The kickoff for the Oct. 2 Colorado game, previously set for 4:30 p.m., has been moved back 2 1/2 hours to 7:00 ET (5:00 for those of us heading out there). FSN will still televise the game. Why the change? From the UGA release…

The change came about after CU’s and the Big 12’s television network partners re-examined an earlier but tentative decision to allow the game to be televised inside an exclusive ABC telecast window.

ABC has only one time slot for a Big 12 Conference game that day, and has already committed to televising the Oklahoma-Texas game in its afternoon window (1:30 p.m. MDT). The kickoff adjustment allows the Colorado-Georgia game to be televised in the later prime time window and afford ABC its full exclusivity in the afternoon.

Telecasts after the third week of the season are generally made public on either 12-day or 6-day advance notice, but ABC relinquished the rights to the FSN, the Big 12 cable partner, early to afford CU the opportunity to better promote the game time.

The later time isn’t the best of news – many Georgia fans have booked early morning return flights on Sunday. With a game likely ending closer to 9 PM local time now, you might as well just stay awake. Any fans watching on TV that had it planned for Georgia-Colorado to lead into Alabama-Florida are screwed too.

You can also bet that the coaches aren’t happy – the earlier the start, the better when it comes to getting back into Athens, resting, and bouncing back for a huge game the next week with Tennessee. Those few extra hours make the difference between getting home closer to dawn than midnight on Sunday morning. There’s also a weather factor and a huge difference between a mid afternoon and early evening game there. The average high in Boulder over the past 5 years on October 2 was about 76 degrees. The average low was under 53 degrees…and the wildly variable October weather in the high plains has seen temps range all the way from 86 in 2005 to 28 degrees last year.

If it’s a sport, there’s someone unhappy with the officiating. It seems we’ve had some of the worst calls of all time recently. There was the perfect game that wasn’t. The story of poor officiating took over the World Cup this June much as it did SEC football last October. And if there’s something as universal as gripes about the refs, it’s ideas for what should be done about it.

Our pet idea for football is fixed goal-line cameras. The ball crossing the line is what the game is all about, and we have no consistent way to review that most fundamental of calls. But even that simple idea has its flaw: the view of the goal-line can be obscured from the sideline.

The NFL is looking at an even better idea: chip-in-ball technology. A spokesman for the NFL “said on Tuesday that they are looking at expanding their use of technology.” German company Cairos Technologies claims that they are talking with the NFL about this specific chip-in-ball technology.

The German manufacturer of the technology does get one thing very wrong about the rules of American football. He states that “in American Football you have the same situation (as in soccer), you need to cross a line and the ball needs to be over the line 100 percent.” The two sports are completely opposite in their treatment of the ball crossing the line. It’s true that in soccer/futbol the ball isn’t considered out of bounds or in the goal until it completely crosses the boundary line. American football only requires the slightest bit of the ball to “break the plane” to register as a score (or first down, etc.). If you’ve ever seen a first down measurement, you know that. Whether that different set of rules is enough to matter in the technology is of course going to come up as the NFL investigates, but it does make a difference in how sensors are to be positioned and triggered.

If the system works, hopefully it’s not too long until the technology trickles down to major college football.

Will Hutson Mason redshirt? Mason has done just fine so far, but all of the caveats about a true freshman in his first preseason camp apply. Seth Emerson asked Mark Richt yesterday “whether they’d still try to avoid burning Hutson Mason’s redshirt.” Richt’s response was about what you’d expect: it’s still way too soon to tell.

I can’t say that there’s even a question here. Mason has to play this year. There’s no need to worry about a redshirt: Aaron Murray will have three to four years under center, and VHT Christian LeMay is on his way in next year. Mason could of course make the competition interesting years from now, but this is very much a situation where Georgia can afford to have a short-term outlook. with Logan Gray moving to receiver, the need is there now to develop a permanent option at #2 QB.

It’s also too soon yet to know what Richt would do if he had to turn to a backup in a game. “It would just depend on how far (Mason) progresses as we go,” Richt said. “I hope we don’t have to worry about that.” Me too. Whether that answer turns out to be Gray or Mason, Georgia is going to be in bad shape at quarterback if Murray suddenly becomes unavailable. You’ll either have a raw true freshman getting his feet wet, or you’ll have a rusty junior with little game experience who has done none of the prep work. Which poison do you pick?

I cast my vote with Mason back in May under one very obvious condition:

If Mason – and of course this is a big condition – shows a fair amount of competence in August, he just about has to be named the #2. I’d take an inexperienced guy who’s in the meetings and getting the reps every day over someone more familiar with the playbook whose repetitions and preparation are mostly at another position. It’s not just a matter of Gray stepping back in to QB if the need arises; even ARod needs to take batting practice and stay sharp. Either way, here’s hoping the backup QB is an afterthought this year.

Richt downplays that concern by noting Gray’s experience and intelligence and reminding us “he’s not gonna forget how to throw the ball.” That’s true, but he’s also not going to have a clue about the defense he’s facing. The only scenario in which Gray might be a better choice is if the need to go to the backup is determined early enough in the week for Gray to have some practice reps and go through the quarterback position meetings and prep. Otherwise I’ll stick with the raw but focused and prepared freshman over someone relying on muscle memory – this is playing quarterback in the SEC, not riding a bicycle.

Ideally, Georgia will blow past the 25.5 point line in the season opener, and Richt will have some considerable garbage time with which to play. Who comes off the bench to spell Murray? That would be the perfect time to play Mason. It’s not going to instantly prepare him for the big time in Columbia, but it would be the start of building that experience he’ll need if the question of a replacement comes up down the road. You’d also expect to play Mason in that scenario because that’s the exact same time Gray should be getting his first significant game experience at receiver. Gray isn’t likely to be anywhere near the first team for a while, and he’s not spending all this time working at receiver just to be switched back to QB when the second team goes in.

The Denver Post sensationally reports tonight that “CU football ticket system hacked by Georgia fans, school says.“

Colorado’s 2010 motto: The only winning move is not to play.

Hacked?!?! What happened? Did some enterprising Georgia fan crack a password and start playing Global Thermonuclear War on the CU ticket system? Are they sure this wasn’t a bitter Georgia Tech fan seeking revenge for 1990?

Nope. A promotion code (“1990”) was issued by the Colorado ticket office and “intended to be used only by members of Colorado’s 1990 national championship team which will be honored at the game as part of its 20-year reunion.” With all the security of “hey, guys, here’s a promotion code you can use for tickets,” CU gave ticket buyers a way to purchase single-game tickets to the October 2nd game. That’s valuable information because the only other way to buy tickets is through a three-pack. Colorado, seeing a fine opportunity to stick it to their Georgia guests, does not offer single-game tickets to the general public for only this game.

Of course that code soon found its way outside of the tight circle of Colorado’s 1990 national championship team, and it was soon spread across the Bulldog nation via message board and e-mail. Pretty cloak-and-dagger stuff, right? So by using this code, and entering it in a promotional field that had zero authentication or validation, Georgia fans started buying tickets without being extorted for the three-game packs. These Georgia fans almost surely had no idea of the intent of the promo code, and I doubt they cared – the code worked, the orders were processed, and all was good until the loophole was closed.

Colorado officials were not amused. Rather than owning up to their mistake and honoring the tickets bought legitimately through their system, they have deemed these purchases “fraudulent.” All 123 tickets ordered using the code will be invalidated. If you bought tickets using this promo code, tear them up.

If you’re a Georgia fan still looking for tickets to the game, Kanu’s advice is solid. Patience is still a good policy. But if you do decide to go “hacking” again, remember your way out: tic-tac-toe with zero players.

I was reading the very enjoyable Michael Elkon dissection of Mandel’s “dirty coach” piece, and his final question gets to the heart of it: “should Masoli have been banished from football for his offenses at Oregon”?

That question of course implies a “who?” Who would ban Masoli? In Mandel’s world, that decision was Houston Nutt’s. It’s a pretty common mindset. When a player gets in trouble, we automatically look to the coach for discipline and draw amusement from those coaches who go a little easier than others in that department. But if these coaches are so dirty, why do so many of these decisions keep ending up in their hands?

Think about all of the layers Masoli passed through before this even got to the “dirty” Houston Nutt. Start with the criminal justice system. Being a part of a team is a secondary concern if the person is in jail. Even after pleading guilty to a second-degree felony and subsequent drug and traffic charges, Jeremiah Masoli has remained free to leave the state and continue his quarterbacking career. Yes, it’s possible that he could still face charges for violation of his probation, but does anyone expect that to go anywhere? In the case of the bar fight at Tennessee, only Darren Myles Jr. currently faces serious charges. Why?

Then there are the heirarchies of authority within the universities. Someone at Ole Miss made the decision to admit Masoli, a convicted felon. All of these schools presumably have a president, athletic director, dean of students, and even student judiciaries. They’re silent. These offices needn’t be powerless against the football coach. The cases of Jamar Chaney and Michael Grant should still be familiar to Georgia fans as instances of an oversight committee stepping in to question the admission of a football player. Georgia’s athletic department also removes some of the discretionary power from its coaches by mandating minimum suspensions for drug and alcohol-related arrests. Coaches can and do butt heads with the administration over these questions, but those conflicts show that the administration can have teeth when it asserts itself.

So when the police, judges, prosecutors, and several layers of university bureaucracy punt, it’s left to the coach to be society’s gatekeeper. It’s not the witnesses who looked the other way at the bar, the judge who decided probation was plenty strong enough for a felony conviction, or the admissions officer who thought Masoli would make a fine addition to the Ole Miss graduate program.

I don’t mean to come off like Otter’s defense of Delta house or cast the coaches as sympathetic please-protect-us-from-ourselves figures. Yes, they’ll bend the rules to win at almost any cost and take at least as much latitude as their bosses will give them. I also don’t pretend that these other parties (yes, even local law enforcement) operate without heavy pressure to do right by the home team. But, as Elkon points out, these “dirty” coaches aren’t the guys breaking NCAA rules. In the case of Masoli, you have a player who, for now at least, is permitted by the law to leave the state of Oregon and continue his career elsewhere. Thanks to the NCAA’s recent rule change, Masoli is eligible to play his final year of eligibility wherever he likes. He’s been admitted by the University of Mississippi. So Nutt is the problem for playing someone who has been cleared by every other level of oversight along the way?

So coaches should have no role in discipline or no standards for character? Of course they should. Consider it selfishly – players who are problems off the field can often be poison to the chemistry of the team. Disruptions harm the team, and negative publicity makes it more difficult to recruit and keep the fans on your side. A coach has plenty of reasons to be active in the discipline of his team. But don’t mistake that job with our irrational expectation that the coaches serve as a proxy for actual justice.

We’ve seen coffins with collegiate branding, so no marketing opportunity should surprise us.

AdAge is reporting that fans of Texas and Texas A&M can add energy to the list of products and services they can buy with the alma mater’s logo slapped on it.

In a deal put together by sponsorship broker IMG College and Branded Retail Energy, a Dallas-based company that markets electricity through affinity partnerships, the schools will create university-branded power companies. Texas Longhorns Energy and Texas A&M Aggies Energy will begin selling electricity and natural gas to consumers in deregulated markets in the state next month.

Each new customer will “generate funds for sustainability initiatives for the respective schools,” and customers will also benefit through various loyalty programs. Customers can “accumulate points for merchandise, tickets to athletic events and more.”

Now this idea isn’t about to sweep the nation; not every state has fan bases large and insane enough to support a venture like this, and only 14 states have deregulated their power industry to allow for such deals. Arkansas is the only SEC state to have done so. Georgia though has already deregulated its natural gas industry. Georgians can buy natural gas from various marketers, so why not one using UGA branding? For now this seems like a straight Texas thing, so no jokes yet about the lights going dim every year around November 1st.

It’s noteworthy that the deal was put together by IMG – IMG recently bought ISP, the sports management firm that controls marketing for Bulldog athletics. ISP wasn’t exactly shy about what it would sell (those who have been to a Tech game know about that), and IMG doesn’t appear to have many qualms about it either.

Georgia has returned to the top of the Princeton Review’s list of party schools. The tradition is upheld at North Campus tailgates, across the football team, and right up to the athletic director’s office. That’s how you win – it takes a campus-wide commitment. Michael Adams, banging his head against office furniture, could not be reached for comment.

The summer of 1995 wasn’t especially extraordinary. Some might remember it as the summer Jerry Garcia passed away. Others were enjoying the Braves’ run to a World Series title. We watched the OJ trial and made Hootie a very rich man.

The summer of 1995 also saw the launch of this site – or at least some embryonic version of it. I had just graduated from the University, was spending the summer looking for a job, and noticed that UGA didn’t have much of an online presence – official or otherwise.

1995 happened to be a pretty significant year in the history of the Internet. The average UGA student had exposure to bits and pieces of the ‘net through campus e-mail or even Usenet newsgroups – are there any former rec.sports.football.college readers out there? But most people who were “online” were still behind the walled networks of AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. Those networks, especially Prodigy, had very active Bulldog groups, and several of those veterans are still active online today. At the end of 1994, Netscape introduced version 1.0 of its browser, and it took off during the first half of 1995. By August of 1995, Netscape was ready to launch one of the first IPOs of an Internet-based company, and we were off an running into the early dot com era.

1995 was a great time to start a website. Everyone was an amateur and a newbie. A bored college grad like myself could throw something up, avoid using the [blink] tag, and learn on the fly and in public because everyone else was too. I moved back to Atlanta to begin a new job but continued to play with a very meager site, carried it through the end of the Ray Goff era, and apparently ended up with people other than myself reading it. Thanks to some of those readers, we soon had contacts with information about recruiting and even what was going on during the first spring practices of new coach Jim Donnan in early 1996.

The path of this site since then pretty much follows along with the evolution of how connected fans have kept up with their teams:

• Message boards: Matt Wright’s wwwboard, customized over and over by fan base after fan base, brought out the best in personality disorders as hundreds of small and independent message boards each created their unique experiments in sociology.
• Dueling networks: The few independent message boards, straining under the demands of maintaining wildly popular sites, soon found sanctuary under the corporate umbrella of a couple of emerging national networks. As these networks combined popular message boards with regional recruiting resources like Bobby Burton or Border Wars, they became one stop shops for rabid college sports fans and rode the wave of the dot com bubble until it burst in 2000. Even the market collapse couldn’t stop the demand to know what 17-year-old Montego Powers thought of his trip to Clemson, so the two leading networks reorganized, reorganized again, found even larger corporate masters at Yahoo and Fox, and continue on to this day as Rivals.com and Scout.com.
• Blogs: Weblogs have been around in popular usage since the late 1990s, but the technology used to create and manage them wasn’t very accessible at first unless you really knew your way around a web server. But as the format became more popular, you saw services like Moveable Type/Typepad, Blogger, and WordPress make it easy for anyone to get going and just write. Critics worried about the unregulated Wild West landscape as blogs took off, but it didn’t take long for this medium to make an impact on traditional media.
• Twitter? Twitter is mainstream enough now to not require description. I’m finding myself writing as much there now as here, and it mostly has to do with time. The conversation is entertaining, current, and many of the newsmakers are there with no filters. That’s led to some disasters and the occasional secondary violation, but newsmakers are discovering the value of having a place for their own unedited voices.

Not even I want to read more of a blow-by-blow history of the site, but I’m grateful that the Internet Archive exists to have captured a lot of it – even the regrettable late-90s design. There’s the 1999-ish site on my original Mindspring account. We moved to the dawgsonline.com domain in the summer of 2000 and began taking on more of a weblog format soon after. I’m glad that the various bits of software I’ve used to manage this site have been open enough to allow me to export from one to the next so that we have an archive back to 2001, as incomplete as it might be.

There aren’t any grand plans for the future of the site other than to keep doing what I’ve been doing – piping up when I have something to say. I couldn’t ask for more than the site has already directly or indirectly given to me: a rewarding career, many new friends and acquaintances, and even my lovely wife.

If you can put up with one self-important “what I’ve learned” observation, it’s summed up by technology writer Dan Gillmor: “My readers know more than I do, and that’s a good thing.” Anyone who’s developed any kind of readership should acknowledge the same thing – tapping into the collective knowledge and experience of everyone who’s contributed to this site has been one of the best parts of the experience. Over 15 years I’ve read thousands of bright and interesting ideas by other writers, commenters, and message board contributors. I just hope I’ve contributed one or two back to the conversation.

It’s appropriate to finish with a word of thanks to some key people whose own pioneering efforts deserve mention:

Steve Patterson: The presence of online-only media alongside more traditional sources is a fact of life these days, but in 1998 the notion of moving across the country to join the Bulldog beat was a huge risk. Now there are few with as much experience around the Georgia beat, and his UGASports.com site is probably the best all-around news source for Georgia football. Steve’s been very generous to give me the occasional opportunity to write there, and he put me in a position to witness the most significant play of the Mark Richt era from less than 20 feet away.

Amy Brown: Most every Dawg fan who’s spent time online knows about Amy’s Anti-Orange Page. Amy was a friend from college who had a similar interest in this web stuff, and her site launched not long after this one. Since all of us were learning as we went, having someone to bounce ideas and frustrations off of was invaluable and motivating.

Jason Brooks: Jason was the creator, moderator, sysadmin, and steward of the original Dawgvent. Most schools ended up with a handful of tribal message board communities, but the ‘Vent was the place to go before the national networks began commoditizing message boards in the late 90s. The active community Jason created brought a lot of us together, and a lot of those connections still continue.

“Paul Westerdawg”: If you look at the archive here, there are a lot of holes early on. Our own early attempts at a blog in 2000 and 2001 relied on hand-rolled software at first because the medium was so new. It wasn’t easy to maintain, so often it wasn’t. PWD’s own site geared up in 2004, and he deserves credit for showing me and everyone else what could be done with a good Georgia sports blog. It was a kick in the pants for me to get writing, and the site helped to make the Georgia corner of the sports blogosphere one of the more active ones.