Who invites a college team to do anything in June anyway?
Much of the current team will be away from Athens after final exams end this week before returning for summer workouts in June.
Recent national football champions Clemson went in January 2019 and LSU in January 2020. Alabama went in April 2018.
Filed under Georgia Football
Sigh.
No word yet if the incident occured after a trip to Toppers, but I’m guessing the AJ-C is already on that particular mother.
Filed under Crime and Punishment, Georgia Football
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Kirby has collaborated with Loran Smith on a book about the 2021 national championship season, “How ‘Bout Them Dawgs!: The Inside Story of Georgia Football’s 2021 National Championship Season”. My understanding is that publication date is set for June 1. (Boy, how many copies are going to make Father’s Day gifts?) Price tag is reportedly on the hefty side ($39.95), although the buzz is that Smart has made a serious effort for the book to have some real meat to it. But I digress.
Smart’s out promoting his book. Here’s one story he told on the radio in the last week.
… Smart shared insight into the time between the Bulldogs’ Orange Bowl victory over Michigan and the National Championship rematch against Alabama.
He got on the phone with the Wolverines’ coaches, did some self-scouting and helped his team come away with a 33-18 win in Indianapolis for Georgia’s first title in 41 years.
“That was big. That probably gave us the biggest difference in the final game, and it was almost a phone call that didn’t happen,” Smart said on 92.9 The Game. “There’s not that long from the semifinal game to the final game, and you’ve got to use your time wisely. A lot of times when you look back and talk to the opposing team you just played, you can gain some kind of insight that they might have had on you. That was a key ingredient talking to them. They had talked to Alabama who had just beaten us in the SEC Championship. They wanted information from Alabama, so some of the information we gathered from Michigan came from information that they gathered from Alabama. It was very unique to hear that prospective, and they gave us a little bit extra incentive and motivation on some things that Alabama had said about us. Of course I was able to parlay that into motivation for our guys.”
Smart said that the majority of what he heard from Michigan coaches was that Alabama did not believe the Bulldogs were well conditioned. That showed in the SEC Championship Game when the Dawgs’ defense looked a step slower than Bryce Young and the Crimson Tide offense, giving up 536 total yards and 41 points.
However, given the motivation of the scouting report from a source so close to the situation, Smart was able to turn that into incentive for his team to get the conditioning concern fixed for the National Championship.
“Yeah, that was basically the gist of it. A lot of people don’t think you can do a whole lot in 10 days, but at the end of the year, there’s a lot of programs that are like, ‘We’re not going to hit. We’re not going to do this.’ You’re a long way into the season so you cut back, but we saw this as an opportunity to crank up a little bit and do a little more with certain guys that needed it. I thought it really made a difference.”
“It didn’t matter what Michigan told us if our kids didn’t buy into it,” Smart continued. “The kids bought into it more because they heard it from a reliable source than if it had just come from me. That part really helped, and we had about five or six guys that were getting up at about 5:30, 6:00, 7:00 in the morning and ran extra those 10 days. The conditioning level in the National Championship Game was a piece that really helped us.”
There’s a certain “enemy of my enemy is my friend” flavor to that, but even so, it’s impressive that the asskicking in the Orange Bowl didn’t cause any hard feelings.
Filed under Alabama, Georgia Football, Heard About Harbaugh?
Really ($$).
Why are Florida fans so impatient? Billy Napier has done nothing but create a culture that is destined to win big in the next two or three years and start competing yearly with other blue bloods. How naive do you have to be to not see all the momentum and stand behind a guy who was faced with a tall task? — Themanebro
Well…
Please take this statement as a genuine question and not a sarcastic jab: What is the thing that you or any Florida fan could point to as definitive proof that things are headed down a path where the Gators will be competitive with Alabama or Georgia in two or three years? Is it that five-star quarterback DJ Lagway of Willis (Texas) High is on the way? Is it that Florida signed 18 blue-chip prospects in the 2023 cycle? What is the thing that you’re holding onto?
I think it’s possible that Napier eventually arrives at that destination. Florida is making some strides in recruiting to improve its program. But in two or three years?
Florida’s 2023 class included two top-100 players. Alabama’s 2023 class had nine five-star prospects and 18 top-100 players. I don’t even know if there’s a proper analogy for adequately explaining the gap between those two recruiting classes. Add on top of it that Florida is going into a season in which Graham Mertz is its starting quarterback and the program embarrassingly fumbled an NIL deal with Jaden Rashada, and there just isn’t a ton to be outwardly excited about.
The great thing is this dude calling the Gator fans who disagree with his outlook naive. I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.
Filed under Gators, Gators...
Quite the story appeared yesterday:
The state’s Board of Regents said Monday that it is aware of an ongoing investigation related to allegations of online sports gambling by athletes at the University of Iowa and Iowa State University, which would be a violation of NCAA rules.
“The Board of Regents and the universities will fully cooperate with any investigations related to these concerns,” the Regents told the Des Moines Register in a statement. “We are closely monitoring the situation and have confidence that university administrators at each institution will take all necessary steps to ensure ongoing compliance.”
The University of Iowa said in a Monday-afternoon statement that 111 individuals had been flagged in the investigation, including 26 student-athletes in baseball, football, men’s basketball, men’s track and field and wrestling, plus one full-time employee in the UI athletics department.
… Iowa State confirmed that “approximately 15” student-athletes from football, wrestling and track and field may have violated NCAA rules.
“Iowa State University and its Department of Intercollegiate Athletics is aware of online sports wagering allegations involving approximately 15 of our active student-athletes from the sports of football, wrestling and track & field in violation of NCAA rules. The university has notified the NCAA and will take the appropriate actions to resolve these issues,” the ISU statement said.
Helluva daily double you got yourself there, Iowa.
Look, I’m not naive. Gambling by athletes is hardly a recent development. There have been gambling related scandals that have run the gamut of organized sports for at least a century in the country, if not longer. Nor is it new to the college level. There were point shaving affairs that seriously impacted college basketball in the ’40s and ’50s.
What is new is the level of ease and acceptance of sports betting now. You don’t have to go to Vegas, or find a neighborhood bookie any more, just dial up an app on your phone and place your bet. And whatever stigma was attached to gambling on games has surely been diluted by the way the gaming industry has been embraced by sports leagues and schools.
All of which leaves the NCAA in a bit of a pickle. Yes, there are rules and regulations about coaches and players gambling, but it’s awkward at best to be threatening in one breath and extending a welcoming hand to the industry in the next. And I’m not saying the threats are wrong! I don’t see where the NCAA has a choice but to crack down hard on this stuff. It’s easy to talk about things like players’ unions and playoff expansion being an existential threat to college athletics, but those pale in comparison to an end game where the public loses confidence in the games being played fairly.
Whether this is a one-off situation, or the tip of the iceberg, I can’t say. Either way, I just don’t know if the NCAA has it in them to keep the barbarians at bay. It’s not like they’ve had a sterling record with other things lately.
Filed under The NCAA
Can Mike Bobo sustain this level of success?
Ironically, red zone success has typically not been an area of strength for Georgia’s offense under both Bobo and Monken. Here are the national rankings for red zone conversion percentage I found in cfbstats.com:
In terms of mating a prolific offense with elite red zone success, last season was an outlier. Can Bobo maintain the trend line, or not?
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
From CFBNumbers’ College Football Analytics Newsletter:
Based on both out of conference and conference opponents, this is how an average preseason strength of schedule has looked in the CFB playoff era. At the top rests Georgia Tech, who have struggled to find footing in their post Paul Johnson era. The Yellow Jackets have gone 14-32 since 2019, largely in part due to having difficult schedules. While the ACC isn’t the toughest conference in the P5, a mixture of ACC teams with high expectations (UNC/Miami/FSU etc.), hard out of conference opponents (Notre Dame/Tennessee/Ole Miss/UCF etc.) and then oh, Georgia and Clemson every season is a gauntlet for a team like Georgia Tech.
So, Tech can’t recruit, can’t develop players and routinely faces the toughest schedules in college football. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Filed under Georgia Tech Football, Stats Geek!
Get The Picture 