This week’s heavy rains across north Georgia have left portions of the UGA campus too soggy for gameday parking this weekend.

The intramural fields and grassy areas around Aderhold Hall, East Campus Drive and the Ramsey Center are too waterlogged for safe parking and will be closed on Saturday.

If you’re used to parking on grass, it’s possible that your usual parking spot won’t be available this weekend. If you are able to park on a grassy area, you’re urged to consider not bringing heavier items that might cause more damage than usual on soft ground. Campus police “also ask those who normally bring pull-behind trailers to consider going without them so that we can have more parking available for other cars.”

For more information, visit the Gameday Gameplan web site.

The early signing period started today, and as expected Georgia got a letter of intent from their only verbal commitment to date, Cady Lalanne. Lalanne is a 6’8″ forward from Orlando rated among the Rivals 150.

Unfortunately the Dawgs lost a recruiting battle for another post player – 6’9″ Shawn Kemp (yes, son of that Shawn Kemp). Kemp signed with Auburn this morning in a decision that went down to the last minute. He failed to qualify after signing with Alabama last year, and Georgia and Auburn got back into the mix and offered him as a prep player. (I’m sure Alabama fans will welcome him warmly when Auburn visits.)

The signing period goes through November 18th, but there don’t appear to be any imminent additions to Lalanne’s letter of intent. After the early signing period ends, attention will turn to recruiting for the spring signing period. Georgia still has big needs at the shooting guard and small forward positions. Everyone seems to be on the same page as far as what Georgia needs to do in order to recruit the home state with success, but results aren’t happening overnight.

It’s the early signing period for the women as well. Andy Landers expects to get letters of intent from three verbal commitments: 5’6″ PG Ronika Ransford of Washington, D.C. – rated the #21 overall prospect by ESPN, 5’9″ SG Khaalidah Miller of Mableton, Ga. – rated the #36 overall prospect by ESPN, and 6’5″ C Ariel Johnson of Oak Hill Academy – rated the nation’s #18 center by ESPN.

The Tennessee Tech football team left Athens with a $475,000 payout, but one TTU player allegedly had a little more in mind.

A University of Georgia student thinks a Tennessee Tech football player may have stolen a laptop computer and iPod while staying at her West Athens apartment last weekend, Athens-Clarke police said.

The value of the stolen goods was around $1,600, and the story reads like a classic college tale of what can happen when friends of friends crash at your place while you’re out of town.

Hines Ward’s Pittsburgh Steelers got the better of the Denver Broncos last night, and Ward capped off the win with his own highlight against former Bulldog teammate Champ Bailey. (It’s at the 4:25 mark.)

The SEC officiating crisis was wearing thin weeks ago, and I’m glad that Nick Saban (of all people) is stepping forward as a voice of reason.

“If I was an official, and I was making what I made officiating because I love the game and I love doing it, and I was getting criticized by the media, including our announcers on TV, like these guys are getting criticized, I’d step back and say ‘I think I’ll go to the lake this weekend. You can have this.’ That’s what I’d do,” Saban said. “Can somebody stand up and fight for these guys and what they do for the game?”

Get all of the conspiracy theories and teacher’s pet stuff out of the way, and Saban’s on the right track. SEC officials are missing calls. There are possibly equipment issues. The point is that the refs are being held to the standard of perfection – a standard to which no other person in the SEC (well, OK, maybe Tim Tebow) is held. We go into hysterics every Monday over the latest howler (one, in this week’s case, that reasonable observers don’t necessarily consider a mistake). It’s easy to dwell on one replay, and we even had disagreement and discussion about this within the Georgia camp before the fateful call against LSU. At the same time the errors in execution, strategy, and playcalling by players and coaches that add up during a game are pushed to the side in favor of “yeah, but did you SEE THAT CALL?!?”

The caricature of the blind ref/ump is older than most of us. They’re going to continue to get some wrong as surely as your quarterback will throw an interception at some point. Though the imperative to improve both the system and the individual officials has to be there, the conference isn’t doing itself any favors by losing its head every time an impossible standard isn’t met.

A couple of rumors involving the future of a couple of defensive ends got cleared up this week.

RSo. Neland Ball received a medical disqualification earlier this season. His career is over due to a chronic back problem. Ball was the nation’s #16 weakside DE in the recruiting class of 2007 according to Rivals.com, just a few spots below teammate Justin Houston. We wish Neland the best going forward.

On a more positive note, UGASports.com was able to confirm ($) that freshman DE Montez Robinson will not transfer and will remain with the Georgia program. Robinson admits that he was homesick and considered a transfer to Purdue. Robinson, rated the #8 strongside DE by Rivals.com in the 2009 recruiting class, was Georgia’s only defensive end signee in 2009 once Toby Jackson went the JUCO route, and he’s played in all eight games so far. An important figure in Robinson’s decision to stay seems to have been TE Arthur Lynch whose own struggles with homesickness were an issue earlier in the year.

We wrote yesterday how the DE position in particular had been hit by the attrition of highly-regarded signees, and you can now add Ball’s name to that list -a 4-star, top 20 national prospect at his position whose contributions to the program won’t be nearly what the coaches had banked on (through no fault of his own of course). Robinson’s decision not to join that list is important – guys like he, Houston, and Washington are going to be counted on for a lot of playing time until an incoming recruiting class that includes at least 5 defensive ends gets up to speed.

It’s been over a month since the last game at Sanford Stadium. We left Sanford on the afternoon of October 3rd deflated after a heartbreaking loss to #4 LSU. Though Georgia did plenty to lose that game – impotent first half offense, allowing two 4th quarter touchdowns, and shoddy kick coverage – the officials served as a convenient lightning rod to draw criticism and blame away from the team.

Saying that the month away from home has been disappointing is an understatement. Georgia has suffered two decisive losses to divisional foes, and a team that headed for Knoxville confident of its ability to play with top 10 teams is now resetting its goals and aiming for bowl eligibility. We’re long past blaming the refs or anything else extraneous; it’s to the point that we’re starting to go overboard in eating our own. Such is the climate to which the Bulldogs return from their month on the road.

It’s pretty easy to guess what kind of reception the Bulldogs will receive at Homecoming: indifference. Questions about empty seats came up at the weekly press conference. The unspoken answer is that there will be many. Those who don’t unload tickets on the babysitter and still decide to come will make up the typically bland Homecoming crowd. The team might or might not play their best game of the year or might turn it over 3 more times, but a 1:00 kickoff, a 1-AA opponent, and a Homecoming game on pay-per-view isn’t going to make much of an impression. Forgive me if I look past this game.

I’m starting to buy in to the idea that the Auburn game in a week is the biggest remaining game on the schedule. That’s not to concede or discount the Tech game (that’s always the game that I circle personally), but I’m thinking more about the need to hold it together in front of a home crowd whose opinions have shifted quite a bit in such a short time.

It was 10 years ago that Georgia suffered a home loss to Auburn that led to one of the ugliest scenes I can remember at Sanford Stadium. The damage done by that loss shook the faith of the fans in a coach who was less than two years removed from a top 10 finish and a win over Florida. That coach wouldn’t last but another season at Georgia. You might argue that Richt is on much stronger ground now than Donnan was at midseason in 1999, and you’d be right. But does that ground seem as firm as it did as recently as a month ago?

Georgia fans drew praise in 2008 for sticking by the team at halftime and beyond during the loss to Alabama. For those of us who remember the 1999 Auburn game it was a remarkable contrast. At the same time there was an implicit caution not to go to the well of good will too soon and too often. Blutarsky talks a bit about that this morning. Richt standing on his record is certainly valid, but doing so "indicates that he’s already spent some of that good will…banked…as a result of his track record." When it comes to the support of the home fans, much of that good will was spent against Alabama and Georgia Tech last season, and not much has been put back into the till since.

The optimist in me doesn’t want to consider the fallout from another blowout loss at home. It was, in hindsight, fortunate that the Tennessee game was on the road. I’m not anticipating a loss, blowout or otherwise, to Auburn, but we do have to concede concerns going up against an offense that has looked great at times this year against a defense that hasn’t. A loss to Auburn isn’t a pleasant thing to consider – not only would it be a loss to Auburn, but I really do worry about the reaction of the crowd on a national broadcast. Fans are coming into the game with arms crossed, eyebrows raised, and in a foul temperament. It won’t take much to set them off. I hope we never find out.

Beating Auburn won’t salvage the season or prevent the uncomfortable post-season evaluations that must occur. A win sets up the possibilities of a 5-1 home record, a good-but-not-great 5-3 SEC record, and a 3-game winning streak going into Atlanta. That might seem like small potatoes (especially with the big game left to finish the season), but it would be an indication of a team that hasn’t given up on the season and is determined to finish it out.

The endless coaching vs. talent debate seems to resolve itself. If it’s coaching, there you go. If it’s talent, it’s still on the coaches to recruit better talent. JUST WIN GAMES. See? Simple. But the discussion carries on. Tommy Tuberville, visiting in Athens, maintains that the bad luck of losing top players early to the NFL and relying on a lot of young players has taken its toll on the Georgia program. Chip Towers and David Hale point out that Georgia has recruited well enough to expect to be competitive with teams like Florida.

I’ve started and stopped this post several times. 1 – it seems silly to quibble over something so arbitrary to begin with as recruiting rankings. 2 – I don’t really disagree with what Towers and Hale are saying. Georgia should be getting more out of its talent. 3 – Every "yeah, but…" in this discussion comes across as nit-picking and excuse-making. I can’t help it.

One frequent complaint about recruiting rankings is that they aren’t readjusted based on the players that actually show up in August. You’ll usually hear this gripe from fans of schools with lower-rated classes after a blue-chipper that earned their rival a higher ranking fails to qualify. Happens every year. To avoid belaboring the point, I’ll start and stop with one position. There are four defensive ends who signed with Georgia and counted in those recruiting rankings that would likely be starters right now. None of them qualified initially out of high school.

• Brandon Lang: Lang is currently a senior at Troy and is projected as a high NFL pick in 2010.
• Clifton Geathers: Geathers, brother of current Bulldog Kwame, is currently a starter at South Carolina.
• Corey Moon
• Toby Jackson

Even if you’ve never heard of Moon or Jackson (just ask your favorite recruitnik to fill you in), there are at least two proven guys on that list who would make someone like Justin Houston struggle to break the starting lineup. It’s no surprise that the defensive end position has been such a glaring issue for Georgia over the past three seasons; the coaches were counting on those pieces to be in place. Yes, it’s the job of the coaches to recruit prospects who stand a chance at qualifying. Yes, other schools have nonqualifiers too. Bad luck? Maybe. One position doesn’t tell the whole story or absolve the coaches from their role in the state of the program, but it does help explain some of the disconnect between recruiting rankings and what we see on the field.

Sure, most of us came up with our personal scenarios this week that gave us hope for the upset. There were the meaningless points of trivia – Georgia’s record against defending champs or record after a bye week – but most of us had in mind something like this: Georgia would have to play at a high level, avoid turnovers and things like blown coverages or missed tackles, and we’d have to get or create some of the same breaks that went the way of Arkansas and Mississippi State. But there was no mistaking that a Georgia win would be an upset. The Dawgs were 16-point underdogs, and teams are usually big underdogs for a reason.

The 2008 blowout loss to Florida could be considered a surprise. The Dawgs were highly-ranked and riding high off a big win at LSU. There were some concerns on defense, but the star-studded offense and the fact that Georgia had been competitive in recent years in Jacksonville caused the lopsided loss to come as a bit of a shock. We knew better this year.

What we got instead should be very familiar to anyone who’s watched Georgia in 2009. The first half was a story of penalties; the second half was a story of turnovers. Georgia got very little pressure on Tim Tebow and created no takeaways of their own. Again, we could be talking about most any other game from 2009. A struggling quarterback found something that worked and used it to have a very efficient game.

Even Mark Richt’s attempts at manufacturing motivation – the uniform changes and the sideline huddle following Georgia’ first touchdown – all were well-worn tactics that seemed more like a coach with few better ideas going back to the well for things that had worked at some point in the past. The uniform thing can work – just ask Tennessee. But Rashad Jones had it right in hindsight: “It’s not the black helmets; it’s what’s behind the black helmets. It’s the players.” Tried on this underperforming team those tactics that had worked so well in the past came across as contrived.

Just as Alabama’s strength coach provided the epitaph for last season’s Blackout, the black helmets are going to be a reminder of a team who came off a bye week with nothing to show for it but a wardrobe change. Everything else looked the same from the end result to how we got there, and no one should be able to say that they are really all that surprised by it.