With the NCAA going back for seconds at the Carolina schools, I wondered whether A.J. Green was ever interviewed in the first place. We knew that the NCAA had asked for permission to interview someone at Georgia, but it isn’t clear whether the NCAA ever followed through on that interview request. We’re led to believe that they never did follow through. Other schools have been able to confirm when their players were interviewed. Last week reporters got basically another “no comment” from Green who made it clear that he was under instructions not to elaborate on his involvement in the investigation.

Kyle’s right here when he notes that as long as this investigation remains unresolved, Green’s character and judgement are taking an unfair hit. It’s fortunately not that large of a hit thanks to the quick response and strength of Green’s alibi for the weekend in question. I don’t blame UGA for the “gag order” – that’s prudent with any ongoing investigation. It’s not as important to me whether Green ever addresses this story again. If he’s clear, that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned.

The important issue here isn’t Green being freed to tell all. It’s clearing his name and letting him move on. The ball here is in the NCAA’s court, and they’ve held it for nearly four weeks. While other schools remain up in the air about the eligibility of their investigated stars for the season opener, Mark Richt seems confident enough that he won’t have similar concerns. If the NCAA wants to double back and focus on a second round of questions at other schools, that’s fine. Just don’t leave A.J. Green twisting in the wind. He has a season to start in three weeks, and he and the Georgia program don’t need the distraction if his role in the investigation is settled.

We’ve explained for a while that there’s a disincentive for major programs to overschedule. Teams still do it, but the incentives built into the BCS system make it a less-than-optimal strategy. Florida AD Jeremy Foley is on board. Mark Richt seems to think along those lines too.

Add Bob Stoops to the list of co-signers. The money quote:

Everybody talks about (schedule) early. By the end of the year everyone’s talking about wins and losses and you’re ranked accordingly.

We’ve already looked at Oklahoma and how their 2010 schedule favors a good season if they can find some answers at quarterback and a few other spots. They have fair non-conference competition with Florida State headlining the list, but it’s not a murderer’s row this year. Stoops was asked if this view meant he’d try to get out of some future contracts. He admitted, “It’ll be considered. It’s too early to say. I know (athletic director Castiglione) Joe’s looking at that but it’ll be considered.”

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.

From UGA Sports Communications:

The Saturday, Sept. 4, SEC football game between Georgia and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette in Athens will be televised by the SEC Network with kickoff set for 12:21 p.m. ET.

Previously announced early season Georgia games included South Carolina in Columbia (Sept. 11) and Arkansas in Athens (Sept. 18), both at 12:00 noon on either ESPN or ESPN2. The Oct. 30 Georgia-Florida game in Jacksonville will be televised by CBS at 3:30 p.m. ET.

Personally, I love it…I’m going to try to pull off the double-header with Georgia’s opener and the LSU-UNC game at the Dome.

See the full teams here.

The good news, if preseason honors mean anything to you, is that six Bulldogs earned a place on the coaches team, and that’s the third-highest of all SEC teams. It’s down from nine honorees last year, but they went three-deep last year. It’s only a two-deep this time. Green, Boling, Walsh, and Butler all earned first-team honors, and Glenn and Boykin were on the second team. Boykin was included as a returner and not as a cornerback.

I don’t think anyone will be or should be surprised by finding zero defenders on the preseason all-conference teams. Many of the key contributors last year – namely the defensive tackles and Curran – are gone. You could argue for the recognition of Justin Houston, but remember that he has taken exactly zero snaps in a game at his new linebacker position. The uncertainty of the effectiveness of the new 3-4 defense as well as the requisite shuffling of positions leaves the Bulldogs with few known entities that would stand out to preseason voters.

Of course the hope is that the Dawgs go from zero to multiple defensive all-conference players after the season. If the 3-4 proves to be effective, Georgia’s defensive stars will draw plenty of attention, especially if the pass rush takes off. There are several guys to watch, and Houston, Boykin, and Rambo are the obvious choices. Don’t be surprised if DeAngelo Tyson ends up on a postseason team – the anchor of the 3-4 is going to have plenty of chances to make a name for himself this year. Who else might break through in 2010?

We’ve looked a few times already this summer at how the economy and other factors are affecting season ticket sales in the football-crazy South.  It’s not to gloat – Georgia could be just another disappointing season away from similar problems, and it’s very much a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-we situation.

The State newspaper in Columbia looked at the problem from a South Carolina perspective and updated some of the information we had relied on for our earlier posts. The market remains soft for several major programs in the area hoping to sell the remainder of their season tickets.  Specifically:

• “Season ticket sales at USC are down 9 percent from last year and have dropped about 20 percent since 2008…There are entire sections in the upper deck at Williams-Brice Stadium that are nearly vacant.”
• “Tennessee invited fans into Neyland Stadium last month to check out the more than 1,000 seats available.”
• “At Clemson, ticket sales have dropped 13 percent since 2008.”
• “The Yellow Jackets have sold about 900 fewer season tickets than they had at this point last year.”

The State’s article goes on to look at some of the factors behind the lagging sales as well as some of the marketing approaches teams are trying to stir up demand. Lots of good info, and they could have stopped there.  But one more school was cited as evidence of “flagging ticket sales.”

Georgia recently lowered its cost for a first-time season ticket buyer to $1,550 — down from $10,651 two years ago and $4,205 in 2009 — after more than 2,000 Bulldog fans chose not to renew their tickets.

In an article about how area schools are struggling to find buyers for, in some cases, over 1,000 unsold season tickets, they mention Georgia:  a school that not only sold out of season tickets without offering them to the general public but which also had to refund season ticket orders to Hartman Fund donors below a certain minimum score.

Hartman Fund minimum donation levels to purchase or renew season tickets run $250-$400 for seats outside of premium club areas.    That means that a first-time donor this year had to donate at least four times the minimum just to have the right to order season tickets in the far reaches of the stadium.

True, it’s not the outrageous demand of 2008 that saw first-time cutoffs of over 10,000.  But it’s still not evidence of scarce demand.  The explanation that over 2,000 fans chose not to renew season tickets sounds dire until we understand that there is some amount of turnover every year.  Even in the record demand season of 2008, over 800 season tickets weren’t renewed. 2,000 non-renewals in a season ticket pool of about 53,000 is less than a 4% churn and just slightly higher than a typical year.

This all might sound like small potatoes, but in an environment where the most absurd situations can be used to feed the hot seat meme, it’s an easy game of connect-the-dots for a lazy columnist to point to such articles as indicators that fans are bailing on the program.  Georgia’s season tickets are sold out, and they have been since they were first offered to Hartman Fund donors in March. 

Obviously this is a developing story, and we’ll learn more at a 2:00 press conference. Hopefully the health of Johnson or a family member is not at the root of the decision, but it’s an unusual time to make this kind of move. Johnson will be properly feted around the media and blogosphere later today (with plenty of Steve Martin references), but leave it for now that he elevated the Vanderbilt program and did it the right way under some very tough circumstances in the most competitive conference in the nation.

Even with an 8-5 record, there were several bright spots in the 2009 football season – the win in Atlanta chief among them.

One game that has never quite gotten its due is the win over Arkansas in Fayetteville. I know that it seemed dodgy. You had Cox playing out of his mind and standing toe-to-toe in a shootout. You had Richard Samuel hit the hole and have his one shining moment at tailback. It’s not that you wondered how Georgia got out of there with the win; you saw the offense score at will. It was just so unexpected and, as it turned out, oh so necessary. It’s not that Georgia beat an SEC contender, but the 2009 Dawgs lost games against lesser teams. In retrospect, the win seems even more improbable because Georgia had to overcome two huge factors that usually meant success for the 2009 Razorbacks:

• The game was Arkansas’ only home loss of the season. The Razorbacks have won just a single road SEC game under Petrino – a close 25-22 win in 2008 against an Auburn team circling the drain. But they were much better at home last season and ended up routing South Carolina, Mississippi State, and Auburn in Fayetteville.
• The game was Arkansas’ only loss in which Ryan Mallett completed over 50% of his passes. Mallett of course had a ridiculous day against Georgia with 21-of-39 passing (53.8%), 408 yards, and 5 touchdowns. As TSK notes, “Arkansas was 7-1 in games in which Mallett completed more than 50 percent of his passes.”

Arkansas’ trip to Athens in 2010 is going to be a popular upset pick – if Arkansas isn’t outright favored. The Hogs will be 2-0 after a pair of cupcakes. Mallett’s likely to be ultra-accurate and put up huge numbers in those wins. The Bulldog defense might or might not be better than the unit that gave up 41 a year ago, but they’ll still be in their first few games under a new system and going up against an extremely talented passer. Georgia will have been tested on the road at Columbia, and it will be Arkansas’ first road game of the year. A win over Georgia would certainly be a win that legitimizes the preseason hype poured on Arkansas this year, but will they have learned how to win big games on the road, and is their defense going to be any better against a Georgia offense that will be plenty loaded itself?

South Carolina won the College World Series last night, and the accomplishment gives them their first national title in any men’s sport. It has to be a big day in Gamecock land, and congratulations are due. Any observer of SEC baseball knows that this was no fluke – South Carolina has been a solid program for many years now and are often a legitimate contender in the SEC under one of the conference’s top coaches, Ray Tanner. That they’d go on a little tear and win it all at Omaha is not surprising, and it has to make it all the more enjoyable that they got to eliminate Clemson along the way. The story of Bayler Teal and his relationship with the team adds a much deeper meaning to the championship, and it makes it seem to us that there couldn’t have been any other outcome.

But South Carolina’s title serves to underscore an unpleasant point around these parts. Georgia is joined now only by Vanderbilt as the only SEC East programs without a national title in any of the “big 3” men’s sports since SEC expansion in 1992. Seven of the 12 SEC members have managed the feat, and Auburn would really like to remind you of their 2004 football season. A club whose other members include Vandy and the Mississippi schools is not the company Georgia wants to be keeping.

As Kyle noted the other day, track season wrapping up means the end of competition for Bulldog student-athletes for the 2009-2010 academic year. No one from Michael Adams to Damon Evans is pretending that it was a great year for Bulldog athletics, and even another second-place finish for the SEC All-Sports trophy does little to mask the disappointment.

The final standings for the NACDA Director’s Cup will be released on July 1st. Georgia is currently in 17th place with only baseball left to figure in to the final tally. It’s possible that both LSU and Texas could pass Georgia based on their participation in the baseball postseason. If that occurs, Georgia would drop below their 18th place finish last year for the worst performance as a program in well over a decade. We’ve been over this ground before, but it’s not an impressive trend for the athletic department under Damon Evans. But, hey – we’re still rolling in cash, right?

ESPN is reporting that Boise State will join the Mountain West. A few weeks ago, that made sense. The MWC is positioning itself to lobby for an automatic BCS bid, and the addition of a program like Boise makes their case much stronger.

But with this week’s news that there will be at least two vacancies in the Big 12, already an AQ conference, was there an effort made on either side to get Boise (and possibly fellow MWC member TCU) into the Big 12? True that Boise and other MWC members don’t measure up in terms of basketball or other sports, but this is a football-driven expansion boom. I hope someone asks the question – otherwise this just seems like moving into a nicer apartment in the same complex.

With the movement of Colorado and Nebraska, we’ve begun the much-anticipated shuffling among the major conferences. With the process set in motion, the question now is how far conferences will go during this round of expansion. Is the 16-team Pac-10 going to happen? Are other conferences going to be as aggressive or settle with 12 or 14 members?

The race towards megaconferences might have one interesting side-effect: the rise of the divisions as their own unique entities underneath the umbrellas of the larger conferences.

In a 16-team conference, you’ll have two eight-team divisions. Yes, there are alternative structures (see Clay Travis’s 4×4 arrangement), but most conferences will choose the traditional model and tie everything together with a championship game.

Currently the Pac-10 is the only major conference that has a nine-game league schedule, and that is (was) in order to facilitate a round-robin schedule. The practice actually puts the league at a disadvantage relative to other conferences in terms of bowl eligibility. It will be interesting to see if the expanded Pac-10 continues the nine-game schedule or if it bows to pressure to be at parity with other leagues who can schedule eight conference games and use that other game for a nonconference opponent of varying quality.

The number of conference games is a big deal to coaches and a key point going forward with expansion. Mark Richt said recently, “As far as I’m concerned, you can add more teams, but I just don’t want to play any more league games.” Richt can’t be alone in that sentiment – unless the nine-game schedule is imposed on all conferences as the new norm, those signing up for an extra conference game are making things tougher for their teams.

But an eight-game slate in a 16-team conference all but cuts off one side from the other. You’ll have seven league games in your own division and then one against the other side. If that one game rotates, it ends any traditional rivalries against teams in the other division. Even with nine conference games, you’re still only playing two schools out of eight from the other division, so things aren’t all that much better in either scenario.

At that point, the larger megaconference is just an administrative abstraction between its divisions. It exists for revenue-sharing purposes and for the clout it brings negotiating for collective deals and postseason positions. I realize we’re not that far away under the current structure, but the solidarity of a single Big 10 or Pac-10 is gone now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But for the conference championship games, we’re almost back to the days of eight-team conferences.

Divisions in our future of 16-team conferences will take on a much greater importance. They’ll be relatively more isolated and even develop identities of their own. The Pac-10 will have its Route 66 / Tom Joad schools and then the Pac-8 schools of the 1960s and 1970s. Nebraska’s division of the Big 10 will certainly have a different feel than one oriented around the Rust Belt. Give me Alabama and Auburn in the SEC East, and we’ll send LSU a postcard every now and then.

This idea about giving the new Pac-10 two automatic BCS berths is definitely full of itself, but it’s going to be the kind of thing you’ll hear more often as these 8-team divisions begin to take on lives of their own. The Senator asks, “What in the hell do they even need a conference for in the first place?” This is a perfect example of the conference-as-abstraction that allows two more or less distinct entities to pool together for TV deals and revenue sharing and still claim two separate places in the lucrative BCS.

I know that other Georgia fans and I are wondering if the SEC will dip their toe into the expansion market and push towards 14 or 16 teams. It’s not too early to start thinking about what we’d like our SEC East “conference” to look like.

I think Andy Staples has it right here: differentiation.

“The league would allow the Aggies to offer an interesting alternative to Lone Star State recruits enthralled by the SEC schools they grew up watching on television.”

Right now the Aggies are second-tier in a Big XII dominated by the Longhorns. If we’re being honest, they’ve even been passed by Texas Tech recently. If they join the others in the exodus to the Pac-10, they remain an afterthought along for the ride. But if they split off and join the SEC, they take a step from out of the shadow of the other Texas schools. Sure, they still wouldn’t be the marquee in-state destination for top prospects as long as Texas remains a title contender. But membership in the nation’s top football conference would be a selling point that would at least make the Aggies a unique option in their area. It’s over 330 miles to Baton Rouge and over 500 miles to any other SEC destination – that’s a lot of fertile recruiting territory to occupy for a prospective SEC member.

Georgia overcame a three-run deficit to beat defending national champion Washington 6-3 in their opening game of the 2010 Women’s College World Series Thursday night.

After Washington plated three runs in the bottom of the first, it looked as if this year’s WCWS opener would follow the same script as last year’s.  Erin Arevalo came in as a relief pitcher and settled things down on defense, but Georgia’s bats remained silent against All-American pitcher Danielle Lawrie.

The Bulldogs cracked the scoreboard in the fourth with a solo shot by Kristyn Sandberg, but they had to work out of a jam in the bottom half of the inning.  Arevalo shut the door, and the Huskies couldn’t add to their lead.  Georgia posted two more runs in the fifth thanks to a barrage of pesky singles and the speed of Taylor Schlopy on a force play at home.

It was fitting that Georgia’s hottest batter broke open the game in the sixth inning.  Megan Wiggins golfed a low pitch over the center field wall to provide the final margin. 

Freshman Allison Owen answered the bell in the final two innings.  With Arevalo struggling in the 6th, Owen entered the game and got out of a bases-loaded jam with a key strikeout.  Owen finished off the game by striking out the side in the seventh.

Georgia’s next opponent is another familiar foe.  Tennessee and Georgia split four games during the 2010 season, but Tennessee bounced the Dawgs from the SEC Tournament and is the most recent team to beat the Bulldogs.  Tennessee, like Georgia, is red-hot in the NCAA Tournament and has yet to lose a game.  They swept #2 seed Michigan on the road to get to the WCWS and destroyed Arizona 9-0 in their WCWS opener.

Georgia and Tennessee will play at 9:30 on Friday night (ESPN) with an important advantage at stake.  The winner will remain in the winner’s bracket, earn a day off on Saturday, and will only have to win one game on Sunday to advance to the championship series.  The loser will have to come back on Saturday and win that game and win twice on Sunday in order to advance.