue-chip recruit who should provide valuable depth. We’d like to see a little more experience from the backup group in 2022, but Bennett is a good quarterback.
“… but Bennett is a good quarterback”. C’mon, guys, are you really allowed to say that?
Finally, from the king of lists himself, Phil Steele pops out four highly ranked Georgia position groups for this season.
Steele credited Georgia with having four top-five individual units: receiving — which includes wide receivers and tight ends — offensive line, linebackers and defensive backs. Steele has Georgia’s receiving unit as No. 4 in the country, its offensive line as No. 2 in the country, its linebackers as No. 3 in the country and its defensive backs as No. 1 in the country.
The others, not so much.
Steele didn’t have the Bulldogs quite as high in some of his other positional ratings. Steele placed the quarterbacks at No. 20 nationally — just ahead of rival Florida — the running backs at No. 19, the defensive line at No. 12 — just behind Alabama — and special teams at No. 14.
(Hmmm… just ahead of rival Florida. And here I thought AR15 by himself would be worth a top ten ranking. Eh, maybe if Mullen were still there, amirite?)
It’s impressive that with all the departures, Steels thinks enough of the roster that the Dawgs have no position group outside the top 20.
Filed under Georgia Football
A day late and a dollar short, again
This isn’t about college football, but you can bet the suits running the NCAA are shitting bricks about it.
The Department of Justice, making a request on behalf of three former minor league teams suing Major League Baseball after the league stripped them of their affiliation, asked a federal court Wednesday to limit the antitrust exemption given to MLB.
The three teams suing MLB were among 43 that lost their affiliation when the league downsized the minors to 120 teams in 2020.
MLB has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed, citing the antitrust exemption. In the filing with the U.S. District Court in New York, the Justice Department asked the court to “define the exemption narrowly.”
… In a Supreme Court ruling in 2021, Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned the legal status of baseball’s antitrust exemption, citing the changes in the market since the initial ruling was made in 1922. The Supreme Court has said that baseball wasn’t subject to antitrust rules because it was a series of exhibitions and not interstate commerce.
I can’t think of a more deserving ending to the NCAA’s fruitless pursuit of amateurism, now in the NIL denial stage, than to watch their hopes for a broad Congressional antitrust exemption get nuked by the courts. After spending millions more defending it, of course. It’s the way they roll.
Filed under See You In Court, The NCAA
Dream season on the Flats
You’d think it would be pretty hard to do, but Bill Connelly’s managed to fashion three paragraphs ($$) in which it seems like each sentence is sadder than the previous one.
Will Geoff Collins’ Hail Mary work? Hired to replace option-dependent Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech in 2019, Collins was always going to need some time to craft a more modern program. But three years in, he has a 9-25 record, and after jumping from 111th to 75th in his second season, his Jackets stumbled back to 96th in 2021 and lost a majority of their most talented players to either graduation or the transfer portal. His fourth Tech team currently ranks 118th in my returning production rankings; only five returnees took more than 400 snaps in a Tech uniform last year — three on offense and two on defense.
There’s just as much turnover on staff, where Collins brought in six new assistants, including former Notre Dame and Tulane offensive coordinator Chip Long. Collins also dipped heavily into the portal, focusing on the secondary (five newcomers), offensive line (four) and skill corps (four) and bringing in a pair of quarterbacks — Akron’s Zach Gibson and Clemson’s Taisun Phommachanh — to battle Jeff Sims for the starting job. By far the most proven transfer is one from last year: defensive end Keion White, who recorded 19 tackles for loss in 2019 but missed 2021 because of an ankle injury.
This is a whole lot of change. Collins had almost no choice but to give it a shot after three seasons of failing to build depth or a culture of success. A Hail Mary almost never works, and Georgia Tech’s schedule is brutal: It features five projected top-20 teams (three in the first five games) and ranks as the seventh-hardest overall at the moment. Odds certainly favor Tech bringing in a new coach for 2023, but huge chemistry experiments work just often enough that the Yellow Jackets could be interesting to follow this season. For a while, at least.
With this schedule, it’s likely to be a very short while.
Filed under Georgia Tech Football
It may not be Montana…
Quick observation from Stewart Mandel’s online magazine ($$):
If anybody in the ACC needed a reminder last month, they needed to look no further than the site of their May meetings in Amelia Island, Fla. There, inside the Ritz-Carlton gift shop, was a line of golf shirts available for purchase.
They featured four different color blocks of Georgia Bulldogs polos.
I wonder if anyone had trouble identifying the logo.
Filed under Georgia Football
Get The Picture 