Record: 11-3 (1-0)

Andy Landers intentionally structured this year’s nonconference slate to avoid the big name opponents that usually fill up a Lady Dogs’ schedule. With so many freshmen and sophomores still adjusting to the college game, this wasn’t the year to be taking on all comers. Still, the nonconference schedule featured a couple of interesting challenges. Unfortunately, Georgia wasn’t up to many of those challenges. There are only a handful of quality wins, and the comeback at TCU was the lone big road win. Road losses at Georgia Tech, USC, and a neutral-site loss to Louisiana Tech knocked Georgia from the polls and kept them from posting any other high-profile wins.

The Lady Dogs actually already have one conference game under their belt. They erupted for 40 first-half points last Sunday and held on to beat South Carolina 61-51 despite only scoring 21 in the second half. With two very important road games coming up, it was essential that Georgia start off SEC play the right way, and they came away with the home win.

Personnel

There’s something to like about each of the players on the court. You can highlight Phillips’ rebounding or Mitchell’s poise or Miller’s offense and so on. But what stands out is the lack of the consistent playmakers that Georgia usually seems to have. Jasmine James will often give Georgia double-figures, but she’ll do it by taking a lot of shots as the ball is usually in her hand when the shot clock winds down. Merideth Mitchell can be a difference-maker if her shot is falling, but it can be spotty. Anne Marie Armstrong has hit some big outside shots, but her offense is inconsistent, and she’s a step slow on defense.

Georgia’s freshmen guards show a great deal of promise. Khaalidah Miller just earned SEC Freshman of the Week honors for a couple of strong recent outings, and she led Georgia with 15 points against South Carolina. Ronika Ransford is a quick, tough guard who shows good skill on defense and getting to the basket. Her shot needs work, but she’s played well enough to earn more time. Ransford and Miller will be a solid tandem down the road, but they’re not quite to the point of taking over games the way Jasmine James did a year ago.

Post play has been a relative weakness. Porsha Phillips is a fine player and an outstanding rebounder but is more comfortable working around the elbow rather than banging inside. Armstrong and Mitchell likewise have the size to play forward but just aren’t comfortable in traditional post roles. Jasmine Hassell hasn’t exactly fizzled at center after a promising freshman campaign, but she’s struggled enough to be challenged for her starting job. Tamika Willis and Ebony Jones are able to give minutes off the bench, but neither has shown much punch on offense.

What to expect in the SEC

The SEC is typically the strongest conference in women’s hoops, but this isn’t an especially strong crop of teams. Tennessee is a national contender, and Kentucky is as strong as they’ve ever been. After that, it’s a toss-up. Arkansas is stronger than expected. LSU and Vandy are in transition seasons. There aren’t a lot of bad teams, and most anyone can pull off a win at home against all but a couple of teams.

Because the women don’t play a divisional schedule, Georgia will face Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama twice. They’ll only face traditional powers Tennessee, LSU, and Vanderbilt once. In most years, that would be a favorable schedule, but Kentucky and Arkansas look to be two of the better teams this year. The Lady Dogs will find out immediately where they stack up: their next two games are on the road against those strong Kentucky and Arkansas teams.

The nonconference schedule has taught us a few things. 1- Georgia’s not likely to light up the scoreboard. 2- they struggle on the road. Georgia’s scoring woes extend across the board. They aren’t get a ton of production inside, they shoot under 30% from outside, and they shoot just over 60% from the line. What this means for Georgia is that they’re likely to be in a lot of close, low-scoring games – and that’s a best-case scenario. If the defense or rebounding effort isn’t there on a given night, they’ll likely lose. It also means that Georgia’s prospects in SEC play are widely variable. They’re good enough to contend for one of the top spots in the league if enough of those close games break their way. But their margin for error is so thin that a handful of points across a few games could plunge them into the bottom half of the conference.

This isn’t one of Georgia’s stronger teams, but the potential is there for a good season and another trip to the NCAA Tournament. Georgia’s biggest unknown the rest of the way is what they’ll get from their post players. If James remains a consistent scorer and the freshmen continue to come along, the backcourt should be OK – but not great.

Think about the layers of people that take care of everything you need to do your job. Everyone from the IT staff keeping the bits flowing to the assistant who takes care of office supplies and keeps the coffee stocked to the HVAC guys who are outside working on the broken heat pump. Every second you have to spend thinking about these things is time spent away from what makes you productive and valuable to your company. If your company doesn’t have people and systems in place to abstract away those functions, I probably don’t have to tell you how frustrated you are about the constant interruptions and crap you have to deal with before you can even do what it is you do.

We’re trained to think of management in top-down terms: orders and direction are given and followed, policies are imposed, and so on. But the best managers get that one of their most important roles is to create those abstractions and make them as transparent as possible. If a salesperson is constantly dealing with IT issues, management has failed.

So it is with athletics or any profession, and Mark Richt is just another guy with a job. So it makes sense that his manager, Greg McGarity, is helping Richt to clear some of those distractions away. Whether you disagree with Richt’s assessment that “we are very close,” the one takeaway from yesterday’s season-ending press conference was that Richt would be more available to “study the game of football.”

“I’m just spending less time messing around with things that Greg wants to be able to help take off my plate from an administrative point of view,” Richt said. “Things are being put in place that are going to help free me up to spend more time doing the things that I love the most, which is study the game of football and be an expert and be on the cutting edge.”

It might seem obvious to the point of “what took you so long,” but there are reasons why coaches sometimes get bogged down in the peripheral stuff. Going back to the role of management, what’s changed in that area over the past year? We know that this move was undertaken with the cooperation of McGarity, and we don’t know what level of administrative support was available from McGarity’s predecessor.

It can also be a difficult balance because those non-football areas can derail what you’re trying to accomplish on the field. Take the emphasis of this offseason: the restructuring of the conditioning program is the one major change made since the 2010 season. The emphasis on toughness and attitude has nothing to do with schemes and cutting-edge football, but Georgia has decided that they can’t win without it. It’s a similar story for academics. They’re in good hands with Dr. Eason, but it’s an area that can sink your program if it gets out of control with a head coach whose head is mostly in the Xs and Os. Richt will still need to have clear communication with these areas while he studies the game, and that’s something that a good manager like McGarity will have to keep an eye on.

Is this a good or even an important move? I don’t know. On one hand, I don’t see the shuffling of some administrative duties as key to the survivial of Richt’s program as some much-needed upgrades on the conditioning side. On the other hand, Georgia, especially on offense, isn’t exactly what you’d call a cutting-edge program. Teams like Stanford showed that you can still win, and win big, with a conventional I-formation and pro-style offense, but Georgia’s offense heavy on sprint draws and play action isn’t actively being copied in what has become a very copycat business. If it takes some reorganization for Richt to have the time to study those areas and make the changes that are implied by that reflection, at least that’s taken care of now.

Pryor rushes for 100+ and throws two TD passes.
Posey led the team with 3 catches, 70 yds, and 1 TD.
Herron scores Ohio State’s second touchdown, finishes with 87 yards.

And the game was wrapped up on an interception by Solomon Thomas, another suspended player. All that was missing was for Mike Adams to be the guy who fell on that fumble into the endzone.

If you’re still looking for something to pick you up and get you to look forward to the future of Georgia football, you couldn’t get a better prescription than this ESPN update from this week’s Under Armour All-America game. There’s still a month to go until signing day, and the competition for these top prospects is intense. But if the tone of this update is any indication which way the key uncommitted members of the recruiting class are leaning, Georgia’s talent level could be looking at a big shot in the arm. And contrary to Buck Belue’s opinion, there are several prospects yet to make their decisions who will be early contributors at any school.

The last offseason was spent discussing and for the most part shooting down the notion that Mark Richt was on the hot seat. I don’t think we’ll have that discussion again this year. Mark Richt will be Georgia’s coach next year – teams not named Maryland don’t willingly try to put a new staff together a month before Signing Day. The outlook beyond next year is what has changed: we won’t throw out ultimatums for 2011 (as if it were our place to make those demands), but it’s clear that the recent track record isn’t cutting it. With a third of the conference playing for national titles since Georgia last won the league, the expectations are high but unmistakable.

There’s a lot of talk about the program being at a crossroads now, but we’re a season past that point. Talking about a “crossroads” implies that the possible paths facing the program lead to roughly equally likely outcomes. Mark Richt, on the other hand, is trying to keep things from going off a cliff. If changes need to be made on offense, that would make an overhaul of both sides of the ball, special teams, and the conditioning program within two years. What’s left after that?

Bad losses have a way of clearing things up. The 2009 blowout in Knoxville wrapped up any discussion on the need for a new approach on defense. The Liberty Bowl did a good job of shooting down the idea that 2010 was mostly a story of with A.J. / without A.J. Without Green, the Dawgs were 1-3. With him, they were 5-4. Better, sure, but only the 2009 season generated more losses for a Richt team than the shortened nine-game stretch of 2010 during which Green was available. The availability of A.J. Green is an interesting footnote on the season, but it’s noise when it comes to the current state of the program.

Mark Richt has already indicated that toughening up the program will be a priority for the offseason. We’ve seen progress in that area with the developments in the conditioning program, and we’re assured that even more work in that area is on the way. But toughness starts at the top, and what we’re talking about is illustrated in a contrast Kyle makes nicely in this post. The new conditioning staff can get its ducks in a row, but it won’t matter if that attitude isn’t carried through all elements of the program from nutrition and academics up to playcalling and execution.

The Boise State game staring us in the face around eight months from now couldn’t be a bigger moment for the future of the program. I’m not really talking about the game in a must-win sense, as a loss in a game like that isn’t necessarily the end of the season (right, Hokies?). But that game, and the South Carolina game after it, will be immediate and legitimate tests of the ability of Mark Richt to right his program during the offseason. Wins also won’t necessarily mean that Georgia is set for an SEC title and beyond, but those wins are necesaary to keep next season from becoming one long and extended march towards the inevitable.

In 2005, Boise State came to Athens intent on measuring itself against the eventual SEC champion. When the two teams meet in Atlanta later this year, the roles will be reversed: this time, it will be Georgia looking to (re)establish credibility by beating one of the nation’s most successful and highly-ranked programs of the past five years.