Last year the Georgia baseball team needed a deep run in the SEC Tournament just to increase its overall record to .500 in order to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. They responded with a series of improbable wins and were rewarded with the program’s third NCAA Tournament bid in four seasons.

Georgia seemed in much better shape heading into the home stretch of this season. They had split with defending national champ South Carolina, and they had swept Auburn. They headed into the final series against a weak Alabama team needing to win two of three games to clinch a winning conference mark. Instead of closing strong as they did a year ago, Georgia awaits the NCAA bracket with four consecutive losses and a two-and-BBQ exit from the SEC Tournament.

The Diamond Dawgs took the first game in Tuscaloosa but haven’t won since. During the four-game slide, Georgia has managed a total of just seven runs. The final game against Auburn ended in a way that summed up Georgia’s year-long struggles plating runners. Needing just one run to tie, the Dawgs could not bring home a runner from third with one out. Georgia’s batting average is third-best in SEC games, but only Tennessee scored fewer runs. In individual games, the inability to drive in runs could be seen as bad luck. Sustained problems in this area over the course of a season, coupled with a lack of power hitting in general, was not a good sign for a team that entered the season with much higher expectations.

The Diamond Dawgs began the year ranked in the top 20 and rose to as high as #8 on the back of a 10-1 record. A sweep by UCLA hinted that Georgia wasn’t quite ready for prime time, and losing three of their first four SEC series raised further questions. Georgia’s strength at pitching never became dominant, and an injury to closer Tyler Maloof diminished the bullpen. The team was able to point to close losses against good conference peers at Florida and LSU, but the inability to break through in those opportunities helped to turn Georgia from a conference contender to a team sweating its NCAA Tournament selection.

It’s debatable whether Georgia fans have ever been truly united behind David Perno – except for a few weeks in 2008 of course. The native Athenian and former Bulldog player was a controversial choice to follow the legendary Ron Polk if only because of Perno’s relative inexperience. Perno’s first two seasons didn’t do much to ease concerns. The Bulldogs didn’t post a winning conference record in 2002 or 2003, and there was already grumbling about the need for a change.

If Perno was ever in danger at that early stage, the 2004 season all but extinguished that talk. Georgia finished atop the SEC East and rolled into its first College World Series since 2001. But if fans put one foot on the bandwagon after 2004, the 2005 season kept them from taking that second step. Georgia followed up the trip to Omaha with a sub-.500 SEC mark. Thus began one of the more black-and-white sequences of success and failure you’ll find in sports. The Diamond Dawgs reached the College World Series in 2004, 2006, and 2008. They followed up each of those seasons with SEC records at or below .500. You’d think a program that made three trips to Omaha in five seasons would have established itself as a conference – if not national – power, but those valleys in between the peaks have made fan opinion regarding Perno as disparate as the records.

It hasn’t been smooth sailing since the near-miss in 2008. The remnants of that 2008 team gave Perno his first consecutive NCAA Tournament bid in 2009, but that squad was only .500 in the SEC and fizzled out in the regionals. The program went off a cliff in 2010 and posted an abysmal 16-37 (5-23 SEC) record. Georgia bounced back somewhat in 2011, but it took some magic in the SEC Tournament to even get to an overall .500 record. A promising 2012 season hasn’t gone much better. The valleys of the past decade were at least followed by memorable teams and deep postseason runs. It’s now been a while since 2008, and Georgia hasn’t been much more viable than a bubble team since.

To be sure, there have been some tough moments for the baseball program recently. The catastrophic injuries to Veazey and Taylor left deep marks not only on the emotional state of the team but also on the lineup. Maloof’s season-ending injury took away another key asset this year. These events, not to disregard their human toll, had real implications on Georgia’s competitiveness. At what point, though, do those tragic events become crutches for unrelated performance problems?

This stagnation led to more and more questions regarding Perno’s future, and it’s come to the point that athletic director Greg McGarity has had to address those questions. McGarity confirmed in no uncertain terms that Perno would return for 2013. “It’s not even an issue,” McGarity declared at a meeting of the athletic board.

This isn’t meant to be a defense or an indictment of Perno. It is, though, an attempt to understand the expectations that the athletic department has of the Georgia baseball program. McGarity will be held to his own rubric for evaluating coaches which includes this expectation: “Develop a program that is competitive in the SEC and nationally, understanding that the definition of ‘competitive’ is different from sport to sport.”

That’s what’s puzzling about McGarity’s statements about the state of the program. Over the long term, and that matters, Perno has taken Georgia to half of its College World Series. His teams have been competitive, but whether they are now and will be is up for discussion. What’s troubling is that McGarity seems to be defining “competitive” down when it comes to baseball. Pointing out that most everyone, save for a few top teams, is roughly .500 is fine – unless your goal is to be one of those top teams. Imagine a discussion of Georgia football’s competitiveness that began by excluding Florida or Alabama. Yes, the Diamond Dawgs are competitive relative to the middle of the pack in the SEC, if that’s how the definition of ‘competitive’ works for baseball.

The timing is also important because there’s more at stake than the immediate well-being of the baseball program. In addition to some minor work slated for Foley Field in the short-term, McGarity spoke today of his plans for about $10 million of more significant improvements to the long-neglected facility. McGarity plans to raise the first $5 million before coming to the board for the rest. It stands to reason that the head coach would be central in any fundraising activity. Even with Perno’s position secure for another year, this major facilities project begins with a polarizing coach at the helm whose future will be a topic as soon as the tarp comes off the field next season.

Georgia’s defense has to have the quarterbacks of the SEC a little on edge this year, but Missouri’s signal callers are going to new lengths to avoid being under center when Georgia visits early in the season. Due to a combination of arrests and injuries, the availability of each of Missouri’s top three quarterbacks is now in question.

First, third-stringer Ashton Glaser was arrested back in March for failure to appear, and he got a punch in the face for his trouble. No suspension has been issued yet, but we’d be surprised if the hammer came down for some unpaid traffic tickets.

Soon after Glaser was arrested, the program announced that starter James Franklin would miss the rest of spring and much of the summer after undergoing surgery on his right (throwing) shoulder. The Tigers don’t expect that Franklin will miss any games in 2012, but any change to the recovery timetable could affect his readiness for the first game, if not the Georgia game.

And today we learn that backup quarterback Corbin Berkstresser was arrested on charges of leaving the scene of an accident. As the Kansas City Star reports, “Berkstresser, a redshirt freshman, spent most of the spring as the team’s No. 1 quarterback” in relief of the injured Franklin. No disciplinary actions have been announced yet.

We’re looking forward to a game in which one team has no defensive backs and the other has no quarterbacks.

Andy Landers has filled the two vacancies on his staff with a pair of nice additions. Angie Johnson has been an assistant at the D1 level for 18 years with the last 15 spent at FSU. Assistants with that kind of seasoned experience aren’t common and don’t become available often, and it’s something that’s been missing from the Georgia program for the past several years. She also served as Florida State’s recruiting coordinator and will join another solid recruiter, Joni Crenshaw, who remains on the Georgia staff.

Johnson is joined by former University of Alabama assistant Robert Mosley. Mosley has only been a college assistant for two seasons, but he built one of Alabama’s most successful high school programs with four state titles in seven seasons.

The Lady Dogs’ staff took a hit during the offseason with the departure of Cameron Newbauer (Louisville) and Travis Mays (Texas). The hires announced this week do a lot to fill those voids and bring new strengths and experience to the Georgia bench. They should be well-received by Georgia fans, and they’re right in line with what Georgia needs to capitalize on a strong and veteran roster in the upcoming season.

The anticipated 2012 Phil Steele magazine launches on June 5th. Today Steele previews his covers and the 41 players who will grace the various regional versions of the magazine. Georgia’s All-American linebacker Jarvis Jones is featured on the SEC cover.

Maybe it’s because I’m caught up in this malaise of being a Georgia fan awaiting this home schedule, but I’m having a tough time reconciling what’s going on elsewhere in the SEC. About half of the stadiums in the SEC are increasing capacity. I suppose it’s necessary in the never-ending facilities race, but can Ole Miss even in its best years support a capacity of 70,000?

There seem to be two diverging vectors. You have the additional money pouring into a sport that’s as popular as ever, and that money gets turned into bigger and better facilities. On the other hand, attendence nationwide is stagnant at best. Games are ubiquitous on television, and that generates much of the massive windfalls associated with the sport, but that same widepsread coverage provides a pretty powerful incentive to stay at home – especially when it’s not a hyped game. Add crystal-clear HDTV, climate control, restrooms, a grill, a stocked fridge, and a few friends, and watching the game in Media Room Stadium can be very appealing. Attendence, especially at a major program, can’t be described as anything but a hassle. Climbing ticket prices, donation requirements, parking fees, and traffic all combine to make it an expensive and trying hobby. Even the experience of tailgating comes with a price tag at some schools (and soon ours?)

So why do we go? There’s still nothing like being there. You’re willing to put up with a lot for that moment when the team runs on the field or to be a part of the explosion of noise when Rambo turned Sanford upside down against Auburn last year. You’re less likely to put up with it for an early kickoff against Buffalo.

I don’t really think kickoff time matters. A weak schedule isn’t going to generate much more excitement at 1:00 than it is 7:00. Fans who struggle to arrive at such games on time will be the first ones to get on the road for a night game when the Dawgs have a 30-point halftime lead. And, as much as we put this on Adams and anti-tailgate people, I don’t really blame the school. Georgia’s campus has seen a construction boom (with more to come), and that means fewer places to park people for one of the nation’s largest stadiums. There aren’t many good solutions, and some of the better ones might involve a fee.

Maybe Ole Miss and other SEC schools putting money into bigger stadiums haven’t hit this critical mass yet. Alabama’s unprecedented demand seems like it could go on forever, but all it takes is the wrong coach to turn the expanded Bryant-Denny into what’s happening at Neyland.

Since I seem to be questioning SEC quarterbacks this week, here’s another. CBS has updated its 2013 NFL prospect rankings. Here are the quarterbacks. The list makes as much sense as any arbitrary set of rankings, but then you come to the seventh name on the list.

That’s right – it’s a guy who couldn’t break through the muddled LSU quarterback picture last year and finished the season with 92 yards passing against Northwestern State. He now rates as a first or second round prospect according to CBS.

I understand all the usual caveats. It’s based on potential and not production. Potential has been the watchword with Mettenberger since high school. He has the stature and the arm that scouts drool over. The production has yet to catch up. Oconee transitioned from an option offense to feature Mettenberger, but he only put up 29 touchdowns over his two seasons as starter. (By contrast, Murray, LeMay, and Mason all had at least 28 touchdown passes as high school juniors alone.) He failed to make a splash last season, but, OK, we’ll grant that Lee and Jefferson were pretty entrenched (but not good enough to hold off a worthy challenge).

He’ll get another chance this year with LSU to show why he remains a favorite of those who stress measurables. His 2012 spring scrimmage was a mixed bag, but Mettenberger did show the ability to bring a vertical passing game to the LSU offense. If he does have the kind of a year that makes him a legitimate first or second round pick next April, the Tigers should have a much smoother experience with their quarterback this year. It will take a heck of a transformation though.

The interesting part about this isn’t the comment about Spurrier’s handling of Garcia. Garcia’s nine lives are the stuff of comedy legend. It’s the “We frankly didn’t have anybody else.”

The “anybody else” that South Carolina didn’t have is now the starting quarterback for a team with top 20 and perhaps even SEC East title hopes and expectations. Connor Shaw did well last year once Spurrier finally parted ways with Garcia. South Carolina lost only once, at Arkansas, after Shaw took over. He performed especially well in the Gamecocks’ final two games against good Clemson and Nebraska teams – 5 passing TDs, 2 rushing TDs, and zero interceptions.

Still, this is a guy who spent the first half of last seasons with as many DNPs as he had appearences. Now he enters his first season as the established starter. Of course it’s not unheard of for seldom-used reserves to become effective starters when given an opportunity. Shaw’s chances for success will be bolstered by a stout defense and one of the nation’s best tailbacks. Is the comfort level with Shaw at South Carolina more or less settled science after the way he finished 2011, or does he still have something to prove?

I have nothing much to add as the Big East leadership struggles with being a basketball conference bankrolled by football. It is another reminder, though, that when we talk about the SEC, Big East, or even the NCAA, we’re talking about the collective will of a group of college presidents. Athletic directors are hired as operating executives, but it’s the presidents who are charged with oversight and charting the strategic course for college athletics.

A college president’s outlook on college athletics is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty far down the list of priorities when you’re looking to fill the office. Still, Georgia’s next president will share governance of the nation’s most powerful conference with just thirteen peers, and his or her influence could reasonably be expected to be greater than a 1/14th share. Michael Adams used his time as chairman of the NCAA executive committee to beat the drum for changes to the college football postseason over four years ago. His ideas were panned as sour grapes following the 2007 season, but, well, here we are.

When we first got talking about changes to the college football postseason, we wondered if logistics might be a potential stumbling block to hosting games on campus. Ticketing allocation, hotels, parking, even concessions and security – all things planned out months in advance for the regular season – would have to be reconsidered in a couple of weeks for the postseason. In most cases these aren’t NFL stadiums with a full-time quasi-public stadium authority ready to turn the building around for another event.

I expected that might be a point of contention, but I didn’t expect it to be a show-stopper. That’s the way it’s looking, though. The Chicago Tribune explains why the idea of hosting games on-campus might be “on life support.”

Jason Kirk at SBNation explains why one of the bigger concerns is misplaced. The schools most likely to host these games have capacity far beyond most bowl and NFL stadiums. If money is at the heart of the discussion (of course it is), you’re looking at another 10-20,000 tickets to be sold.

Most fans love going to bowl games, but attendence and lack of sellouts at even the BCS bowls indicate that they’d probably much rather stay home and sell out the local stadium if it gives their team an advantage in advancing. And far be it from me to wax poetic in this context, but wouldn’t the scene of Oregon hosting a major playoff game in its smaller stadium be a great and memorable moment for college football?

One thing that’s caught my attention in this discussion is the claim that “the conference commissioners…are eager to take back New Year’s Day.” We know why the bowls have drifted away from New Year’s: with so much money being paid out, the sponsors and networks want their own prime time slot without competition from other bowls. So we get the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl with their own nights on television but unable to break 70,000 tickets sold as fans choose to stay home after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. If the commissioners are able to consolidate the semifinals on New Year’s, the other traditional New Year’s Day bowls will either have to move their own dates or risk being drown out by hours of analysis and pomp for the big games.

Substitute Clemson for Miami, and this primer on Florida’s scheduling philosophy could serve very well to explain the factors that go into creating Georgia’s schedule.

I appreciate the credit given to some of Georgia’s scheduling initiatives, but the departure of Damon Evans might have signaled the end of a more aggressive scheduling approach. (Not that I disagree.) Georgia would prefer seven home games much more often than not, and Mark Richt was not thrilled by some of those treks across the Mississippi.

Year2 touches on the bottom line: Florida has used this scheduling philosophy en route to building some of the nation’s most successful and profitable football and athletics programs of the past two decades. If that’s not the purpose of a schedule, what is? There isn’t, as we heard our former director say of Georgia, a “branding” issue as the result of a hyper-regional football schedule; football and basketball national titles along with some dynamic players and coaches have more than taken care of that. A different approach to scheduling at Florida would be a fix for a problem that doesn’t exist.

Though Georgia’s 2012 schedule has been widely panned, we’ve maintained that there are still several big games and challenges on the slate. Georgia’s SEC opener is the first of these big games, and we can expect a team, town, and fans out of their minds to host their first SEC game.

As Seth Emerson reports,

Pinkel said the excitement about joining the SEC and the league opener against Georgia was “mammoth,” and people were already talking about it in Missouri. Which is rare, he added.

If you didn’t already know that Georgia had one of the SEC’s tougher drug and alcohol policies, the past week or so should have taken care of that. To a lot of people, Georgia’s position on testing probably seems to be, as Michael Elkon put it, “unilateral disarmament.” He’s left scratching his head and wondering why Georgia (or any program) would willfully do this to themselves.

The answer goes back to early 2006, and it has to do with what was going on around the UGA campus. University President Michael Adams, as early as his 2005 State of the Univeristy address, showed concern over the school’s reputation as a party school and its impact on “academic rigor.” Two high-profile events within the next year helped to turn that concern into momentum for campus-wide action: 1) the drug and alcohol-related death of student Lewis Fish and 2) the trashing of campus following the 2005 Auburn game.

By that point, the issue had moved from airy speeches to the editorial pages. The reaction was swift. New policies were put in place across campus that affected everyone from the underage freshman to the football tailgater. The actions and policies ranged from the prudent to the puzzling to the reactionary. See if any of these ring a bell:

• University police began arresting students for underage possession rather than citing them.
• Georgia announced new tailgating restrictions for the 2006 season including some controversial “family-friendly” tailgating zones.
• President Adams and Florida’s Bernie Machen launched a campaign against the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” moniker for the football game in Jacksonville.
• Georgia introduced “a comprehensive set of new penalties for students who violate UGA’s drug and alcohol policy” which included everything from a parental notification to automatic suspension from the University.

It’s no coincidence that policies meant to take aim at student drinking and drug use were accompanied by changes to the football game day experience. There is perhaps no more visible symbol of Georgia’s “party school” reputation than a football weekend – especially the football weekend in Jacksonville. The tug-of-war between the football fan and the University continues today with tweaks taking place on almost an annual basis.

In such a climate, it’s easy to see how the athletic department’s internal policies came under review. With the University cracking down on the general student population and teaming up with the Athletic Assosciation to clean up tailgating, Georgia’s guidelines for acceptable student-athlete behavior had to face scrutiny.

So in July of 2006, we ended up with this. It’s the current athletic department policy for Georgia student-athletes. It’s not a football-only policy, and, while Damon Evans and other athletics administrators might have had input, it is very much in the spirit of the more general campus-wide policies put into place around the same time.

Elkon asks “whether the current stance taken by the Georgia athletic department is the result of media attention paid to off-field issues.” The answer is, indirectly, “yes.” It’s no defense of the policy, but its existence and content makes more sense when you understand that it was much more the fruit of a top-down initiative from the University than it was any kind of organic pet project of Mark Richt or his direct higher-ups. In fact, some of the first student-athletes facing serious discipline for drug or alcohol-related incidents ran afoul not of any football team policy but mandatory University policies (see: Akeem Hebron).

With the origins of the policy understood, the next question is what can or should be done about Georgia’s very real disadvantage relative to its competition.

Should anything be done? Georgia has certainly left itself little wiggle room with its policy, but as Elkon concedes there are several areas where schools chart a course that might be considered detrimental in the context of building a competitive football program – oversigning and academics are two good examples.

It’s difficult to guess how a walk-back of the policy would be taken. Critics would certainly pounce on the timing – do you have standards only until the point that they begin to adversely affect the football program? We’re also talking about sanctioning drug use. That might not seem like such a big deal to many people, and it’s a reality of life on campus, but it’s possibly unacceptable to others who face zero-tolerance policies in their own daily lives.

It’s also not a sure thing that the University would sign off on just any revision. The motivations for a crackdown present in 2006 are for the most part still a fact of life in Athens, and the administration would certainly be aware of the mixed message it would be sending to the rest of the University community by allowing the athletic department to soften its policies without cause.

That’s not to say that the current policy is set in stone. The UGA policy itself has been modified since 2006. In 2010, the policy was amended to remove an automatic suspension after a second drug or alcohol-related arrest. That didn’t mean that the second arrest carried no consequences; it just “was designed to differentiate between a student caught with a beer in a dorm refrigerator and a DUI-related offense,” as the administration explained. The current campus-wide policy was revised in October of 2011.

Should this be an area where the SEC steps in and normalizes policies across the league? I’m not so sure. It would certainly give schools like Georgia an out by removing any competitive disadvantage, though I don’t see why schools wouldn’t be able to put in place policies that go beyond a minimum standard. I also don’t know if it’s a good idea for schools to cede more authority to the conference instead of making – and living with – their own policies that reflect their own priorities and standards.

We’ll continue the playoff theme for another post. Graham Watson at Dr. Saturday asks if conference commissioners are on the right track with postseason reform. Whether we need to change the postseason at all has been beaten around enough, but we can focus in on a few key questions.

Would we play some games on campus or all games on neutral sites?
If some games are on campus, is that too much of a competitive advantage?

An advantage? Yes, and that’s a good thing. Too much? No. With a schedule of only 12 games, we can still salvage a very large role for the regular season. Complete a successful regular season, and you host. Stumble a time or two, and you’re off to Tuscaloosa for the opening round. There should be consequences – both positive and negative – to performance during the regular season, and earning the right to host should be one of them. 1-AA gets this correct.

I’m also sympathetic to the complaints of northern and midwestern schools. These neutral sites, especially if they involve the bowl and BCS sites, would tilt heavily in favor of southern schools. If you’re a Big 10 team that’s earned a top seed (work with me here), you shouldn’t be sent to New Orleans to face an at-large SEC school. Make the lower seed play a December game above 40 degrees latitude.

If all games are at neutral sites, would fans be able to travel to two games in a row?

Some would, most wouldn’t. But these things aren’t done for the fans, right? Just look at the first few rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament. Great TV, but unless you have UNC playing in Greensboro, crowds are sparse. Smaller schools would struggle to bring numbers in most any situation, and fans of schools with the top seeds would likely budget for the subsequent rounds. It’s not just fans – the logistics of moving an 85-person team, the support staff, and things like marching bands also need to be considered. Play the first rounds on campus, and those logistical issues and expenses are halved.

Apart from the fans, we have to think about another big logistical concern to hosting games on campus. Turning around a basketball arena is one thing. Finding out you’re going to host a national college football playoff game a week from now would be a huge project to undertake. Would schools handle tickets and parking? When a campus hosts an NCAA Tournament game, the arena is more or less taken over by the NCAA – forget your season ticket seat, your parking pass, the look of the court, and many of the comforts of home. Everything is done from a blank slate. Would a football playoff game work the same way? A lot of advance work would have to be done by athletic departments for games they might not even host.

How would teams be selected? By a committee, by the current ranking formula, or by a different formula?

I’d prefer a committee. I think the basketball tournament took a large step this year with a more transparent selection process. Though the process remains an obscure stew of criteria, they emerged with a top-to-bottom ranking and were forced to answer some pointed questions about their reasoning. It wasn’t necessarily mistake-free, but it’s still a more transparent process by a group that should follow the sport much more closely than your average pollster or coach.

When exactly would games be scheduled, considering finals, holidays and our desire to avoid mid-January games?

It seems trite to say “every other fall sport manages,” but…yeah. And what’s wrong with mid-January games? We’ve blown through the January 1st barrier like Chuck Yeager. If we’re playing in Mobile a week after New Year’s, I think we’re well past the point of having a sacred end of the season. But this seems like a question more suited for a 16/24/32-team playoff. Scheduling won’t be an issue with most of the +1/4/8-team proposals being kicked around.

On polls starting in October…

Watson seems to prefer that the polls decide the playoff participants with the demand that the relevant polls “start in October to give all teams a fair shake at those top spots.” We’ve explained before why preseason polls aren’t going anywhere. So long as there’s Phil Steele and a hundred other blogs and publications feeding a fan’s desire to talk about the next season as soon as the previous one ends, whether there’s an official poll before October is moot. The narrative will have already been set, there will already have been a pecking order and favorites established, and a poll that starts nominally in October can’t help but be influenced by all of the conversation that’s happened to that point.

In 1974, Maryland and N.C. State played an epic basketball game in the ACC Tournament final. State was ranked #1; Maryland was #5. The game lived up to its billing – the Wolfpack narrowly won 103-100 in overtime. It remains the standard for ACC hoops, and it’s tough to beat in a discussion of the greatest college basketball games.

Few games in any sport can be credited with causing a specific change that will affect the course of the sport. The 2009 NFC Championship Game led the NFL to reconsider its overtime format. Another ACC Championship game in 1982 is often pointed to as the impetus for a shot clock in the college game. That 1974 N.C. State – Maryland game is generally considered the final straw that brought about a decision that would change the nature of the NCAA Tournament and the college basketball postseason.

Prior to 1974, college basketball’s NCAA Tournament was an exclusive affair limited to only conference champions. It’s hard to think of the NCAA Tournament as anything but the monolithic end-all of college hoops, but it wasn’t always so. The NIT, today’s parting gift for bubble teams, was actually a viable competitor to the NCAA Tournament back in the day. You can see why: a tournament that only included conference champions excluded some pretty good teams. (If you look at this season’s Final Four, only two of the four won their conference tournaments.) As recently as 1974, teams that finished ranked among the top 10 were part of the NIT field.

Though other great teams (including #2 Southern Cal in 1971) had been excluded from the NCAA Tournament in the past, college hoops lived with this arrangement as a fact of life. The loss by Maryland was the tipping point that forced the guardians of the sport to question whether it was just that a top 5 team, far better than most conference champs, would be excluded from the national championship process because they lost in overtime to the #1 team. The NCAA Tournament was expanded to 32 teams in 1975, and the era of the at-large bid began.

College football is now working through some of the same questions college basketball faced nearly 40 years ago. As football begins to consider a fundamental change to its postseason, the areas of contention are familiar to anyone who has followed the BCS/playoff discussion. How many teams? On campus or neutral sites? Should participation require a conference championship?

Just because this is well-worn ground doesn’t mean that it’s not worth having these discussions again. Did basketball get it right when it reacted to the 1974 ACC Championship with a larger national bracket? It did start the NCAA Tournament down the path of becoming one of the nation’s most popular sporting events. Teams across the nation have something to play for towards the end of the year even if they’re not the cream of their conference. Allowing at-large teams gave greater meaning to the regular season rather than have a single weekend of conference tournaments determine the participants of the national tournament.

There are downsides to the direction college basketball has taken. Critics claim that the magnitude of the NCAA Tournament has distilled the season down to a few weeks.* We’ve just about neutered the major conference tournament. These tournaments made waves that would change the game in the ’70s and ’80s. Now coaches of national contenders wonder what the point of a conference tournament is. The decision to expand the tournament also opened the door to bracket creep. The size of the field has been increased eight times since 1975. There is support from some of the game’s more respected figures to go even further to 96 teams and beyond – teams much more interested in a participation trophy than a realistic shot at a national title.

Turning back to the issue of at-large teams in a football playoff (of any size), it seems like only a matter of time. If the BCS Championship is, in practice, a playoff of two, we’ve already answered the at-large question this past January. Whether Alabama’s loss to LSU in November has the same lasting impact on its sport that the 1974 ACC final had will be evident in the playoff format that eventually emerges. Regardless, it’s tough to find a playoff that hasn’t eventually faced and answered this question with a larger field and the inclusion of at-large teams. College football, with the Alabama-LSU example fresh in its collective consciousness, should go ahead and allow for at-large teams from the outset no matter the format.

* The point that the NCAA Tournament frenzy makes the first 3+ months of the hoops season meaningless less-interesting is repeated often enough that even playoff proponents don’t bother quibbling with it anymore. I wonder though how much it has to do with the general popularity of the sport and the sheer length of the regular season. The NBA regular season is a numbing 82-game trudge towards the playoffs. The NFL season is much more compelling on a week-to-week basis. Given a relatively scarce inventory of 11 or 12 regular season games in college football, each week still has weight.

The season came to a crashing halt for the Lady Dogs on Sunday with a 76-70 loss to Marist in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Georgia entered the tournament as a 4-seed, its highest seed in five seasons. Marist, though a 13-seed, were tournament veterans and had won 20 of 21 games before facing Georgia. The Red Foxes weren’t intimidated by the setting or the opponent, and their confidence showed on the court.

It was an omen of a long day to come when Anne Marie Armstrong took a knee to the back during a scramble on the floor for a loose ball in the game’s opening minutes. Armstrong sucked it up and returned to action, but it was clear that she was limited and rattled. She finished with just six points, zero defensive rebounds, and a team-high five turnovers. Miller and Mitchell were able to pick up some of the scoring load, but Georgia’s inability to get much going inside hurt them, particularly down the stretch when Mitchell was unavailable.

The game story going around paints a picture of a no-win decision for Andy Landers: do you try to stop the Marist offense with an experienced senior struggling with foul trouble or do you go with a freshman who’s a less-effective defender? That was certainly the situation Georgia faced midway through the second half.

The problem is that the defense wasn’t all that hot *with* Meredith Mitchell in the game. What was happening is pretty simple: Marist spread the court well and encouraged Georgia’s aggressive man defense to extend. The spacing left lanes for those with the ball to drive to the basket or those without the ball to cut to the basket behind the extended defense. It was startling how often Marist was able to beat Georgia in these one-on-one situations off the dribble.

Georgia’s defense strategy wasn’t without merit. The Lady Dogs came up with 13 steals in large part by pressuring the ball, and it helped to fuel the second half comeback. But too often Georgia’s extended defense left a player on an island and without help as a Marist player went in for the easy basket. At times even Georgia center Jasmine Hassell was left isolated in on-ball defense 20+ feet away from the basket. She had no chance.

The decision to play a foul-laden Mitchell was a by-product of Georgia’s game plan. As Landers admitted, “Our defense wasn’t very good and they were very good with executing their drive options, which led to layups and fouls.” Even with foul trouble, Georgia didn’t adjust its defense. Often teams trying to protect a key player in foul trouble will switch to a zone defense. A zone might have also choked off the lanes Marist found to attack the basket. The downside of a zone is that Marist might have had more open looks around the perimeter, and they were shooting the ball well. We’ll never know: Georgia never tried anything else.

The loss ends a season that had shown moments of promise but ended with early exits in both the SEC and NCAA Tournaments. The improved fitness level of the team at the end of the year led to hope for a third-straight Sweet 16 appearance. It’s disappointing, but this isn’t the year to make dire proclamations about the state of the program. There’s nothing like a loss to bring out discussion about Andy Landers and his program, but despite the results in the postseason the program is on solid ground.

First, let’s cut through the nonsense. Georgia doesn’t have a legacy of underachieving in the NCAA Tournament. This is the first time Georgia has been truly upset in the tournament since the 2-seed Lady Dogs lost to 10-seed Missouri in Athens in 2001. It’s the first time they’ve even lost to a lower seed since the 2004 tournament in which 3-seed Georgia lost to 4-seed LSU in the Elite 8. Their final game of the tournament has been against a 1 or a 2 seed in seven of the last nine seasons. Georgia has been more likely to beat higher-seeded teams and did so in each of the past two seasons to reach the Sweet 16.

Georgia’s tournament performance relative to its seed has been fine, but it’s that initial seed that tells a more important story. Georgia’s #4 seed this year was its best since 2007, and its average seed over the last ten years has been between a 5 and a 6. That’s certainly not awful, and the Lady Dogs have managed to have enough consistency to make the tournament each year. Still, the further you get away from the top seeds the tougher it becomes to advance to the Elite Eight and beyond. You’re put in the position of having to beat a #1 or #2 to move past the Sweet 16, and Georgia has gone 0-6 in those games against top seeds since beating #2 Purdue in 2004. The only way to improve to your initial seed is to perform better during the regular season.

Can Georgia improve on its regular season in 2012-2013? Next season is shaping up to be a watershed moment for the program. The program will have lost only two key contributors over the past two seasons. Four starters will return, and all will be upperclassmen. Three other returning players will have significant experience. This seven-player core will be bolstered by a solid and deep signing class of at least five players. There’s significant turnover in the SEC: at least three programs will be looking for new coaches. Tennessee loses five seniors. Though there will be several programs in contention – there always are in the SEC – Georgia should have the experience, depth, and talent to be one of those teams fighting for a conference title that has eluded the program for over a decade. Expectations will and should be high.