A “special reunion”

South Carolina’s football history is so devoid of greatness that they’ve decided to honor a football coach who literally quit on them mid-season.

Steve Spurrier, South Carolina’s winningest coach, and members of four of his most successful teams will reunite at Williams-Brice Stadium on Nov. 4 when the Gamecocks host Jacksonville State. The 2010-13 squads compiled a 42-11 record with three 11-2 seasons, each tied for the most successful season in USC history, and won the 2010 SEC East championship.

Spurrier will address the crowd at halftime. The teams will also be recognized at halftime and will gather for a private reception the night before.

It won’t be Spurrier’s first return to Columbia — he was there most recently when USC hosted Florida two years ago — but it will be the first time he’s been recognized. His name adorns the Northeast ramp at Williams-Brice in honor of his win total and the three 11-2 seasons.

Spurrier quit midway through the 2015 season, less than two years after his 2013 squad finished 11-2 and ranked No. 4 in the country.

In the spirit of keeping it real, they ought to invite Greyson Lambert to provide a few choice comments.

Welcome to the new normal

Might as well call this the “Prime” Rule:

The NCAA has voted to eliminate the annual limit on initial counters in FBS. So, you can replace as many scholarships as you lose up to 85 scholarships.

— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) October 4, 2023

Yeah, it does make permanent what was implemented temporarily to help coaches manage their rosters in the wake of COVID.  Now, however, this comes across like the NCAA is giving the green light to wholesale roster change for the sake of roster change.

It’s a good thing the NCAA insists this isn’t a job.  I’d hate to think college players could be fired whenever a coach feels like it.

Smartspeak

Couple of quotes from Smart’s presser yesterday I thought I’d share.  Although I can’t say I’m buying this one, which sounds like it comes straight from the Vince Dooley school for finding something praiseworthy about any opponent:

“I personally think every SEC team should be ranked. I guarantee you that there are some teams that don’t want to play them that are ranked.”

Riiiight.  Assuming he votes in the Coaches Poll, somebody should pin this quote and refer back to it when they review his end of season ballot, because I’m fairly certain it won’t have 14 SEC teams on it.

This, on the other hand, I found interesting.

“I haven’t watched everybody, so it’s hard for me to say. I just feel like there’s a lot more parity out there, and I don’t know why it is. I don’t think anybody is as good as they were three or four years ago. I watch games of three or four years ago, and I don’t think high school football is as good as it was three or four years ago. I think less kids are playing football, and the quality of the football that’s played is a little less. At the grassroots level, the teaching of it, less people played football that are coaching it. When you struggle to find officials because people didn’t play and they don’t want to officiate, and they have to rotate high school games because they don’t have enough officials, and when you can’t find coaches to coach youth organizations and they didn’t play, the quality of the sport goes down a little bit. It deteriorates, and I’ve been able to see that. There are just less people playing too. That’s more saying that it’s a sloppier game than it is a finesse game or a power game. That doesn’t explain why there’s more parity.”

Two parts to unpack there.  One, I have the feeling if there’s a sense of greater parity out there than we’re used to seeing, a lot of that is the result of Alabama and Georgia not being the dominant teams we’ve been accustomed to watching play.

Two, Kirby, who must watch a shit ton of tape, certainly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the state of high school play.  He hints at the underlying cause — fewer people playing, fewer with football experience coaching — without getting into why that’s happening.  It’s something the people running college sports should be more concerned about than NIL and antitrust exemptions.  That they’re not is just another reason the long term prospects for college football aren’t healthy.

A truncated Observations post

Between shaky reception and distractions at the track (you haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed a Porsche tractor race, trust me), I wasn’t able to give Saturday’s game my full attention from start to finish, so it seems unfair to put out the usual bullet point break down.  You’ll have to settle for a few broad strokes I gathered from what I was able to watch.

• Georgia’s edge setting against the run blows chunks.  It’s been bad for a few games, but Saturday was the nadir.  It was so bad, it put me in mind of that embarrassing 2014 Cocktail Party loss.  (Ironic, given that Muschamp was the Gator head coach in that debacle.)  What made this so hard to take was that they never adjusted in the second half.  And this was the most one-dimensional offense Georgia has seen this season!  That the lack of discipline maintaining gap integrity is uncharacteristic of a Smart-coached defense doesn’t make it any less distressing.  I don’t know what the coaches need to do, but they had better figure out something fast.
• Freeze outcoached Muschamp and Schumann.  Hand in hand with the poor execution goes the poor scheming and failure to adjust.  Auburn lacks a functional passing game this season.  Given what teams have done to Georgia’s defense with a running quarterback, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what Freeze had up his sleeve.  Essentially, he tweaked UAB’s game plan to fit his own purposes. (It worked, too, at least until Auburn ran out of time at the end.)  Yet Georgia sat in its usual two-high safeties look for much of the game, for some reason.
• Beck and Bowers, or is it Bowers and Beck?  Enough said.
• The offensive line remains a mess when it comes to run blocking.  Truss is at a new position, so I get some of the problem, but what’s Ratledge’s excuse?
• Turnovers were brutal.  A cursory look at some of the stats — UGA outgained Auburn by more than 100 yards, had more first downs, were 8-13 on third down conversions while holding the Tigers to a 2-12 rate and were 4-4 in the red zone — and you might have thought the Dawgs had another routine, winning day on the Plains.  Yet Auburn had a win probability in excess of 60% with ten minutes to go in the third quarter.  So, yes, minus the screw ups, Georgia wins this game comfortably.  Unfortunately, that’s a recurring theme in 2023.
• Let’s hear it for the kicker!  Solid recovery from Woodring, who nailed his first two field goal attempts in a road game like they were no problem at all.
• They got Auburn’s best shot.  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  The point being, with as much as I saw go wrong, this team still held its ground in the second half and eventually took control of the game late.  There are plenty of teams out there that aren’t capable of doing that.

I’ll leave things at that.  This team has a lot of tightening up left to do and with their first ranked opponent coming to town this week, not a helluva lot of time to do it.

Who didn’t see this coming?

This may be the most “of course they are” post ever in the history of this blog.

Per @BernieFratto, According to some reports, Urban Meyer will interview for Michigan State’s Head Coaching Position.

“Michigan State has a lot of Donors to back this type of deal up, so we’ll see where it goes.” pic.twitter.com/S0ozhFumRN

— College Football Report (@CFBRep) October 3, 2023

Going from a guy who jerked off while on the phone with a woman who speaks frequently to football teams about sexual assault to someone who tolerated for years an assistant’s assaults on his wife?  Shit, they’re a perfect match for each other.

************************************************************************

UPDATE:

About the “reports” linking Urban Meyer to the Michigan State HC job… I just checked with him. There is zero truth to it with him being a candidate for it. He has no interest in that, and is happy with what he’s doing now at Fox Sports.

— Bruce Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB) October 4, 2023

As Dirty Harry once said, a man’s gotta know his limitations.  It took some time, but maybe Corch has admitted to his.

Semi-elite?

As much as I would like to argue with Bill Connelly’s assessment of Georgia through five games ($$), I’m not really sure what I can come up with in rebuttal.

Georgia has played two SEC games against opponents in the bottom half of the conference. Against South Carolina (41st in SP+) at home, the Dawgs trailed 14-3 at halftime. Against Auburn on Saturday, in their first road game of the season, they were down 10-0 after 13 minutes. It was hard to even pretend they were in legitimate danger — they outscored the Gamecocks 21-0 in the second half and outscored Auburn 27-10 over the final 47 minutes — but both games were far closer, and for far longer a period of time, than they had any reason to be.

Even if you’re the vastly superior team, if your game is tied in the fourth quarter, as was the case in Auburn, it can take just one funky bounce to screw up your season. Georgia has had plenty of injury problems, but despite the easy schedule, the Dawgs are merely good in a bunch of categories a title contender is expected to be great in. Their offense is 19th in points per drive, and their defense is 10th. They’re 10th in success rate and 17th in success rate allowed. In the red zone, they’re 60th in touchdown rate and 103rd in TD rate allowed. A two-time defending national champion gets the benefit of the doubt, but this just hasn’t been a genuinely elite team to date.

Of course, someone has to make Georgia pay. South Carolina and Auburn couldn’t, and obviously Ball State (0-0 after one quarter, 45-3 final) and UAB (7-7 after 19 minutes, 49-21 final) came nowhere close. Of the Dawgs’ seven remaining regular-season opponents, none rank higher than 15th in SP+, but five rank better than South Carolina or Auburn, starting with Kentucky (21st) on Saturday. At any moment, the Bulldogs could shift into gear and dominate, but if they continue to play like they have been, they aren’t beating all five of those teams.

No, I can’t argue the Dawgs have played like an elite team, at least not on a 60-minute, week after week basis.  (That doesn’t mean they haven’t looked elite in spots, particularly when they’ve needed to.)

None of which is to say Georgia doesn’t have enough to navigate the remaining regular season schedule successfully.  But it sure would be nice to enlarge that margin for error.

As Carson Beck goes, so goes Georgia.

Check out Beck’s passer rating by quarter:

• 1st — 118.42
• 2nd — 153.76
• 3rd — 200.11
• 4th — 205.94

Basically, it just takes him a while to find his footing.  The coaches need to figure out how to get him there sooner.  (In case you’re wondering, last season, Bennett never had a passer rating by quarter that exceeded 200.  But he was never under 150, either.)

When they’ve needed Beck to be great, he’s delivered.  Pretty impressive for someone with a whopping five starts under his belt.