The Chicago White Sox have called up Gordon Beckham just a week after he was promoted to AAA ball. This time last year, he was preparing to lead Georgia into the College World Series. Now he’s in the majors and will join the circus that is the Ozzie Guillen clubhouse.

Bulldog coach David Perno commented,

“I talked to Gordon and he’s excited. It’s obviously quick but if anyone I’ve ever coached can handle it it’s Gordon. He’s had something special about him from day one. From a maturity and a talent standpoint he is definitely ready, and I am looking forward to watching him.”

According to UGA, Beckham will be the fourth Bulldog to take the field for a major league team this year, joining Jeff Keppinger (Astros), Clint Sammons (Braves) and Mitchell Boggs (Cardinals).

More Bulldogs will start down the path to the big leagues next Tuesday June 9th when the 2009 MLB draft gets underway.

(As an aside, Braves fans will recognize the player Beckham is replacing on the Sox roster: Wilson Betemit.)

There’s not much to add to the discussion about Rex Robinson’s analysis of Georgia’s kickoff woes. He knows what he’s talking about, and he does a good job of laying out the rules changes that make touchbacks so infrequent. We know that, with one exception, SEC kickers couldn’t get a touchback even 15% of the time last year. So it’s correct to assume that you’re going to be covering your kicks more often than not.

Here’s where the Bulldogs ranked among the SEC in kickoff coverage over the past few seasons:

02: 4th
03: 6th – first year after Kirouac
04: 3rd (though the stats here seem incomplete)
05: 4th
06: 9th
07: 9th
08: 11th

If you listen to a lot of fans, the directional kick has been the scourge of Georgia football since Richt and Fabris took over in 2001. For the first several years, it was actually pretty effective at least in the coverage unit’s place among the SEC.

Obviously something’s been different since 2006, and as Robinson notes, the rule change from a 2-inch tee to a 1-inch tee went into effect that year. Does that explain the drop to the bottom half of the conference rankings? Possibly. It’s also possible that the kickers (Bailey, Coutu, Walsh) over that time haven’t been the best at kickoffs.

The staff is hedging towards the belief that maybe it *is* the kicker. They’ve used a valuable scholarship to add a third scholarship kicker solely for what he can bring to the table on kickoffs. Will he reverse the trend that’s headed downward since the shorter tee was introduced?

But is it all about the kicker or even the hated directional kicks? We talked about this during last season. Plenty of attention has been paid, thanks to Robinson’s post, to the actual kicking, but not much has been said about the makeup of the 10 guys heading downfield to get to the returner. If you want your difference between Georgia and the better coverage units, look at the field position where we first engaged the blockers.

If the kick coverage improves this year, I expect a good bit of the improvement will come from a larger and (hopefully) healthier pool of younger defensive players. It’s a point Richt made certain to emphasize during the Road Tour. If you look down the roster at the back seven positions on defense, the number of players unavailable last year due to injury or redshirting could almost make up a coverage team of their own. Robinson, Rambo, Dewberry, Pugh, Commings, and Banks are just a few who could give the unit a shot in the arm this year. Even true freshmen like Branden Smith could help, and I expect you’ll see them out there.

The story of Robert Dozier is pretty well known among hardcore Georgia basketball fans. He signed with Georgia, was denied admission, and ended up at Memphis. It wasn’t exactly a secret that irregularities with Dozier’s SAT score were the source of his trouble getting into Georgia.

With the much higher-profile case of Derrick Rose’s alleged SAT cheating now all over the news, Dozier’s relatively dated and obscure story suddenly seems a lot more interesting and relevant.

Both the softball and baseball teams wrapped up their seasons on Sunday, but the tone with which the seasons ended couldn’t have been more different.

The softball team fell 9-3 on Sunday night to Washington, assuring the Huskies of a spot in the championship series against Florida and ending an exhausting run of four games over two days for Georgia. Along the way the Dawgs eliminated Missouri, upset Big 10 champ Michigan, and pushed a strong Washington team to the brink of elimination by lighting up one of the best pitchers in the game.

Though the two departing seniors were important pieces of the team, the story you couldn’t avoid over the weekend was that everyone else will be back for at least two more years. Finding a new pitching ace will be critical to the team’s future, but the powerful offense will be more or less intact.

All that is no guarantee that the team will be able to go as far or even deeper in the coming years, but you’ve got to like their chances. There’s no question though the Georgia softball is firmly on the national map now, and the underclassmen have a taste of what it will take to win it all.

At the very least, Georgia softball won themselves a lot of new fans from the Super Regional comebacks through the WCWS run. I’m one of them. They were entertaining to watch, played loose even under the incredible pressure of the moment, and love playing for Georgia – how can you not like a player who knows the significance of wearing #34 at Georgia? Names like Schnake, Schlopy, Hesson, and Goler were on the radar of even the football-only crowd this weekend, and they’ll have a lot more people tuning in to see how they follow it up next year.

The outlook was far less sunny for the baseball team after it fell to Ohio State 13-6 in the elimination game. First was the embarassment of losing to a team that set records for futility its two regional losses. But more troubling was the way in which Georgia lost the game. Three errors. Baserunning blunders. Less-than-acceptable effort from an upperclassman starter. I guess you can credit Ohio State for not collapsing after falling behind 5-0 to a team that routed them on Friday, but the loss is as much on Georgia as it is for the Buckeyes rising to the occasion.

Leadership was a frequent scapegoat in the many autopsies of the 2008 football season, and it sounds as if some of the same themes are coming up around the baseball team. Coach Perno has always been frank and direct with his thoughts, but the postgame comments after Sunday’s loss were fascinating in terms of what wasn’t held back.

During the team’s 2007 CWS run, the team certainly leaned on veterans Beckham, Peisel, and Fields. When players like Massanari, Lewis, Cerione, Poythress, and Weaver turned it up in the postseason, the result was a solid team built for a deep run. But absent those 2007 stars, the returning veterans couldn’t carry the team down the stretch and into the postseason.

Will next year continue the even-year success that Georgia has enjoyed this decade? Certainly there’s a strong core of rising sophomores returning, and there’s another strong recruiting class coming in (subject to the draft of course). But who will be considered the leaders of the team? Poythress is surely going to be drafted. Cerione will be a senior, but can a guy who “just can’t handle his emotions” (according to Perno) be looked to as a leader? After he was pulled from the game and Perno’s postgame comments which accused Cerione of “jump(ing) into the fence just to jump into the fence”, part of me wondered if Cerione had played his last game at Georgia. Joey Lewis looks to be the sole everyday player who you’d feel comfortable about as a senior leader, and he might be drafted too.

David Ching has some thoughts and additional information about next year’s roster. Pitching (and especially the bullpen) is a whole other can of worms. McRee’s disappointing season might make him a less-attractive draft pick this year, but can he find the control to go with his pro-quality stuff and emerge as the ace? Can Weaver shake off a woeful end to the season and reestablish himself as the go-to guy in the bullpen?

OK, so the SEC won’t be seeing signing day lists of 30+ players anymore.

I predict it won’t take but a year or two until some enterprising coach gets accused of playing fast and loose with the new rules. After all, the NCAA already limits teams to 25 signees per year. The new SEC rule is a response to the back room accounting that developed as a way to get around the NCAA’s limit. Oh, him? He counts towards last year’s 25.

One thing I haven’t read yet is how this new rule will deal with grayshirting. That’s when a freshman agrees to delay enrollment for a semester with the understanding that he’ll be on scholarship thereafter. Will these marginally-qualified prospects who brought up the rear in the oversigned classes still commit and just be encouraged to wait a semester instead of signing a Letter of Intent?

per official UGA release…

The Georgia-Oklahoma State football game in Stillwater on Saturday, Sept. 5, will be televised by ABC TV with airtime set for 3:30 p.m. ET.

This will be Georgia’s 69h appearance on ABC all time. Georgia’s all-time record on ABC is 42-24-2.