Now buying.

One good, one not so good.

First the good. D.J. Shockley signed with the Atlanta Falcons, a four-year deal worth $1.663 million including a signing bonus of $53,750. He sounds like someone who appreciates the opportunity and recognizes that he still must compete to make the team. It’s not a certainty that he will survive the training camp cuts.

It’s kind of like one of those dream-come-true moments. Everybody doesn’t get to make it here, and I get to sign a contract with the Atlanta Falcons. It’s a new thing for me. I’m ready to learn and see where it takes me. I’m trying to earn a spot on this team, and the best way to do it is to work hard.

Now the bad news. We’ve known for a while that Odell Thurman was in trouble for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy, and Wednesday the punishment came down: a four-game suspension. Odell was the Bengals’ leading tackler last year as a rookie, but I guess the pot was a bit more important than building towards a pro bowl season.

(One side note to the Thurman story…he has a child by Kara Braxton, a former basketball player at Georgia and a current member of the WNBA’s Detroit Shock. The WNBA wrote glowingly of the pair last year around draft time. She was enough of a mess to get kicked off the Georgia basketball team, and I just hope for the kid’s sake that Odell’s problems are treatable and aren’t shared by Braxton. Those two don’t exactly have a history of good choices in each other’s company.)

Steve Patterson of UGASports.com has an interview today with enigmatic defensive tackle Marquis Elmore. Elmore’s had every nickname from "Mudcat" to the self-given "Zeus", but none of them have been heard much over the Sanford Stadium PA. He is one of those figures in sports more well-known for what he hasn’t done. This is his senior year, and it’s his last chance to make an impact.

Elmore arrived at Georgia as an elite five-star defensive prospect out of Charlton County. Given the success of some men named Bailey from his neck of the woods, the notion of another blue-chip defender from Folkston had Dawg fans salivating. But Elmore was a classic "tweener" on defense. While his combination of speed and size was devastating in high school, he was too slow to be an effective linebacker and too small to be an effective lineman in college. The coaches made that observation early in Elmore’s career and moved him to the defensive line where he could begin adding bulk. A chronic back injury early in his career was the first of several medical setbacks, and he wasn’t able to progress much neither in learning the techniques of a down lineman nor in adding strength and bulk for the leverage he’d need.

Boss turned out OK in his senior season. (Photo: UGASports.com)

Georgia could use the depth at the defensive tackle position. Jeff Owens came on strong late last season to earn a starting job as a sophomore. Senior Ray Gant is the other starter, and he has had his share of injury setbacks. Redshirt freshman Kade Weston hasn’t seen a second of action yet, but he’s backing up Owens. Elmore and Dale Dixson are the other "veterans" on the line, but neither has done much with limited playing time. True freshman Ricardo Crawford is almost assured of playing time this year to help with the depth. With Crawford and the promising Owens and Weston pushing for playing time, the opportunity for a meaningful senior season won’t be handed to Mudcat. "I know I am a senior, but anything I get I have to work for," he said. "I am going to push, push, and keep pushing."

Mark Richt told the Roswell Bulldog Club last week that Elmore is now up to 295 lb., a very reasonable target weight for a defensive tackle. Elmore is finally healthy. "I have been here four years and I feel like I have been injured the whole time," he told Patterson. But he knows that’s not an excuse. "I am not the first guy and I am not going to be the last guy to come in and be plagued by injuries." Very true, and some of them have come back to leave their mark on Georgia football.

Right now, Elmore is unfortunately most well-known as the poster child for those who downplay the importance of recruiting rankings. The great thing about sports though is that all can be redeemed with one great season or even one great play. Boss Bailey, another top prospect from Folkston, was also feeling the heat entering his senior season. After decent but unspectacular freshman and sophomore seasons, Bailey’s career was sidelined by a knee injury on the opening kickoff of the 2000 season (helluva omen, wasn’t it?). He spent his junior season coming back from that injury, and it wasn’t until his senior season in 2002 that Boss exploded into the stuff of legend (and earned himself a nice NFL paycheck).

I don’t mean to suggest that Elmore is set up for a Boss Bailey-like senior season. Boss had much more of a foundation of success and playing time in his first few years and had earned a starting job. But the fact that we remember Boss as a star and an otherworldly blocker of kicks instead of the "bust" label some were throwing around entering the 2002 season shows that it’s not too late for Mudcat (or anyone for that matter) to salvage his Bulldog career and contribute something enduring to the program’s legacy.

The SEC media days begin today. Those who have more or less stayed tuned in to the Dawg news in the offseason shouldn’t be surprised by much that comes out of the Georgia camp. It’s sometimes entertaining to see what the other programs have to say, but the net effect is usually the depth of analysis from a preseason magazine. It’s an important annual milestone, though – practice is right around the corner! Here’s about what we can expect the conventional wisdom to produce:

• Georgia will have a new quarterback. That can’t be good.
• Quentin Moses can play ball.
• Georgia has running backs.
• Some kind of human-interest story. Did you know David Greene and David Pollack were roommates?
• Lip service will be paid to Mark Richt and Georgia’s recent accomplishments, but they will still pick Florida, LSU, and Auburn as the favorites.

Some might wonder why quarterback incumbent and senior leader Joe Tereshinski III wasn’t one of the seniors that will accompany Richt (Nick Jones and Moses will be this year’s player representatives), but last year Gerald Anderson and Max Jean-Gilles made the trip instead of D.J. Shockley. Don’t read much into it – and appreciate the chance to get some linemen rare time in the spotlight. If anything, this might be a good debut and introduction for Jones who could certainly propel himself into the NFL draft with a solid senior season at center.

Mark Richt’s Dawgs have lost just 13 games since he arrived in 2001. I think those 13 losses comprise the entire Georgia video library over at CSS. Yet I keep watching.

I did it again last night….CSS, Dawg football, UT 2004. Gotta get my fix. I don’t care if it’s the ugly 2003 Middle Tenn. St. game, just give us one Dawg win. Please?

And I’ve gotta say….it’s not that bad.

Check it out: http://www.uga.edu/gameday/

The two pages most fans should read right now are the ones on parking and tailgating.

Many of the changes we’ve heard about to the gameday experience are collected here, and fortunately many of them are clarified. The key points:

• You can park before 7 a.m., but you can’t start setting up and making noise until then. Pretty reasonable. Not too many people crank up the tailgate that early, and being able to at least park before that time will help to alleviate the 7:00 mad rush to grab spaces I was concerned about.
• Parking on grass and other vegetative areas is not allowed (except as designated by the University). I guess we’ll have to wait and see where those “designated” areas are.
• One vehicle per parking space. Big one here. No parking and then setting up shop in the parking space next to you. I like this…you have limited open parking spaces, so put cars in them.
• Fans using a tent or canopy over the tailgate of a vehicle should keep travel lanes open for vehicle traffic and should not take up space in other parking spaces. Along the same lines – park in your space and keep the lot and other spaces open for other cars.

They’ve also addressed the space taken up by so-called “corporate tailgates”. Excellent. Now these behemoths that take over entire lots are to be regulated by the school.

UGA also promises more trash receptacles and portable restroom facilities. Long time coming. We’ll see if it’s enough.

The site is a little short on details right now, such as a parking map and the exact locations of these alcohol-free “family” zones, but it should be enough information to put 95% of tailgaters at relative ease as we make our plans for the upcoming season.

The AJC reports that junior point guard Kevin Brophy was killed Thursday in an auto accident near Greensboro, Ga. on Hwy. 15 while driving home to Savannah.

There’s just not much more to say. This is terrible and devastating news, and we offer our prayers to Kevin and those close to him.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better kid if he was my own,” said Mark Sussman, the athletics director at Memorial Day School in Savannah and the person with whom Brophy lived the last three years. “He came to this country to play basketball and get his education. His dream was to play at a big-time college and he was able to do that.”

Update: WSB radio in Atlanta reports that Brophy wasn’t wearing his seat belt. The most tragic thing about this story might be the fact that it might have been prevented. Brophy was driving a borrowed car (his girlfriend’s late-model BMW), probably wasn’t terribly familiar with the handling of the car, lost control in a storm, and wasn’t wearing his seat belt. Be careful out there folks!

Coaches Felton and Hermann had to identify the body. That must be one of the hardest things they’ve ever had to do in their coaching careers.

Further coverage:

• ABH
• Teammate and coach comments (ABH)
• AP story
• Legacy.com guestbook
• Nice tribute from UGASports.com’s Brad Harrison

Yep. Exactly.

I’m surprised I hadn’t blogged about this before, but I’ve promoted this exact idea articulated so well by HeismanPundit for years on the message boards. You have performance majors in art and music, and physical ("sports") performance should be right up there as well. People often forget that a key part of a classical education used to be physical – the Greeks especially were fascinated with it.

A formal study program would have to be legitimate and not the throwaway Jim Harrick, Jr. courses everyone always imagines when this topic comes up. From theory to sports medicine (or physiology) to sports business, you’d be training a better class of professional athlete and a better class of coach and analyst down the road. How many people enter the NFL without a second’s thought of how to manage the millions of dollars coming their way?

The first school to make this happen would get ridiculed, and they’d have to be watched closely to make sure that the course of study was valid. Done properly, the results would be very interesting, and the pioneers in the field would gain a nice recruiting edge while everyone else caught up.

The SEC coaches have released their preseason all-SEC teams, and Georgia has placed 12 players on them. Auburn leads all teams with 14 selections. Interestingly, there was only one unanimous first team selection (Mississippi LB Patrick Willis). The SEC is waiting for some stars to step up.

Several of the selections were quality players who will be coming back from serious injury. It would be an amazing story if Prothro played this season. Broussard is a key for LSU. Andre Caldwell was scary good early last year. Can they overcome those injuries to play at an all-SEC level this year?

As expected, DE Quentin Moses leads the Bulldog delegation on the first team. Surprising to some might be who joined him on the first team. The supposedly-depleted Georgia offensive line placed C Nick Jones and OT Daniel Inman on the first team. Former walk-on Tra Battle is a first-team safety.

I know some will be upset that Thomas Brown was the only Dawg RB on the list, and he was only third-team. Blame it on the rotation or whatever you’d like, but the backs as a unit or as individuals have to be more productive and consistent to move past the other guys on the list.

Some might also wonder where Massaquoi is. He wasn’t among the top 10 in RPG or YPG. He also had very few impact/highlight catches that would get the attention of voters. You have to do more than get 3 or 4 catches a game and 50-60 yards. Good hands guy as a freshman, and there we are.

Now as a more experienced player he should expect more chances each game and the opportunity to have a bigger impact on games. It’s not automatic though as he’ll face double-teams and tight coverage until other threats step up.

For most Georgia fans, the name Glen Mason evokes unpleasant memories about the mess that was Georgia football in the mid-1990s. In these parts, Mason is more a bit of trivia than a football coach taken seriously. I would imagine that many Dawg fans are relieved that some midwesterner who managed moderate success at Kansas and Minnesota didn’t get his hands on this program. But I’ve got to give him some credit.

Some of the other Dawg blawgs like Georgia Sports Blog and DawgSports were kicking around numbers on which states produced the most NFL talent. The states you’d expect showed up at the top of the list, and Georgia was in a respectable position right up among the best.

Among the states with the fewest players in the NFL were Kansas and Minnesota. And one man has had success with the flagship football program of both of those states: Glen Mason. First, he took lowly Kansas and had four winning seasons in the early 1990s including a 10-2 mark in 1995 which attracted Georgia attention. Now he’s turned Minnesota into a respectable mid-tier Big 10 program.

Winning in the upper midwest is a tough assignment. Colin Cowherd maintains, and I agree, that Barry Alvarez will always be criminally underrated for the job he did at Wisconsin. He took a weak program in a talent-poor state and turned it into a program that played for Rose Bowl titles, produced Heisman-quality backs, and established themselves among New Year’s Day bowl regulars. At least Wisconsin had a rabid fan base and a place in college lore with its fight song and band.

Minnesota has none of that. It lies on the periphery of the Big 10 and, though it plays for axes and jugs and whatever else they use for trophys up there, there’s just not much tradition. They too lie in a relatively talent-poor state, they play in a dismal dome, and they’re typically….well, bad. There are a few homegrown success stories such as Marion Barber, but they’re pretty scarce.

Now Mason hasn’t taken the Gophers to the Rose Bowl, and they haven’t really been able to take the next step beyond the 7-4 or so plateau. But even that level of success, given what he has to work with up in the frozen tundra, is quite solid. He’s found a way to win games behind a bruising running attack, and his team will head to a bowl game in most years. They’re capable of knocking off the better teams in the Big 10, though they won’t do it every week. That’s pretty rare air for Minnesota. Actually, it’s only a win or two a year away from what Georgia had in the late 1990s while working with much less.

A lot of coaches wouldn’t even touch Kansas or Minnesota – they aren’t high profile, the fan base isn’t particularly rabid, and they are stuck in some pretty competitive conferences. We don’t know how Mason would have done in the SEC, and though his turnarounds have been steady, they haven’t been immediate. Georgia fans wouldn’t have had much patience especially given the lack of name recognition. Still, as we enter the 2006 season ten years after the season Mason was to have started at Georgia, I have to tip my cap at the job he’s done and continued to do. He’s earned a good measure of respect as a coach.

UCF, for a paltry $10k cancellation fee, has backed out of their September 29th game at Tennessee. The Vols travel to Athens the next week. Tennessee has replaced O’Leary’s team with Louisiana-Lafayette, and the Ragin’ Cajuns should put up much less of a fight while Tennessee gears up for the Dawgs.

UGASports.com breaks the news: Elite 11 QB Logan Gray of Columbia, Missouri will attend Georgia. Mark Richt’s reputation as a developer of quarterbacks carried a lot of weight, and his impressions of Georgia made him feel right at home.

Gray knows that he’s coming into a crowded and competitive quarterback situation at Georgia, and he’s expecting to redshirt as a freshman. Assuming Matthew Stafford plays this year as a freshman, Gray could potentially start as a junior. Don’t expect Richt to sit still, though. The Dawgs seem willing to add a quarterback each year, and Richt has had success in attracting some outstanding prospects who aren’t afraid of the depth chart. Gray’s commitment marks the third consecutive year in which the Dawgs have landed an Elite 11 quarterback.

With Gray’s arrival on campus next year, it’s hard to imagine a time when Georgia has had more quality depth at quarterback. The mission now for Richt and staff is to find receivers who want to catch passes from elite quarterbacks and linemen who want to protect them.

Georgia’s offense has been decent but certainly not as productive as some others around the nation. I’ve maintained that it’s a talent issue, particularly at QB and WR. With few exceptions (Lindsay Scott comes to mind), Georgia hasn’t had better than third-round NFL talent at those skill positions. As much as we revere and respect guys like Greene and Zeier and Terrence Edwards, we’ve yet to see this offense in the hands of truly special talent.

Think of the defensive end position: Georgia took a nice step up with Josh Mallard, Demetric Evans, and Robert Geathers. They had solid college careers and went on to the NFL. But we hadn’t seen anything like Pollack, Moses, and Charles Johnson. Sorry to use a business buzzword, but that’s a paradigm shift. I’m hoping we’ll soon see a similar shift on offense. It looks as if the quarterbacks are in place. There is promising young receiver talent starting with Massaquoi, but the Dawgs haven’t had the recruiting success there that they’d like especially when contrasted with a haul like Florida had last year.

Will these quarterbacks become pied pipers for the best receiver talent? Can Georgia turn this abundance of quarterbacking talent (not to mention the tailbacks on campus) into a better offense? That’s Mark Richt’s job now. As playcaller and director of the Bulldogs’ offensive scheme, he has to fill in the surrounding cast around these signal-callers.

I’ve only skimmed the now-infamous New York Times story about alleged academic fraud at Auburn. I find it hard to get interested in off-the-field stories, and one of the favorite offseason pasttimes in the SEC is hoping that this year’s allegations against your rival(s) will finally nail them good. Still, the story leads to a few thoughts.

We put up with a certain amount of hypocrisy to support college sports. Schools across the board from Georgia to Stanford lower their admission standards for athletes. We admit guys and gals with triple-digit SAT scores alongside the cream of the academic crop and expect our athletics programs to graduate people at a rate equal to or greater than the rest of the student body.

In order to resolve that apparent incongruity, there is an entire academic support system beneath the surface whose job it is to keep student-athletes on track and, at the minimum, eligible. From coaches to adminstrative staff to academic professionals, most of these people do their jobs well, above-board, and they contribute to the education of those in their charge. But when this system fails, things can quickly become ugly.

Problems occur when the support systems we all know and accept get taken too far. Tutors are great. Having tutors allegedly write your papers isn’t great. All students can appeal and discuss grades, but few have an academic support team preparing and pleading their case before a professor or department. Grades get reconsidered all the time. Intimidation and outright grade fixing isn’t so hot. All schools have certain easy classes and professors, and students know how to seek them out. Special treatment for athletes in those classes or abuse such as that alleged at Auburn isn’t kosher.

The pressures are intense, and the system gets bent very far at most every school with a major athletics program. It’s there, and it’s not something we like to talk about. We know that a disproportionate amount of athletes have declared certain majors, and we joke about Underwater Basketweaving courses knowing that it’s not far from reality. We like a great steak, but we don’t want to see the inside of the slaughterhouse. We want top-level sports teams, and we don’t really care to see the messy details of how marginally qualified athletes remain eligible and graduate. When a Kemp or a Bensel-Myers or a Gundlach comes along and shows that a line has been crossed, we get exposed to a part of college sports that we realize is there and omnipresent but is still distasteful.

All that said, there are still some basic guidelines, and the "everybody does it" excuse can only be stretched so far, especially when used in a progression of rationalizations that usually goes a little something like this:

1. We didn’t do it.
2. You can’t prove we did it.
3. Even if we did it, it’s not against the rules.
4. Even if it’s against the rules, it’s not a big deal.
5. Everyone does it.

You can’t help but laugh that this kind of behavior led to triumphant announcements about Auburn’s academic standing alongside schools like Duke and Boston College. But that’s what the APR rewards. Keep ’em eligible, keep ’em graduating. Remember basic principles – whatever gets rewarded gets done.

Ticket cut-offs for the 2006 season have been announced, and demand is at record levels again. For some perspective, here’s what it has taken to get tickets over the past few seasons. Florida is the best barometer for changes since our allotment remains more or less steady from year to year.

2003:
Clemson: all cumulative scores above 11,175
LSU: all cumulative scores above 13,860
Tennessee: all cumulative scores above 11,616
Vandy: All orders were filled
Florida Club: all cumulative scores above 25,051
Florida Regular: all cumulative scores above 4,301
Georgia Tech: all cumulative scores above 15,700

2004:
South Carolina — all cumulative scores above 11,187
Arkansas — all orders were filled
Florida — Club – all cumulative scores above 27,001
Florida — Regular – all cumulative scores above 5,986
Kentucky — all cumulative scores above 5,651
Auburn — all cumulative scores above 14,101

2005:
Miss. St.: all orders were filled
Tennessee: all cumulative scores above 15,601
Vandy: all orders were filled
Florida Club: all cumulative scores above 30,701
Florida Regular: all cumulative scores above 5,301
Georgia Tech: all cumulative scores above 18,751

2006:
South Carolina: all cumulative scores above 16,000
Mississippi: all cumulative scores above 12,850
Florida Club: all cumulative scores above 32,400
Florida Regular: all cumulative scores above 6,800
Kentucky: all orders were filled
Auburn: all cumulative scores above 19,506

Josh Kendall caught up with Joe Cox and family and discussed his darkhorse position in the quarterback derby. The most important point for many of us is that Cox will remain at Georgia regardless of the outcome of the competition. But there’s a lot more to take away from the article:

• Cox’s attitude is outstanding, and you can see where it comes from. Lots of heads screwed on properly in this family.
• This is the reality of coming in to an elite program. There will likely be other quality guys competing for the same position. Georgia seems to be making that turn where the quality of the program outweighs concerns about competition for a starting job. Knowshon Moreno signed on this year despite Georgia’s crowded tailback position. Three quality quarterbacks have now signed on over the past three seasons, and (knock wood) a fourth could commit this week. It’s good that Cox recognized this reality, and he seems to be dealing with it fine.
• The perspective of Cox’s father is tremendous. Joe Cox really does have a great opportunity at one of the best programs under a proven developer of quarterbacks.

Cox has received a bit of a bad rap for his G-Day performance which is all most fans have seen of him. They don’t know that he received raves leading the scout team last year. They overlook the fact that despite the interceptions, Cox moved the offense better than anyone else on G-Day. He might not win the starting job and might end up as a career backup. That still means he’ll likely get his chance under center at some point. Every Georgia starter for as long as I can remember has missed a series or even a game, and I can think of several instances over the past decade alone when I wished we had someone with Cox’s ability coming off the bench.

Now to the fans: Blake Barnes had similar comments recently. Now Cox has said it. No one is transferring. They all want to play football for Georgia and are quality guys we want in the program. We need the depth. Can we please stop trying to pack their bags for them and push them out the door? What a blessing to have this kind of depth developing at this critical position.

OK, I know Dennis Dodd probably had a deadline and it’s the slow preseason months. But naming the all-decade team of the 2000s before 2006? It’s not that I disagree with his point that we’re in a great age of college football. If anything, that just makes me look forward to what the next few years might produce. The traditional powers are strong, there are lots of interesting upstart programs looking to break through, and there is no shortage of talent coming into the game.

Just a sampling of players who might not have made a college football “best of the 1990s” list compiled right before the 1996 season:

• Peyton Manning
• Ron Dayne
• Peter Warrick
• Michael Vick
• LaVar Arrington
• Jevon Kearse
• Ricky Williams
• Andy Katzenmoyer
• Charles Woodson
• Takeo Spikes
• Plaxico Burress
• Corey Simon
• Champ Bailey
• Hines Ward