Georgia and North Carolina will open the 2016 season in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game at the Georgia Dome on September 3, 2016.

It’s been a long time coming. Georgia and Carolina have played 30 times with Georgia holding a 16-12-2 advantage. Outside of current SEC members, only Georgia Tech and Clemson have been more frequent Georgia opponents. In fact, the Dawgs have faced North Carolina more times than they’ve faced four SEC West schools. But the Dawgs and Tar Heels haven’t met since the 1971 Gator Bowl when brothers Vince and Bill Dooley squared off in a 7-3 Georgia win.

Rekindling the series has come up several times in the 40+ years since, most recently in 2009 when talks were underway for the 2010 and 2011 Kickoff Classics. UNC ended up playing LSU in 2010, and of course Georgia opened with Boise State in 2011.

Personally, this is the best matchup I could ask for – the team I grew up supporting against my alma mater. My only quibble is that this was a missed opportunity for a series. The history between the two programs is there. Athens and Chapel Hill are iconic college towns with two top public Southern universities. The stadiums even share a common heritage. Kenan Stadium isn’t huge, but its picturesque setting among the pines is worth visiting. It was built by T.C. Atwood who then designed our own Sanford Stadium. I’ve said my peace before about giving up home games for neutral sites, but it especially applies for these two teams: fans of both schools are giving up the chance to visit another classic college town and stadium in order to close down a soon-to-be abandoned dome in downtown Atlanta.

I get why a home-and-home would have been tough to do. Georgia is headed to South Bend in 2017, so the return trip wouldn’t happen any time soon. The neutral site game gets us off the hook at the cost of a 2016 home game against a lesser opponent. Neutral site games also charge a premium for tickets, so there will be a minor financial windfall. Georgia received $1.7 million for the 2011 game against Boise State, so we’d expect at least $2 million this time around. Those 2011 tickets were $55 – higher than a $40 home game but still towards the low end of neutral site games.

If this is the only way to make a game between UGA and UNC happen, so be it. I hope it’s a starting point to consider an on-campus series in the future.

Discussion of Georgia’s eventual indoor practice facility (IPF) has always come back to this tough choice: do you sacrifice existing outdoor practice fields for the on-campus location, or do you sacrifice convenience to build exactly what you want out on South Milledge Ave?

Seth Emerson, previewing a Tuesday Athletic Board meeting at which an IPF will be on the agenda, suggests that another location has emerged as a possible compromise that provides both a convenient location and a way to retain the outdoor fields. This location though raises another set of concerns. Emerson writes:

…one site has emerged as a possibility: The area just beyond the existing outdoor practice fields, off of Lumpkin Street, leading up to Stegeman Coliseum.

Other locations had not been ruled out as of last month: An off-campus area off Milledge Avenue, or tearing up one of the existing outdoor fields and building it there. But the location off Lumpkin seems a good compromise, keeping the existing facilities but not having it far from the Butts-Mehre building.

That location, “just beyond the existing outdoor practice fields,” is the block bordered by Lumpkin Street, Carlton Street, Sanford Drive, and Smith Street. It’s the site of the Hoke Smith Building, the Hoke Smith Annex, and a large parking lot that serves the Hoke Smith complex as well as athletic events during off-hours.

The location is ideal until you consider the buildings already occupying the site. Displacing typical academic buildings would be a tough enough sales job to the University community. These buildings house the University’s Cooperative Extension Service – essentially the state’s home base for CES outreach and 4H. It’s not as if these services would go away, but relocating them would draw statewide interest.

The political cost is just the start. The expense of a new CES location would obviously add to the cost of the practice facility. Would UGA or the athletic department foot that bill?

Would there be a way to preserve the buildings? Not realistically. If you try to shoehorn in a facility with the exact footprint of a practice field, the hulking football facility would just about touch the buildings and require the closure of Smith Street and Sanford Drive. And of course the facility will take up more space than the outline of a practice field.

So we’re left with this: if you take over the block completely, there seems to be ample space for a full-size indoor field with a nice buffer of greenspace around it. Personally, as someone who attends a lot of events at Stegeman, I’m not looking forward to losing those parking spaces, but that’s something I’ve said every time a new University building goes up. It’s worth pointing out that this solution is just one of several being considered, and we’ll learn more as the board discusses the future facility.

[See Georgia’s 2015 signing class here.]

Overall

Take a step back for a second – in the past year, Georgia has replaced both coordinators and the entire defensive coaching staff. Only Mark Richt and three offensive position coaches remain from the 2013 season. On the field Georgia weathered the first stage of that transition in 2014 with a 10-win season and a top-10 final ranking. On the recruiting trail, Georgia might’ve fared even better. Despite losing longtime offensive coordinator (and perhaps the program’s best recruiter) Mike Bobo, Georgia held on to and even added to an outstanding 2015 recruiting class. Georgia’s new coaches have put together consecutive consensus top-10 recruiting classes, and Wednesday’s large (and perhaps soon to be even larger) group replenishes the roster at several positions.

Needs

I sat at the Blind Pig facing their list of signees, and the emphasis of the class was hard to miss. The half of the list dedicated to the offense had a blank column big enough to write Terry Godwin’s name vertically while the defensive side had run out of space. About two-thirds of Georgia’s class are defenders, and the team addressed areas on defense hit by graduation as well as areas that needed shoring up.

The class is strongest on the defensive line. Georgia signed not only defensive tackles (Trenton Thompson could have immediate impact), but there are also several guys who could be effective 3-4 defensive ends. The class was a little thin at linebacker with only a trio signed (pending Roquan Smith), but one of the cardinal rules of recruiting is to avoid getting hung up over a player’s stated position. We’ll see how the pieces are plugged into the roster down the road. The secondary, though losing only Swann, had to replace a slew of transfers and added signees both at cornerback and safety. Several will have an opportunity to have the immediate impact that Dominick Sanders had in 2014.

Georgia’s haul on offense was lighter, but you still see areas of focus. The Dawgs didn’t sign a quarterback, and the only backfield signee was a late addition more in the mold of Quayvon Hicks than a true tailback. Georgia got an outstanding tight end, bolstered the receivers, and four offensive linemen ranging from 6’4″ to 6’7″ give the team a head start on replacing the group that will be graduating after 2015. 5* athlete Terry Godwin gives Georgia another versatile weapon to go along with Michel, McKenzie, and Mitchell.

With a class of around 30 players, it’s hard to say that any areas of need were left wanting. Georgia is committed to the quarterbacks on the roster knowing that the nation’s best quarterback is on his way in 2016. Likewise, Georgia will ride with the five returning scholarship tailbacks and address the future of that position in 2016. You might have liked a little more help at inside linebacker with Herrera and Wilson departing, but we’ll see how the staff distributes the roster in August, and UAB standout Jake Ganus could help.

Walk-ons

Californian Nick Robinson will join the team as a quarterback. U.S. Army All-American kicker Rodrigo Blankenship will walk on until a scholarship becomes available in 2016 when he’ll be the leading candidate to replace Marshall Morgan. Hudson Reynolds of Bainbridge could very well become the next long-snapper once Theus graduates.

Immediate Impact

Where does the large 2015 class have the best opportunity to get on the field? You can start with Trenton Thompson. The dominant lynchpin of Georgia’s defensive line class will be an important part of the rotation right away. We’ll likely see other true freshmen join Tracy Rocker’s rotation. It will also be hard to keep Godwin off the field – as we saw with Michel and McKenzie in 2014, a creative offensive coordinator should get playmakers involved even as true freshmen. Depending on the health of Jay Rome, tight end Jackson Harris could be next in line behind Blazevich. The most intriguing area might be the secondary – the 2014 unit was largely improvised with changing lineups and walk-ons and true freshmen pressed into service. Some like Sanders and Mauger made enough progress to be considered returning starters, but there’s a whole lot of playing time up for grabs.

Kirby Choates

We’ve all heard the fans who claim to prefer lower-rated prospects who bleed red and black over the 5* guy making a business decision. Often that’s just a form of sour grapes and has always struck me as odd – why not prefer 25 5* guys whose parents named them “Herschel?” That’s a roundabout way of getting to Kirby Choates Jr. Choates, a “self-professed longtime Bulldog fan,” was off the radar for most of the process while he worked to become academically qualified. Even once he cleared up academic concerns, it was touch and go whether Georgia’s class had filled up. The offer he had waited for finally came, and his signing ceremony tells you everything you need to know about what the opportunity to play at Georgia means to him. It’s unfair to make Tim Jennings (another unheralded 11th hour offer) comparisons, but we do know that Kirby Choates will have a lot of fans in his corner when he arrives in Athens.

Roquan Smith

Smith’s story became an instant Signing Day classic – the surprising announcement, the wait while he put the UCLA gloves on, and then the excitement that circulated as rumors of second thoughts spread. Georgia’s top signee, Trenton Thompson, became involved. Then news hit that his would-be coordinator at UCLA was going to become part of the Atlanta Falcons staff. The day ended not with a reversal but with a step back to reconsider all four of his finalists.

We were reminded that Signing Day isn’t a day – the 2015 football signing period goes through April 1. For his own sake, I’m glad that he didn’t rush into following through on a very public announcement if he still had doubts. The confusion over the UCLA coaching decision showed that he made the right decision to wait.

As a Georgia fan, of course I want Smith in Athens. His talent is without question, and he plays at a position of need for Georgia. He’s feeling the stress and weight of a bigger decision than most of us had faced at that age, and the pressure from friends and family to stay home can be both a positive and a negative. I think Tyler has a good insight here – I hope those bridges can be rebuilt as Smith reconsiders his decison.