For the first time in several years, Georgia will have as many as five or six prospects undecided entering National Signing Day on Wednesday. Any of them would be a tremendous addition to a strong class, and any combination of them would make for big news.

Georgiadogs.com will have the official list of signees, and G-Xtra will have live broadcasts throughout the day.

You can also follow our Twitter feed for quick bursts of news through the day as it comes from Athens, the message boards, and the official site.

It’s been an eventful few days around the Georgia basketball coaching search. Just to recap:

• Furman Bisher, who hasn’t covered Georgia basketball since it was played at Woodruff Hall, started the Knight-to-Georgia talk on Saturday.
• Georgia players expressed interest in the idea of playing for Knight. Corey Butler demonstrated why players usually aren’t in the best position to make these kinds of decisions. "To be honest, I don’t know that much about college basketball," he said. "I just play it."
• The governor of Georgia, a former UGA football player who probably couldn’t find Stegeman Coliseum if you dropped him off at the Georgia Center, is reported to be a possible broker of a deal if Knight decides to persue the job.
• Dick Vitale joined the campaign. Just take it easy on all of the "General" references though…we’re a little nervous in these parts about generals born in Ohio.
• Through everything, both Knight and UGA maintain that there has been no contact.

Say what you want about the opinions of everyone from Furman Bisher to Dick Vitale, but the one thing they have in common is that the best interests of the Georgia basketball program are secondary at best to them. Knight’s friends in coaching and in the media will support him in anything he wants to do. Local media have to be drooling over the thought of the Knight circus coming to town. Knight is certainly an accomplished and respected coach, but Damon Evans and those making this decision cannot allow themselves to be the rubes who allow this torrent of outside interests to shove someone into the job who might not be the best fit for the long-term success of the program.

Look, I’m not saying that Knight is a bad coach. How can anyone say that? The question isn’t whether Knight can improve Georgia basketball. First, it can’t get much worse. Second, it’s not a Knight-or-nothing discussion. Knight can and likely would improve the program. So can some of the other candidates mentioned. Given the downward trend during Knight’s last few years in Lubbock, the abrupt way in which he left the program, and the current struggling state of that program, it’s valid to ask whether someone else might be just as able to turn the program into a winner while doing a better job of positioning the program five years from now.

But at least he’d be entertaining.

If I’ve heard one line more than any other this week, it’s that one. Knight would be exciting! He would fill the stands if only because people want to see the inevitable explosion. He’d put Georgia on the map. You know what else would do all of that? Winning.

We’ve seen that even a moderately successful program will pack Stegeman Coliseum. The interest in and demand for Georgia basketball in 2002 and 2003 was sky-high. Every single SEC game was sold out. That was a team that barely cracked the Top 25. Harrick’s bittersweet final home game against Florida in 2003 was basketball at its best, and the Coliseum was second to none that night for a big-time college hoops atmosphere.

Fans weren’t scalping tickets during those years to see the antics of the coach on the sideline. They weren’t there to see tantrums and gimmicks. Though there was a strong personality coaching the team, fans packed the house to see a winning team, quality basketball, and a group of guys playing their tails off. Right up until the end the interest that was building in Georgia basketball was happening for all the right reasons.

So what now?

Georgia is not going to hire anyone now and not without talking to several candidates. (They’re not, right? Right!?) It’s going to be at least six weeks before those candidates begin to become available. Between now and then the attention around Knight will die down and shift. Hey, look, now he’s interested in the Alabama job.

This week’s news hasn’t been without its benefits. It can’t hurt to have the Georgia job as a story on most national sports shows over the past few days. Instead of some bogus test making the Georgia program a national joke, we’re hearing now how great an opportunity it is. And it is. At the same time, the frenzy that would otherwise be around the usual list of hot candidates is squarely on Knight. That’s a good thing – Georgia can go about its search, and those men can continue coaching their teams with much less distraction.

The Alabama basketball team pulled out all the stops for its Saturday night showdown with a Georgia team that was 0-5 in the SEC.

Turns out that on Friday night, a day before the Alabama basketball team played Georgia, Saban sat them down and gave them some sort of a fiery pep talk. Who said the man couldn’t whip any team into a frenzy? And it worked.

Yep. It worked all right. A 75-70 win over a team that had just lost by 26 at Florida and fired its coach. Way to go, Lombardi.

Trippi (L), “Red” Grange, and Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice (from LIFE magazine)

A familiar name is all over the news this week. One of the big storylines in this year’s Super Bowl is the return of the Cardinals franchise to the league championship for the first time since 1947. The star of that 1947 Chicago Cardinals squad was of course Georgia’s own Charley Trippi.

This sentence says a lot about what kind of player Trippi was. Remember that during this 1947 season the future Hall-of-Famer was a rookie.

Never was Trippi more magnificent than in the 1947 NFL Championship Game when the Cardinals defeated the Philadelphia Eagles, 28-21. Playing on an icy field in Chicago, Charley wore basketball shoes for better traction and totaled 206 yards, including 102 yards on two punt returns. He scored touchdowns on a 44-yard run and a 75-yard punt return.

Have you ever seen Trippi in action? Bear Bryant called him the greatest college football player he’d seen. The UGA Libraries Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection has a pair of videos from the Trippi-era Bulldogs of the 1940s.

The best is from the 1947 Sugar Bowl, a 20-10 win over North Carolina and Trippi’s last game as a Bulldog. Trippi played the entire 60 minutes of the game on both offense and defense. Though John Rauch was the quarterback (and a damn good one), Trippi threw the 67-yard touchdown pass that put Georgia up for good. In fact, in the first five plays of the game, Trippi runs the ball, passes the ball, punts, and makes a tackle.

The second Trippi-related video is a silent movie from the 1943 Rose Bowl. Trippi and Frank Sinkwich led Georgia to a 9-0 win over UCLA.

Bobby Knight might be interested, but hopefully the feeling isn’t mutual.

A week ago, the Georgia women’s basketball team was reeling. They were 11-7 overall and 1-2 in the SEC. They hadn’t defeated a ranked team all season and struggled to break 50 points against the better teams they faced. Worse, two of their next three games were against Vanderbilt and Auburn. Both were ranked, both were undefeated in the SEC, and Auburn was a perfect 20-0 after running over Tennessee last weekend.

They pulled off the upset of Vanderbilt last Thursday. Then they survived a late game collapse against Alabama to come away with their first SEC road win of the season. But Auburn was an entirely different challenge. Georgia hadn’t defeated a top 5 opponent since Tasha Humphrey’s freshman season – a 78-64 win over Texas in November of 2004. It took over four years, but Thursday’s 67-58 win over Auburn couldn’t have meant more to a program that has completely turned their season around in just one week.

It started, as it has all season, with defense. An active 2-3 zone kept Auburn to more than 20 points off their season average, and the outside shot wasn’t falling for the Tigers. Player of the Year candidate DeWanna Bonner got her 27 points, but no other Auburn player could muster consistent offense. Georgia meanwhile found a balanced offensive attack with four players in double-figures. Angel Robinson was effective inside with 17 points, and a combined 25 from Marshall and Puleo gave the Lady Dogs a needed punch from the wing. A 15-4 run midway through the second half put them up by 11, and they hit free throws and avoided turnovers down the stretch to hold on for the win.

It was the program’s biggest win in a while and on the heels of last week’s win over Vandy gives Georgia a huge shot of confidence heading into February. Of course life gets no easier. Mississippi State is a tough team this year, and then it’s Tennessee in Knoxville next week. Georgia still has return games with Vanderbilt and Auburn left. They still don’t have the firepower on offense to overcome a letdown, but the defense has been a pretty consistent factor all year. Nothing is given though, and things would look a lot better with a win Sunday over Mississippi State.

Georgia is now 14-7 and 4-2 in the SEC. They’ve scored over 60 points in three straight games for the first time since early December. They’re just one game out of the SEC lead near the midway point of the conference slate. NCAA Tournament chances that seemed hopeless now, though hardly certain, seem much brighter. If they can win four of their eight remaining games, they’ll finish no worse than 8-6 in the SEC and 18-11 overall and in the top half of the conference. That would put them squarely on the bubble heading into the SEC Tournament, but with these very quality wins and with the fact that they are the host team for NCAA Tournament opening round games in Gwinnett, you’d have to like their chances.

The benefit of pulling the trigger now is that Georgia has plenty of time to consider prospective coaches. Most candidates will be coaching for at least another six weeks. Damon Evans can be as thorough as he needs to be with the decision, and the fact that Georgia is looking for a coach will be on the minds of interested candidates right away.

Rather than focusing on a random list of names at this time, I’ll be satisfied with this assurance from Evans’ press conference this morning (courtesy of Anthony Dasher of UGASports.com):

“I’ll say this. Our commitment and my commitment to build University of Georgia basketball is strong. And when I say strong, I’ll add very strong to that. We are going to go out and get the best possible person for this job. That may mean we have to commit more resources than we have in the past but I don’t want to hold us back from doing what we need to do to have a successful men’s basketball program.”

Translation: we’ll pay – and pay well – for the right coach.

The Dennis Felton era at Georgia is over. It began under a cloud and never really emerged. There were fits and starts but ultimately setbacks that eroded what progress had been made. A program that wanted to return its focus to the court couldn’t avoid damaging off-court incidents that cost it some of its best players. Fair or not, Felton was behind the 8-ball from the beginning, and his program never gained enough positive traction to bootstrap itself up from the pit in which it started.

In the short-term, the most important thing will be keeping much of the current team and recruiting class in place. This isn’t 2003 – there is no scandal from which to run away. Any releases this time, if requested, should be evaluated much more closely than during the "let ’em all go" period following the last coaching change. The collapse and loss of an entire recruiting class put Dennis Felton in an even tougher spot when he took over, and this is no time for history to repeat itself. The new coach will have enough challenges out of the gate, and keeping the core of the team intact should be a priority. The news that Pete Hermann will be taking over as an interim coach is a good sign. Hermann is respected and is the best person to keep the team from disintigrating.

A college head coach wears many hats, but the job boils down to this: get good players and put them in a position to succeed on the court. Much of the analysis of the Felton years will focus on the latter (win totals, lethargic offense, etc.), but what did him in was the inability to attract and retain enough quality players to field a consistently competitive team.

It was a two-fold problem. First was getting the players to begin with. The stigma around the program in 2003 didn’t help, and it begat a cycle where no one wanted to play for a bad team, so the team remained bad. There were a handful of recruiting successes. The first was Sundiata Gaines, a point guard from New York. Felton landed a handful of the top players from talent-rich Gwinnett County. Channing Toney, Louis Williams, Mike Mercer, and Billy Humphrey were all quality signings. The Dawgs even pulled in a top JUCO forward, Takais Brown.

It’s there that we come to the second part of the problem – retention. If you look over the list of Felton’s better signings, few lasted four years in the program. Louis Williams of course went right to the NBA as expected. Toney transferred, and Mercer, Humphrey, and Brown were all dismissed from the team. Georgia was actually making progress two seasons ago, but the knee injury to Mercer started a freefall that saw the 2007 season end just short of the NCAA Tournament, the dismissal of three key contributors within a year, and put Georgia in its current situation of almost no backcourt production. In this sixth season under Felton, only four players made it through four years with the program (Gaines, Bliss, Newman, and Stukes).

Is Dennis Felton a good coach? We might not be able to answer that. I don’t think anyone can argue that he had a complete team with which to work except for maybe a brief period in 2006-2007. But that of course is as much a part of the job as anything else. He was, by my own observation, an intelligent man with a good grasp for the game. That didn’t matter as long as the personnel remained incomplete.

To be fair and clear, this is not a new problem that began with Felton. Even Georgia’s more successful coaches faced recruiting problems. Tubby Smith did well with a solid senior class in his first season, but there is no question that his second team overachieved. Good coaching? Sure. Good recruiting? Not so much.

Even Jim Harrick couldn’t turn the tide. In fact, the situation Felton inherited was exacerbated by Harrick’s own recruiting problems. Between the 2000 class that gave us Rashad Wright and Chris Daniels and Felton’s first class in 2003 that included Levi Stukes and Steve Newman, Georgia did not add a single four-year player in 2001 or 2002 that stuck with the team. The Hayes twins were the only significant additions during those lean years. The result was that after the departure of the 2004 senior class, Felton was left to rebuild a program with only his rising sophomores.

When top-rated Atlanta center Derrick Favors chose Georgia Tech over Georgia recently, his reasoning was an indictment not only of Dennis Felton but also of Georgia basketball history.

"Just the history, how many guys Georgia Tech put in the NBA and how many guys Georgia put in the NBA."

Ouch. It’s that simple. Over the lifetime of a current high school senior, how many Bulldogs have made any kind of impact in the NBA? Maybe three: Shandon Anderson, Jumaine Jones, and Jarvis Hayes. Anderson and Jones aren’t in the league anymore, and Hayes is an 8 PPG guy. Georgia’s most celebrated players since Hayes are tough point guards Wright and Gaines – solid and admirable college players but not exactly pied pipers for NBA-quality talent. That legacy didn’t start with Felton, but it certainly didn’t improve with him either.

The situation at Georgia is and always has seemed ideal for success. You’re smack in one of the most talent-rich basketball regions in the nation. You have an athletic department with deep pockets that has shown its commitment to basketball with one of the best facilities in the nation. You have a large fan base that has shown it will support a winner and can turn Stegeman Coliseum into a vibrant home for college hoops. Thanks to a strong overall program, you have instant brand recognition. Even though the SEC is down this year, you still play in a major conference with plenty of TV exposure. Yet for all of these advantages, Georgia basketball has never been a consistent winner, and it starts with recruiting.

Job #1 for the next Georgia coach will be to do what no recent Bulldog coach, not even Smith or Harrick, was able to do: stop the flow of Georgia talent out of the state. Get that done, and all of the pieces are in place for a successful program.

On a personal note…

I can only speak for myself, but I found Dennis Felton to be an engaging and passionate man who had the highest goals and expectations for Georgia basketball. He jumped into a dire situation with great enthusiasm. Even with the wheels coming off he handled himself with professionalism and class. Though it didn’t work out, he ran his program openly and above-board. He’ll be just fine.

There is word this morning that embattled Georgia basketball coach Dennis Felton has been terminated. A press conference is set for 11 a.m.

ESPN will be at the G-Day spring game, but how many players will be available for the game? We already knew that 14 players would be unavailable for spring, and that number continues to grow with some pretty big names added to the list this week.

The latest Bulldog to join the roster of the injured is tailback Richard Samuel. Samuel had wrist surgery to repair ligament damage suffered during the Capital One Bowl. He will be in a cast for three months but should be fine by the start of preseason camp.

UGASports.com previously reported that DT Brandon Wood (shoulder/wrist) and OL Josh Davis (shoulder) will have surgery and should be unavailable for the spring.

Dawg fans have pounced on incoming freshman quarterback Zach Mettenberger’s observation about the already-noticeable difference in this year’s Bulldogs.

Last year I was around a lot, and the leadership wasn’t too great last year. I’ve been here three weeks and I can already tell that the leadership and the seniors, they want to win a championship again. They want an SEC championship. They want a spot to play for the national title. So far, the leadership has been outstanding in my opinion.

His comment is getting a lot of favorable play because it gives us another plausible explanation (and scapegoat) for what went wrong last season and also gives us hope for the coming season. The coaches remain the same and we lose several key contributors, but maybe a little shift in leadership and attitude will help to turn things around. It certainly helped Florida (though a couple of new coaches didn’t hurt the Gators either).

You didn’t have to be an Elite 11 recruit to wonder about Georgia’s leadership issues last season. We’ve been over that ground several times. We’ve also heard that things are a bit different this offseason, and the imperative is coming as much from the coaches as it is the player leadership. It’s positive to hear all of the right things coming from the players, but the leadership and attitude has yet to be tested against a very difficult 2009 schedule.

But seriously – three weeks? It’s not that Mettenberger might be entirely off-base, but is an incoming freshman who hasn’t even gone through a full practice yet really in the position and the place to contrast team leadership? Mettenberger’s proximity to campus and family ties to the athletic department did give him a chance to be around the program much more often than a typical prospect. There’s still a difference between being around the program and being in the program.

Yesterday’s news about defensive end prospect Toby Jackson turned out to be half-true and not in a good way. It’s true that Jackson will be headed to junior college instead of UGA next fall, but his destination has changed. Instead of playing for Georgia Military College, Jackson has enrolled at Navarro Junior College in Corsicana, Tex.

The story gets more interesting (and discouraging) with further details provided by UGASports.com. It’s no secret that Georgia coaches would prefer someone like Jackson at a friendly JUCO program like GMC, but apparently the quasi-military environment of Hargrave prep school turned Jackson off enough on the thought of another military school that he headed out to Texas.

Jackson maintains that he’ll still play for Georgia down the road if he is qualified and if the Bulldogs are still interested. Jackson, again, is someone who might have contributed as a true freshman in 2008, so it’s likely that Georgia will continue to recruit him if he stays on track. But as time and distance continue to increase between Jackson and Georgia, the odds of him ever showing up on campus decrease. Whatever negative experience he had in the structured environment at Hargrave, the path to major college football is still going to require a good bit of dedication, focus, and discipline on his part.

Long-time recruitniks will surely remember names like Cletidus Hunt, Andre and Peppi Zellner, and Corey Moon – all promising defensive linemen whose academic struggles kept them from ever enrolling at Georgia. The story doesn’t always end badly (Hunt and Peppi Zellner made it to the NFL), but Georgia’s history hasn’t been very good with prospects who don’t qualify out of prep school.

• How the UGA Athletic Association can use the “sovereign immunity” defense with a straight face and no shame against Decory Bryant. Come off it, UGA.
• How this “100-0 win” story ends up with the winning coach getting canned for refusing to apologize for his team’s accomplishment. I doubt you’d find this outcome next fall after any lopsided Texas high school football games. The best lesson from all of this comes from the team that was held scoreless. They brushed it off and moved on – losing and losing big was nothing new to them. Too bad everyone else felt the need to manufacture outrage and go after the scalp of the guy put in the position of playing such a mismatched opponent.
• What’s so wrong about Rep. Jack Kingston opposing a resolution honoring the national champion Florida Gators. Congrats to the Gators and all, but that doesn’t mean that Georgia fans have to like it. It’s a “no” vote, folks, and about as meaningful as any other rubber-stamp resolution that goes through the Congress. It’s not like significant (any) time or money was put into this thing.

  For those who like to complain that the Congress should find something more important to do with their time, the representatives don’t seem to be the only people with their priorities out of whack.

  Kingston spokesman Chris Crawford said the congressman got more phone calls on that vote than just about anything else he did that year — from Georgia fans congratulating him, and Florida fans chastising him.

Most areas of the 2008 Bulldog team were far from perfect, but I doubt I’d be alone in naming the pass rush as one of the top positions for improvement going into 2009. The defensive ends were hit by preseason injuries as hard as any group, and they struggled to make an impact during the season.

Prospects for upgrading the defensive end position took a big hit this morning when the recruiting services reported that Toby Jackson will not qualify out of Hargrave prep school and will instead enroll at Georgia Military College next season. Jackson was considered a likely contributor as a true freshman in 2008 before he failed to qualify out of high school, and Georgia coaches and fans had big hopes for him in 2009.

Georgia will continue to recruit Jackson, and he’ll have the option to be a JUCO transfer should he stay with it and complete enough hours at GMC. But that won’t help Georgia in 2009. The Dawgs have only one defensive end commitment in the current class – Montez Robinson. Robinson is a fine prospect, and it’s huge in hindsight that Georgia was able to get him away from Auburn after the coaching change over there. Robinson’s impact notwithstanding, Georgia is going to have to hope that improvement in the pass rush comes from a healthier group of relatively inexperienced returning players. As Anthony Dasher notes, a couple of position changes might not be out of the question.

It hasn’t been the best of seasons for Andy Landers and his team, and the reasons why are a subject for another day. Georgia got a badly-needed win and confidence boost against #18 Vanderbilt last night to move to 2-2 in the SEC and show that they still have a pulse. This was as good as quality wins get; Vanderbilt had already defeated Tennessee and LSU this season.

Georgia’s formula for success centered around post play. Vandy, already undersized, lost All-SEC candidate Christina Wirth for much of the game due to foul trouble. Georgia was able to attack inside with Angel Robinson and Portia Phillips from the opening tip, and Ashley Houts added enough punch from outside to challenge the Commodore defense. The Lady Dogs held a good-shooting Vandy team to under 40% from the floor and won both the rebounding and turnover stats.

It was far from a perfect effort. Free throw shooting was atrocious (19-35). Unnecessary turnovers continue to plague the team. The offense was stagnant for much of the second half, and production from the wing continues to be lacking. Those shortcomings which had contributed to losses earlier in the season proved not to be fatal on a night where Houts, Robinson, and Phillips all clicked. That trio is going to have to carry this team in many more games this year if Georgia stands a chance of finishing in the top half of the conference.

The Lady Dogs are in action again on Sunday at Alabama. Though Bama is 0-5 in the league, the road hasn’t been especially kind to Georgia this season. An 0-5 bottom-dweller should be easy pickings for most Georgia teams, but nothing has come easy this season.

As bad as the year has been for men’s hoops in the state, Thursday night was a bright spot for the women. Both Georgia and Georgia Tech notched significant upsets over ranked opponents.