Is Courtney Kupets the greatest college athlete ever?

It’s obviously a loaded question. So many people in so many sports over so many years. To even begin to make a claim like that, you’d have to consider her place as…

• The best Georgia gymnast. You’re talking about the sport’s most dominant program over the last 20 years. The list of All-Americans, national champions, and former Olympians is miles long. Still, it only took one year for her to match the Georgia record of three individual national titles in one year. She broke that record this year with four titles.
• The best collegiate gymnast. Georgia might have the best program, but there have been incredible individual performers at many other programs. Kentucky’s Jenny Hansen was named the NCAA’s top gymnast over the past 25 years in 2006 after winning eight individual titles during her career. Kupets matched and then topped that mark this weekend with nine career individual titles and also matched Hansen’s three career all-around titles. Without her season-ending injury in 2008, Kupets might have walked away with double-digit individual national titles and as the sport’s first four-time all-around champion.
• The best Georgia athlete in any sport. Names like Walker and Wilkins come to mind when you think about Bulldog greats, but you have to dig deeper when you’re looking for the most accomplished Bulldog athletes. There are swimmers like Kristy Kowal and Courtney Shealy. Few had the impact that Vicki Goetze had on Georgia golf. John Isner is just the most recent legend cranked out by Georgia tennis. Teresa Edwards is one of the most recognized women’s basketball players in the world.

Still, when you look at team and individual accomplishments, it’s hard to come up with a better choice than Kupets. She’s done all she can do. Even more, she came back from a Achilles tear as a junior to have her best season as a senior.

When it comes to the best college athlete ever, the question becomes muddier. It’s hard to top someone like Cael Sanderson who never lost a wrestling match in college. There have also been dominant individuals in team sports – Mia Hamm was a standout on a team of standouts that won four national titles. For all I know, there might be some Stanford water polo player who was better. There’s no question though that Kupets at least belongs in the discussion.

When the Top 10 baseball team taking 2 of 3 from Arkansas to move into sole possession of first place in the SEC is considered one of the lesser stories from a weekend of Bulldog athletics, you know it was a good few days.

It was just another weekend for Georgia athletics. In case you missed a couple of them, here are the highlights:

• National championship in gymnastics: the 5th consecutive national title for the program and 10th overall
• National championship in equestrian: the 2nd consecutive national title for the program and 4th overall in the 5-year history of the program
• National all-around gymnastics championship for Courtney Kupets as well as three out of four individual event titles
• SEC championship in men’s golf
• SEC championship in women’s tennis
• SEC individual championship for women’s golfer Marta Silva Zamora
• #6-ranked softball team swept Auburn
• Baseball opened up a two-game SEC lead with a series win over Arkansas

After all that, I still have the feeling I’m missing something. Over the past decade Georgia athletics have been at their strongest in spring sports, but this is shaping up to be one of the stronger years.

With the economy and a recently-implemented ticket priority system to blame, South Carolina “is not likely to sell all of its football season tickets” for the 2009 season. It would be the first time since Lou Holtz arrived a decade ago that the Gamecocks have not sold out of their approximately 57,000 season tickets.

In response, the program has retooled its advertising budget to promote season tickets, and they are also targeting younger alumni and loyal fans who didn’t have access to season tickets before.

For years whenever the topic of the Internet and forms of communication more advanced than a rotary phone came up, coaches frequently reverted to playing the dumb jock.

Gawrsh, I cain’t even program a VCR…what’s this"e-mail" thing ?

To be fair, this kind of response was mostly a defense mechanism and usually not exactly honest. If a coach admitted he surfed the message boards or read e-mail, he might be pressured to validate and respond to some of the ridiculous criticism and rumors that float out here. Every message board hero would think he had a direct line to the ol’ coach. Most coaches were at least briefed about the online chatter.

So, yeah, it’s kind of strange (and amusing) to see the coaches follow each other into the world of tweets and pokes. A decade ago these guys would be cracking jokes about not being able to turn a computer on.

Of course in reality many of these Twitter pages and Facebook accounts are manned by some intern or other ghostwriter. I don’t know and don’t really care if Mark Richt even knows how to sign on to Twitter or post something on his blog. The change is that coaches are at least starting to become more open about lending their names if not outright participating in the online world. The transition of cutting-edge technology and social networks from something used by fans on the fringe to a strategic opportunity to build the program is just about complete.

And why not? The costs are negligable. It’s where your recruits and an increasing number of your fans with disposable income are. It’s to the point now that if your program and coach doesn’t have some sort of online presence beyond the cookie-cutter official Web site, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

Now it’s time for the NCAA and the sideline to catch up. The New York Times had a great piece last fall outlining the organization’s resistance to certain technologies, especially those which might give a team an advantage during the game. Laptops upstairs in the box are verboten. Texting with prospects is outlawed. The reasoning ranged from the absurd…

"(A game is) like going into a test," said Ty Halpin, the N.C.A.A.’s associate director of playing rules administration. We don’t let you bring in a computer and an iPod when you take an exam."

…to the practical…

There is a concern that an onslaught of technology might give richer colleges a competitive advantage over schools that cannot afford the latest equipment, further driving a wedge between the haves and have-nots in the sport.

I definitely understand that concern. The software and hardware for instant video analysis and real-time collaboration isn’t cheap. At the same time, an initial investment in technology can give smaller programs tools and expert systems which might make their lower-paid and less-experienced coaches more effective and competitive against the big programs. It’s not like the big programs don’t already leverage technology to their own advantage; as the Times points out, most big programs have advanced video systems that help them with preparation. Teams can bring to the box unlimited analysis, charts, and scouting on paper (something that’s also typically not allowed in an exam, Mr. Halpin), but they can’t bring the same information in on a laptop.

Mike Bellotti told the Times he planned to raise the issue in front of the rules committee, but it seems as if no action was taken during the committee’s February meeting.

How long will it be before a tablet PC replaces the clipboard on our college football and basketball sidelines?

Matthew Stafford was on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and he got to do a little skeet shooting with a football. (And prepare yourself to see Stafford in a suit.)

Things are still quiet during the spring signing period for new men’s coach Mark Fox, but Andy Landers yesterday added two players plus a walk-on to a group of four signed during the early period. It was already considered a top 10 class based on the four from the fall, and the newest three add some important depth and roles to the roster.

That’s seven incoming players added to a roster that’s only losing one senior and one transfer. If the numbers hold, the team will go from six scholarship players to twelve. The biggest weaknesses of the team last season were depth up front and production from the wing, and this class definitely addresses those issues. The team will still be led by its core of four upperclassmen (Houts, Marshall, Robinson, and Phillips), but the infusion of talent should give the team many more options and – call me crazy – might even let them rest Ashley Houts every now and then.

A quick overview of the incoming class:

Armstrong: A versatile 6’3″ wing
Hassell: A 6’2″ pure power post
James: A 5’9″ guard with a reputation as a scorer and defender
Willis: An aggressive 6’2″ post with mobility
Criner: A guard who can pull up or slash to the basket
Jones: A 6’2″ post project with a volleyball background…a leaper who can block shots and rebound.
Williams: Walk-on guard with a good perimeter shot

Pete Carroll is right: every team in America might now be able to break down Georgia film now and study how the Dawgs run the same few vanilla plays and base defenses with half the team sitting out. Especially since no Georgia game over the past eight seasons has been on TV. I can just imagine the scene last October when a breathless Florida assistant burst into Urban Meyer’s office and panted, “Can you believe it? CBS! Those idiot Bulldogs are actually playing LSU on national television! The fools are showing us everything!!!”

Carroll doesn’t seem too concerned when it comes to people getting a look at his own program. The Trojans have quite a liberal open-practice policy.

Only a few dozen fans showed up for USC’s morning practice today, a big change from Sunday night when an estimated 1,000 people or more pushed onto Howard Jones Field. … “In the NFL, for all those years, there were always people at practice during camp,” (Carroll) said. “So this isn’t that unusual. I think it’s unusual to go the other way, to tell you the truth.”

On Saturday Joe Cox again flexed his leadership muscle and reminded his teammates of the need to stay out of trouble over the next few months when coaches have the least amount of supervision over the team. The weekend that concludes spring practice is typically one where the team lets loose, but they managed to stay out of the papers this year.

I don’t necessarily believe that there’s always a direct relationship between off-field incidents and in-season performance. In 2003 Georgia had several preseason incidents and suspensions to go along with an SEC Championship ring-selling scandal, and they managed to field the most impressive defense I’ve seen from a Georgia team. So I’m not going to flip out if and when something happens this summer – I’m a lot more worried about things like the running game and pass rush than whether or not the team has facial hair or enjoys themselves downtown. Still, Coach Richt admitted that the incidents and negative publicity last year were a "distraction", and keeping clean certainly won’t have any negative effects on the team.

So far the message has hit home. No one is pretending that the team has adopted the monastic lifestyle, but at least they’ve managed to either avoid police attention or make the right decisions when they do go out. Chip Towers notes that the program had already tallied four arrests by this point in 2008, and they’ve managed (knock wood) to keep that at zero so far in this calendar year.

So far, so good. I’m holding out hope that it’ll continue, but even the quietest offseasons don’t pass without at least one or two incidents. I’d welcome the change.

Last week the N.C. State compliance office warned a student over a Facebook group made as part of an effort to recruit a top basketball prospect to the school. It seems like a pretty far-reaching restriction on speech, but the University and the NCAA hold that the action amounted to someone acting as a booster who attempted to influence the recruiting process.

Even as the NCAA and its members struggle with how to handle emerging technology, you can see where they’re coming from if you understand the accepted broad definition of a “booster.” For example, here are the guidelines used by the UGA compliance office to determine who is a booster. If you…

• Participated in or been a member of an organization promoting Georgia Athletics
• Contributed financially to the UGA Athletic Association, the Bulldog Club, individual athletic programs or any other Georgia Athletics or sport-specific booster organization
• Assisted in the recruitment of prospects
• Provided NCAA permissible benefits to enrolled student-athletes or their families
• Are a former UGA student
• Promoted the UGA Athletic Association in other ways

…then you are a booster according to UGA, and your interactions with student-athletes and prospects are covered by NCAA rules. Until the NCAA catches up to current technology (and what bureaucratic organization ever does?), members like N.C. State have to apply the existing rules to seemingly-harmless situations with sometimes absurd results. A Facebook group urging a prospect to go to N.C. State seems fine, but does a full-page newspaper ad? What’s the difference?

But that doesn’t mean that NCAA members and even the NCAA itself aren’t using the same technology. Coaches and even entire conferences have joined up with Twitter and Facebook, and the NCAA’s official blog has its own Twitter account.

The BCS has seen to it that the college football season no longer ends on its national holiday of January 1st. That’s the price we pay – the money involved means that the programming has to be spread over as much prime time coverage as possible, and the season drags out for another week.

Even with a couple of BCS games along the way that additional week between the New Year’s Day bowls and the BCS Championship has a lot of down time, and ESPN is helping minor bowls leapfrog the major bowls on the 1st to play on dates that are to the advantage of the bowls, the host cities, and – of course – the network.

At first it was bowls like the International and GMAC which few had heard of and even fewer watched. Last year the Liberty Bowl moved to January 2 and will remain there for another year.

Now the Alamo Bowl will join the January 2nd schedule. January 2, 2010, is a Saturday, and the press release notes that the 8 p.m. slot on ESPN will be “unopposed from any other college or NFL football games on network television.”

So far, that’s two bowls that will be on ESPN’s January 2nd college football schedule. The Cotton Bowl will also be played on January 2nd for the second straight year. Will others be tempted to move to the more convenient Saturday date?

With G-Day in the books, how did the Dawgs look? 13-3: was it great defense or lousy offense? Did all of that leadership and focus we heard about over the past three months show up in the team’s first public performance since the bowl game? Your thoughts are welcome…here are a few of mine:

• The absence of any major injuries makes G-Day a success in my eyes. The real work of spring is done away from our eyes, and this scrimmage is just a dawg-and-pony show for the fans (and, in this case, ESPN). Getting through it without any more players going down for the year is always a plus.
• The crowd was better than I expected. I’m always skeptical about expectations for big G-Day crowds, and even the presence of ESPN didn’t lead me to expect much this year when the game coincided with Easter and the Masters. But the turnout was solid, and the crowd which spread out would have packed the north and south stands. I think about 35,000-40,000 people showed up, and it was a perfect day for football.
• Unfortunately those who turned out didn’t get much of a show. ESPN producers were probably considering a switch over to highlights of the 2007 World Series of Poker to give viewers a relative shot of excitement. It looked as if we might be in for an interesting day after the flea-flicker on the first play, but when the red team could do little to capitalize on that one long gain it set the tone for a snoozefest.
• You were especially disappointed if you came expecting to see a show from either of Georgia’s two legitimate stars. It’s not that A.J. Green or Rennie Curran played poorly; you just didn’t hear much from either. After a nice catch on the first play of the scrimmage, Green wasn’t heard from again. With the ESPN guys talking about how this broadcast was more of a "show" than a "game", Georgia left its best star largely out of the show. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about a thing like that from G-Day, but the program invited ESPN and their national coverage. I think we owed them a little better show.
• Injuries of course had already taken their toll on the team, and it was necessary to take the lineups and results we saw with a grain of salt. Just for an example as many as three offensive line starters (Sturdivant, Vance, and Davis) were all out, and the impact trickled down the depth chart. I was thrilled to see Marcus Washington back out there making plays, but I would hope that a senior could get past the true freshman offensive lineman in his way.
• Logan Gray’s nice afternoon was a treat to see not because it creates a quarterback controversy but because it keeps us from doing the usual fan thing of overlooking the reserves in favor of the shiny new freshmen. It also serves to quiet, at least temporarily, those who would rather get Gray on the field at a position – any position – other than quarterback. The guy belongs under center (or in the shotgun, if you prefer). It’s up to the staff now to make creative use of Gray’s skills at quarterback.
• The completed flea-flicker made the first play a success, but Caleb King appeared to make a huge mistake on the play. While King turned around after the pitch back to Cox, a defender shot through to King’s left and would have taken Cox’s head off if not for the no-contact rule. With other backs like Carlton Thomas (and let’s not forget Richard Samuel) showing ability, these are the kinds of things that will affect playing time during the season.
• The play of the secondary – especially Commings and Boykin – made me feel a bit better about the departure of Asher Allen. How much did they have to do with the lack of production from the red team’s top receivers? If there were holes in the defense, they were underneath and in the areas covered by linebackers.
• Though the drops were a big storyline, I’m not especially concerned. Only one drop was by a scholarship receiver, and Aron White hasn’t shown the tendency to drop in the past. If it were Green, Moore, and King littering the field with drops, that might be something. But most of the guys dropping passes aren’t going to be big contributors in the fall.
• It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the tailback position is headed back in the direction of a RB-by-committee. As is usually the case, that says more about the absence of someone stepping up and claiming the position. At best, we’ll see the "three-headed monster" days of Brown, Lumpkin, and Ware. Hopefully it won’t head in the direction of 2003 where a committee of Cooper, Browning, and Lumpkin were far less effective. Carlton Thomas definitely had an exciting debut, but I’d fear for his longevity if he’s forced into an every down role. Used situationally and on returns he could be a very exciting player.

Sports talk station 960 the Ref out of Athens is finally streaming online.

If you think Atlanta sports radio has little to offer (and I do), give the guys in Athens a listen. The Ref also carries UGA sporting events – we’ll see if those are streamed as well or if UGA forbids it in favor of their own G-Xtra service.

At any rate, The Ref is at the very least a better daytime alternative and probably just doubled its audience. Welcome, guys.

When the Lady Dogs starters get introduced before games, they run out along a red carpet that lists the years of Georgia’s Final Four and SEC championship seasons. That carpet hasn’t needed to be updated for years. Since coming up devastatingly short of both an SEC Tournament title and a Final Four trip in 2004, the Lady Dogs haven’t come close to challenging for either.

It’s been ten years since Georgia’s last visit to the Final Four – the longest drought under Andy Landers. The last SEC championship for the program was in 2001. It’s not that the program has disappeared in the meantime. They’ve made the NCAA Tournament every year and only last season had a streak of Sweet 16 appearances snapped. But there’s no question that the program has slipped, and getting it back won’t be a simple one-year fix.

When Dennis Felton was let go earlier in the year, it was easy to conclude that recruiting and attrition were at the heart of the problems that led to the end of the Felton era. Other than a brief period in 2006-2007, Felton was never able to assemble and retain anything resembling a complete team. Signing and keeping quality players has been an issue with the men’s team for decades. But now the same problems are creeping into the women’s program despite a tradition of success.

The Georgia women’s basketball team announced yesterday that sophomore guard Angela Puleo would be leaving the program. Puleo was put into a tough situation out of the gate as a freshman. In most programs, she would have been brought along as a situational 3-point shooter off the bench. But the roster situation at Georgia thrust her into a starting role immediately, and it was impossible to fill the shoes of Cori Chambers, the most prolific outside shooter in Georgia history.

Puleo’s departure means that the entire 2007 recruiting class of four players, rated by some as a top 10 class, has dissolved and will contribute nothing to the program as juniors and seniors. Puleo will transfer. Jasmine Lee was dismissed. Nicole Stroud’s career was cut short by injuries. Top 20 prospect Brittany Carter barely contributed as a freshman and transferred after one season.

The impact of the evaporation of that 2007 class is more significant when placed alongside the classes that surrounded it. Put it this way: Georgia will have a nice senior class next season of Angel Robinson, Ashley Houts, and Christy Marshall. There will only be three other players on the roster with any meaningful experience – starting or otherwise. Once again incoming freshman will be counted on for significant minutes.

For a number of reasons we’ll get into below, Georgia had hit a dry patch in recruiting. The obvious example is Lawrenceville’s Maya Moore leading UConn to the national title last night. But it’s no longer just other elite programs prevailing over Georgia for local talent. Georgia Tech welcomed the #6 class in the nation in 2008 which featured three players from Georgia all rated among the nation’s top 100 prospects. Meanwhile the Lady Dogs’ sole signee in 2008 was a guard from Alabama. That’s turned around this year with a top 5 class, but can the staff keep it up? And can they avoid the attrition in the incoming class that wiped out the promising 2007 class?

Attrition is as much a part of recruiting as actually signing the classes, and it’s a problem that has hit the Georgia women’s program hard in recent years. Even if Georgia missed out on other prospects, those they’ve signed have been plenty good enough to keep the program competitive. The trouble has been keeping them around. Below is a list of some of the players Georgia has signed but lost over the past few seasons before their eligibility expired. Some played for a while; others never made it into school.

• Recina Russell – Big 10 freshman of the year
• Brittany Carter – national Top 20 prospect
• Amber Holt – JUCO All-American
• Angela Puleo – starting shooting guard
• Jasmine Lee
• Nicole Stroud
• Erica Brown – McDonald’s All-American guard

That’s quite a team in and of itself. It’s unfair to put this attrition all on the coaches. Recruiting is an inexact science, and you can never predict who will be able to cut it at the next level. Injuries, academics, and personal issues are risks you take, and they’ve all played a role in this attrition. Regardless, the sum of this attrition and the results in recruiting has been to leave the program with little depth at best and with critical holes at worst.

Part of the problem has had to do with turnover on the staff. In 2005, longtime assistant and top recruiter Michael Shafer was hired away by Richmond. Since then the Georgia staff has been a story of on-the-job training for a number of inexperienced assistants. I don’t think there’s any coincidence that the dropoff in talent has happened under an unsettled and green staff. Finally in 2007 Landers hired Kim Hairston away from Cal, and Hairston’s experience began to pay off and was in part responsible for the incoming top 10 recruiting class. The question remains whether enough has been done to shore up the staff. It’s still relatively inexperienced, and player development has been questionable. With Mark Fox’s arrival on the men’s side, we’re getting a reminder just how important the composition of the staff is to success on the court and in recruiting.

As is always the case with stories like this, bad luck seems to find its way into the picture. Mike Mercer’s knee injury brought a cruel end to a promising season and was, in retrospect, the beginning of the end for Dennis Felton. Similarly, an unprecedented rash of injuries to the Lady Dogs frontcourt in 2005 affected the program for years. Talented players like Tasha Humphrey and Megan Darrah were forced to play out of position for much of their careers, and those teams were never complete enough to advance beyond the Sweet 16.

If all of this sounds like a lack of faith in Andy Landers, it shouldn’t. I believe he’s more than capable of turning it around. The addition of Hairston and the incoming recruiting class is evidence that there’s plenty of fight left. It’s more than just one class and one season though. The top 5 class coming in will temporarily raise the talent level, but the departure of the rising senior class will require another big recruiting effort in order to sustain anything that’s started next season.

The Georgia Sports Blog called it the other day, and now it’s official: Mark Fox has added Philip Pearson to the Georgia basektball staff. Pearson was the right-hand man at Alabama and was the interim coach after Mark Gottfried was let go during the season. Gottfried’s Alabama staff had plenty of experience getting quality prospects from the state of Georgia, and Fox will lean on Pearson’s experience as a member of that staff to rebuild the Georgia program.

An interesting side-note:

Fox said he received hundreds of text messages from people interested in working at Georgia within the first 36 hours after he was named the Bulldogs coach.

So…one more assistant coach spot to fill. Who will get his text answered?

One of the reasons that Arizona State won’t be as touted for their trip to Athens this fall as they were at the beginning of last season is the departure of starting quarterback Rudy Carpenter. The competition to replace Carpenter thinned out a little this week when Jack Elway, John’s son, decided to leave the team after getting burned out on football. He’ll remain enrolled at ASU. From what we saw last September, deciding to hang around Tempe is not a bad decision.