A really interesting concept from Major League Baseball. For $4.95 per month, users will be able to download 20-minute videos almost immediately after games which feature all hits, runs, and relevant plays in a game. These condensed games are not just highlights – all of the game’s action is preserved. You can still see how a game develops, check and see how your roto players are doing, and watch the games of contenders in your team’s division in about an hour.

I would love for the SEC to offer something like this. How much of a football game is actually action? Again about 20 minutes. The rest is huddling or cleaning up after a tackle, etc. For $4.95 per month, would you pay for a service which offered every minute of football action in the SEC for a given weekend (about 20 minutes per game or a few hours total) and not miss a play? I know I would. Bring it on.

Gym Dogs just miss a miracle
After a season of injuries and setbacks, the Gym Dogs survived from meet to meet, won the SEC championship, and last night came within a hair of taking the national championship. As it turned out, Alabama turned in a great performance of their own to place first, but Georgia left it all on the mats. Pulling things together this year might have been one of Suzanne Yoculan’s best coaching jobs, and the story of the 2002 gymnastics season is one of the better ones to come out of Athens in some time.

Something that didn’t come out of the Athletic Board meeting this weekend – unless every news story passed over it in favor of the expansion of Sanford, there was no news on the longterm plans for the basketball program. What a good chance to capitalize on the success of Jim Harrick and show some foresight. But nothing except a ticket price increase. Not even a basic commitment to renovate Stegeman Coliseum. We know Harrick and all coaches meet privately with the athletic department to bring these kinds of concerns; let’s hope he had more success there than these reports from the public Athletic Board meetings.

The hot topic today is the proposed expansion of Sanford Stadium discussed by the Athletic Board this weekend. The issue of course is how to add capacity without disrupting Sanford’s open west end and the view from the bridge on Sanford Drive. Though, as Coach Dooley says, enclosing the west end “may happen at some point,” that kind of major project should only happen when a few questions are answered:

• Is the expansion driven by demand for renewable season tickets? It doesn’t sound like it. Part of Dooley’s justification for the current expansion is that “just from the visitors standpoint alone, there’s a lot of demand.” Building an expansion to satisfy single-game tickets and nonrenewable season tickets is also questionable. Though the added gate revenue will help, the brunt of the cost will likely be borne by the GEEF contribitors. Until the ranks of the GEEF members swell to the point where demand is edging out single-game ticket sales, pursuing a larger expansion will leave the funding for the project with uncertainty and will almost surely guarantee a less-than-capacity stadium for all but the biggest games where visitor and single-ticket demand makes up the difference.
• Where will all those people park? President Adams says today that the University is continuing to build parking decks to handle the job. While we’ve known for some time that the master plan includes ringing the campus with additional parking decks, that’s hardly an optimal solution for a tailgating-crazy fan base.
• What other projects will be required? A west expansion will almost surely put the capacity over 100,000. Access to the stadium and flow inside is already cramped. The ongoing work on the east access should help somewhat, but what other work to the concourses and approaches to the stadium will be required in order to handle an additional 15,000+ people?
• What of the Tate Center? Any serious expansion to the west stands will dwarf the Tate Student Center and will present some interesting engineering challenges in order to support the upper deck. Will the student center be integrated into the expansion?

And of course there is the question of the bridge. All of these factors add up to show us that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill adding of seats and will be a major commitment of resources in order to make it happen – it could be one of the larger capital projects taken on by the Athletic Association in its history.

Steak and lobster are on the line in Saturday’s G-Day game. Injuries have turned this into little more than an exhibition, but still there will be fans who use this as their measure for setting expectations for the 2002 season.

Way to go Terry College. A lot of the faces in the front of the classroom that I knew are still there and I know they are a big part of improving the national reputation of UGA’s b-school.