“I didn’t come away feeling great about Florida.”

Et tu, PAWWWLLL?

“I still think Florida is an enigma Cole,” Finebaum said on McElroy and Cubelic according to On3. “And what do we know about Florida other than a disastrous first season? We know that in the last six or eight weeks Billy Napier is killing it on the recruiting trail. Okay. If you’re sitting over there where Florida is, and you’re doing anything other than killing it on the recruiting trail, you’re in big trouble. But ultimately is he moving ahead of Georgia?

“I haven’t seen that. I mean, they’re moving up the charts but to win the SEC, you need more than a big recruiting class, you need a lot. So I didn’t come away feeling great about Florida.”

Moving ahead?  I think your average Gator fan would be happy if Billy simply wasn’t losing any more ground.

That Starks interception

I was amazed by it in real time, but the sheer athleticism and football IQ on display when you watch it unfold in slo mo is astounding.

🧵: For this week’s stat thread, we will be taking a look a Malaki Starks!

Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/2zty6JaUVp

— Jonathan Williams (@Dr_JWill) July 24, 2023

That it occurred in his first game as a collegian makes it even more so.  Wowser.

Not as easy as it looks

I’m probably reading more into it than I should, but if Bobo hasn’t changed the offensive terminology from what was used under Monken, and any changes are described by Smart as mere “wrinkles”, why am I seeing a quote like this?

“I think we’ve gotten a lot more comfortable,” Van Pran said. “I look forward to fall camp. I think fall camp will be really big for us and with really forming what we can be as a team. I’m excited for it. So I think we’ve made some progress, but I think we have a little bit more to focus on.”

Quarterbacking

Ian Boyd:

College quarterbacks rarely power champions, instead they’re often glue guys who facilitate and connect championship talent at receiver and the O-line. He’s the jockey or driver for a powerfully built machine.

There are exceptions, of course.

A massive factor here is the fact college offenses tend to be built around the run game. The blue bloods stockpile elite big men to power their attacks in the trenches and the over-achieving non-blue bloods are generally the schools who work out innovative ways to run the ball and set up play-action without having access to elite O-line recruiting.

Boise State and Baylor (under Art Briles) are obvious examples of the latter. Nebraska could count here as well even though everyone counts them as a blue blood due to their sustained success, but instead of using play-action they used the option pitch or quarterback run game.

These dynamics, along with quarterback play in general, are all pretty poorly understood by the general college football commentariat.

Including Heisman Trophy voters, but I digress.  Boyd poses what he calls “Ian’s 4 Laws of College Quarterbacks”:

My four laws that explain the nature of college quarterback play: https://t.co/cadBMJmFgi pic.twitter.com/5XUQmBChU8

— Captain Bruisin, cruise director (@Ian_A_Boyd) July 24, 2023

You may scoff somewhat, but looking at those, I would say that Kirby is on the mother, as he usually is.  Boyd actually mentions Bennett as an example of what he’s talking about.

Now granted, Georgia would win the title with returning starting quarterback Stetson Bennett, but not a lot of people would say Georgia won either title because of Bennett. The people who thought Georgia would win in 2022 didn’t think they’d win because of Bennett. Not to say he wasn’t a productive player who made important plays, but a lot of his plays were of the sort many other guys could also be imagined to have made. He wasn’t the engine of Georgia’s success.

If you look at Georgia’s personnel moves this offseason, both in the transfer portal and on the recruiting front, you’ll see an emphasis on improving the wide receiver room.  (They’ve already got the tight end room optimized.)  Georgia has never abandoned the running game, or having the kind of offensive line that can allow it to flourish.  And one big reason Bennett eventually won the starting job over Daniels was because Smart and Monken recognized the value of his mobility.

Anyway, something to think about.

Who coulda seen it coming, I ask ‘ya?

I am hard pressed to come up with a group of people more unduly impressed with their collective intellectual grasp than college athletic directors.  Here, The Athletic ($$) gathered four of their former shining lights, DeLoss Dodds, Tom Osborne, Barry Alvarez and Joel Maturi, threw them in a room and basically asked “WTF happened, fellas?”

Their answers are both sad and hilarious.

Dodds: It is what it is because we didn’t try to do the right thing a long time ago. When the NCAA lost the television rights and the (College Football Association) took it – which was probably a pretty good system – but then the SEC dropped out of that and it became a conference thing. And then the conference commissioners got into competition about who could generate the biggest TV package and that’s the direction we’ve gone. It’s left a lot of people in the rearview mirror and it’s put TV executives in charge of college athletics.

That’s pretty much where we are.

When (the Supreme Court) gave each institution the rights to their own TV rights, that’s what changed the world. But on the other side of that, instead of the college people dictating what would happen in TV, the TV people started dictating what was going to happen to the colleges.

How could they let that happen?  I mean, other than by not taking the money…

Maturi: Let’s be honest: It is driven by finances. That’s the reality of college sports today. And probably there’s never been a time in history where it’s changing so much, whether it be the leadership, whether it be the conference realignment that exists.

… The SEC and the Big Ten seem to be driving a lot. Some people don’t know if there’s going to be five Power 5 conferences, let alone six or something because the AAC thinks they belong. From a success standpoint, they may be right but not necessarily from a financial standpoint. That’s what determines things.

If I’m an AD at Minnesota or any place in the Big Ten, I don’t want to add another school that’s going to decrease the amount of money that I get annually. You’ll gladly add somebody that’s going to add to the amount of money that I get annually. But I’m not so sure that I’d want to reduce it, even if it’s a very successful athletic school. I don’t think that drives the money.

Money is driving college athletics?  The things you can learn from elder statesmen…

Nothing new under the Athens sun

It’s a real shame Alan Judd is no longer gainfully employed by the Journal-Constitution because, boy, have I stumbled across a story that seems right up his alley.

Hundreds of Athens drivers were caught going over the speed limit in 2018 on College Station Road.

If you were one of the ones caught speeding, chances are, you were going 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, it was in the afternoon, and you were pulled over by Sgt. John “Jay” Butt.

Documents obtained from an open records request with the Athens-Clarke County Municipal Court show that from June to December 2018, the police department issued 576 citations related to speeding on College Station Road alone. However, Butt, Athens-Clarke County traffic unit supervisor, issued nearly half of the citations given in that six-month period.

The information prompted a three-month investigation as to why so many people are getting pulled over for speeding on this road. Even though officers are allowed to patrol any area in the county, Butt says he’s on College Station regularly and spends about 75% to 80% of his time issuing citations.

“I pull over a couple people a day there,” Butt says. “I pretty much make my decision when I stop somebody, I’m going to issue a citation.”

Dateline on that story:  July 25, 2019.

Maybe, just maybe — work with me here — Athens, Georgia has a bigger speeding problem than just with UGA football players.

(h/t Roe DAWG)