It wasn’t a great night for the conventional wisdom. I’d like to claim that I saw all of this coming, but of course I can’t and won’t. I probably thought most of these points myself. Instead, here is a healthy dose of hindsight as we look at some of the widely-accepted pregame analysis leading up to the Sugar Bowl.

Quick passes from the run-and-shoot offense neutralize pressure.

When Colt Brennan spoke with Tim Tebow about the Georgia defense, hopefully Tebow was able to offer his unique perspective on taking a sack from the Bulldogs. Brennan’s quick instincts and strong arm might have saved him from eating through a straw for a few months. Georgia’s pressure on Brennan was relentless, and their eight sacks only begin to tell the story of the harassment. The pressure also affected Brennan’s famed accuracy, and Georgia’s defensive backs made Brennan pay for forced passes. "We wanted to make Colt throw it faster than he wanted to," explained Mark Richt after the game, and the Bulldog defense executed that plan to perfection.

Georgia will run, run, run and control the time of possession to keep Brennan off the field.

Can you believe that Hawaii won the meaningless time of possession battle? Georgia’s running game was adequate but nowhere near spectacular. Knowshon Moreno and Thomas Brown didn’t run roughshod through the defense, and the Dawgs were generally ineffective at salting the game away on the ground in the final quarter. Moreno and Brown were able to find some early holes, and Moreno added two early touchdowns.

In a game in which the Georgia running game was expected to be showcased, the Bulldogs were held below their season average with 169 total rushing yards. Thomas Brown’s game-high 71 yards on 19 carries led the way, and an injured Knowshon Moreno didn’t break ten carries (though he sure made his few carries count). After some long gains in Georgia’s final few games of the regular season, the Bulldogs had no carries for over 20 yards in the Sugar Bowl.

You just have to accept that Brennan will get his.

Many people, myself included, had already penciled in 3-400 yards passing and around 28 points for the potent Hawaii offense. The big question would be Georgia’s ability to clamp down in the red zone and keep Brennan from turning his prodigious yardage into enough points to win.

We badly underestimated the Georgia defense. Brennan had just 169 yards passing. His replacement Tyler Graunke did most of the damage with 142 yards and one touchdown through the air in just one quarter.

Georgia, snubbed by the BCS, would lack motivation.

This one had been shot out of the water several weeks ago, but some still focused on the buildup to the game and its importance to Hawaii. You couldn’t be certain until the game started, but both the Georgia crowd and team were ready from the opening kickoff. Any disappointment about the national title game was taken out on the opponent.

To be fair, not all of the analysis missed the mark. One point in particular nailed it.

Limiting Hawaii’s yardage after catch is critical to controlling their offense.

This key to the game was dead-on. Georgia did a masterful job at preventing Hawaii’s short passes from turning into big plays. FOX’s stat tracker showed only one broken tackle for most of the night. When Georgia was able to get the Warriors into long-yardage situations on second and third down (which was often), Hawaii found it very difficult to get the large gains they needed to move the chains. This stat, combined with Georgia’s effective pressure, probably was the story of the game.

Boise State indeed.  Instead of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl analogue that FOX and others seemed to want so desperately, Hawaii took us back to Boise State’s 2005 trip to Athens – a game in which Jared Zabransky was reduced to a thumb-sucking mass of jelly by halftime.  This time, the victim was Hawaii’s Colt Brennan; he was pounded into ineffectiveness and left the game around the beginning of the fourth quarter.  Instead of a display of offense for the ages, Hawaii and Brennan gave us a different sort of record-setting performance:  a BCS-record six turnovers and a 41-10 Georgia win.

The totality of the win was obvious by the end of the third quarter as Thom Brennaman and Charles Davies made fools of themselves excusing Hawaii’s play and criticizing Mark Richt for trying to score against a team known for prodigious comebacks en route to their 12-0 regular season.  That just skims the surface of a disappointing broadcast, but we’ll leave that to others for now.  I would though like to thank FOX for introducing the post-kickoff commercial to the college game.  That element of pro coverage was sorely missing on the other networks.

Looking back, the game set up like a typical 3-14 first round NCAA Tournament game.  If the underdog gets a few breaks early and hung around, maybe the favorite tightens up a bit and you get the upset.  Georgia took control of the game from the opening drive, and there would be no comeback or tense finish.  As Musberger cooed about a Rose Bowl “as it was meant to be”, the nation got treated to its third BCS mismatch of the day – yes, including Missouri who, when it comes to the subject of proving who belonged, showed infinitely more than Georgia’s opponent.

I’m proud of Georgia, the coaches, and the seniors for drawing on the lessons of 2005 and ensuring that West Virginia’s Sugar Bowl win was the exception and not the rule.  Great job guys, and hopefully the lopsided win is the springboard to leaving no doubt in 2008.

The Senator raises today one of the downsides to a playoff. We’re to the point in the NFL season where coaches are deciding which starters to rest before the playoff run. It’s even worse in baseball where the best teams have 15-20 games to kill between the time they clinch a playoff spot and the start of the postseason. Get ready to see a AAA lineup.

I understand the concern, but I guess I’ve watched too many Duke-Carolina games at the end of a basketball season to wrap my head around this possibility. We can debate the bigger meaning of a Duke-Carolina game when the conference tournament wipes the slate clean the following weekend, but each meeting still carries the full emotional load of the rivalry even when both teams are assured of a postseason bid. I couldn’t imagine Georgia fans overlooking an otherwise meaningless loss to Tech or Alabama fans content with playing the B team against Auburn even if they were still alive for an SEC and national title. Irrational, maybe, but rationality has never been a trait of the sports fan.

For teams that don’t end the season with a rivalry game, there are still some other reasons not to lie down. Chief among them is seeding, and this factor keeps college basketball from dealing with meaningless final games. The pros slot the postseason positions based on record, and these positions are often decided well beforehand (as is the case this year). A seeding system means that you are auditioning right through your final game, and your last few results are often the most meaningful. Would you rather play West Virginia or Southern Cal in the first round?

With so few games in the college football regular season, conference titles are often still in question entering the final week. Only the Big East was settled before the final week this season. Though several teams might feel comfortable that their playoff invitation is in the mail, it’s reasonable that many teams will still be playing towards a conference title down the stretch of the regular season.

Kyle has done the digging over at Dawg Sports to get to the bottom of Mark Richt’s contract and the associated buyout clauses. I agree with his ultimate conclusion that Mark Richt will end his coaching career in Athens. We’d be very fortunate for that to happen.

Something tells me though that the end of Richt’s career will come sooner than we think it will. He won’t be one to hang on until he dies in the job or stays on out of hubris in pursuit of immortality. Given his already-impressive involvement in his church and community, I could almost picture a “career change” – a moment years down the road where Mark Richt steps away from coaching several years before the norm to devote his energy to his family, faith, and faith community while he is still able.

Clearly Richt sees coaching as a position where he can make a positive impact on others, and I’m sure that’s a big part of what fires him up each day and each year. As he said in 2005,

I coach because I love these players; I want them to succeed in life, and I hope that I can make a positive impact on their lives to where they can become a very good husband, a very good father, a very good employee, a very good citizen.

No one knows if the time will ever come, but it’s possible that Richt might one day conclude that his talents and time could make a bigger impact in a different type of service. If his coaching career continues on the same trajectory, the Bulldog Nation will be as simultaneously proud and heartbroken as it was the day Herschel Walker left for the USFL.

I don’t suggest that such a time is imminent or even foreseeable or that I want it to come any sooner than you do. Selfishly, I want the Richt era to last as long as possible. I just don’t see it ever getting to the point where we’re asking whether or not the game has passed by a 75-year-old Mark Richt.

Ivan Maisel has a nice piece up (h/t Get the Picture) that is mostly about Michigan and Rich Rodriguez, but I’m also glad to see someone try to temper the celebration of parity that’s going on this season.

For all the talk of parity, the teams playing for the national title are 1) a team that played for the title last year and 2) one of the preseason picks. I also note that four of the six BCS conference champions were favored to win their conferences, and the other two – Ohio State and Oklahoma – aren’t exactly newcomers to the scene. The only real manifestation of parity in the BCS is Kansas.

It really has been a wild and incredible season, but something strikes me as wrong when people in the game are placing who lost above who’s winning. As entertaining as upsets are and as great of a story as Kansas is, I still prefer to see excellence shine through. The 2006 Rose Bowl was the ultimate as Bush’s Southern Cal slugged it out with Young’s Texas. Though there are exceptions, true excellence in college football is most likely going to come from a traditional power, and it’s better for the sport when programs like Michigan are doing well. As insensitive as it might be to say, it’s better for the game that Rodriguez is at Michigan than at West Virginia.

Exams are over, bowl practices are about to get going, and thankfully the lull in the news is about over.

I’ve been able to watch Hawaii several times this season thanks to their late starts. One thing that has struck me about them is their ability to pull out wins under any circumstances. In five of their games, they trailed in the second half. Four times they’ve required either overtime or last-minute heroics for the win. And yet in each game they’ve found the resiliency to bounce back and win. Their comeback against San Jose State was good background noise on a Friday night in Nashville – even a two-touchdown deficit with four minutes left wasn’t enough to bury them.

I understand the level of competition we’re talking about. Still, this is a team used to being able to turn games around. In short, assume that no lead is safe.

This game could go a lot of ways, but if Georgia finds itself with a second-half lead of any size, there is almost no appropriate time to let off the gas either on offense or defense. We can debate the best way to defend their attack, but I think we can all agree that a prevent-style defense that gives Brennan all day to pick apart the coverage isn’t going to be effective.

I’m glad to see CFR jump back in to the playoff fray with this comment yesterday:

Maybe — just maybe — it’s possible there’s a link between a postseason tournament in a sport and its regular season being treated as nothing more than seeding? Maybe that’s why college football’s the only sport with a truly compelling regular season, hmmmm ???

Nothing more than seeding? Maybe I’ve misunderstood what’s so compelling about the college football regular season. When people talk about how great the regular season is, I take it they’re not celebrating South Carolina’s quest to become bowl-eligible. The compelling part is how games across the nation each week affect the polls and the teams in the national title chase.

You know – like seeding. If the positioning and jockeying for a spot in the BCS and national title game isn’t what drives the regular season, what does? How would that be diminished by a playoff?

The playoff vs. bowl debates are just getting going again, and we’ll endure another off-season of passionate status-quo defenses and pie-in-the-sky what-if playoff schemes. In the end, I think what makes the college football regular season so compelling is that the drama and meaning of 162 baseball games, 82 NBA games, or even 30+ college basketball games is reduced down to 12 football games over just three months. One loss to a baseball team isn’t even noise. One loss – especially a conference loss – to a college football team is a serious blow. I really don’t believe that the format of the postseason would change that.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Georgia have its way with Wake Forest on Saturday. In what I’d consider the Dawgs’ first significant win of the year, they used a run early in the second half keyed by six consecutive points from Terrence Woodbury to open up a close game.

Wake isn’t going to challenge for the ACC title this year, but they are a decent team that beat Iowa and nearly knocked off Vanderbilt in Nashville earlier in the week. Georgia was able to play good defense and pull away from a quality opponent. After surviving a scare from Division II Augusta State a few days ago, it was relieving to see the team play towards the upper end of its abilities. Woodbury in particular had one of those games that reminds us why everyone is so high on his potential, and his level of play will have a lot to do with Georgia’s success this year.

The newcomers continue to impress. Swansey looks more and more comfortable on the court, and he’s a solid sub for either Gaines or Humphrey now. In fact, given Humphrey’s streakiness, Swansey might be considered a steadier option at times. Big Jeremy Price continues to make the most of his minutes. It’s unfortunate that Jeremy Jacob will be out for several weeks with a stress fracture, but the return of Albert Jackson helps keep the frontcourt depth up.

Turnovers remain a problem, and it’s to Georgia’s good fortune that they were able to limit Wake’s ability to convert so many turnovers into points. When Georgia reduced the frequency of turnovers in the second half, Wake lost any opportunity of coming back. 16 of Georgia’s 26 turnovers came from the starting backcourt – these are veteran players who should be better with the ball.

A second area for emphasis is on the defensive glass. Though Georgia outrebounded Wake Forest by a comfortable margin overall, the Deacons managed 19 offensive boards. That’s not a blip – the Dawgs are giving up over 16 offensive rebounds per game over their last four contests. Offensive rebounds mean second-chance points and fewer possessions for Georgia. Fortunately only Wisconsin has proven capable enough to make Georgia pay for such generosity on the glass. Gaines shouldn’t lead the team in rebounding, but he did on Saturday.

After a week off for exams, Georgia at 6-1 will head to Hawaii for the Rainbow Classic. The Dawgs start play on Thursday December 20 against ETSU. Looking over the rest of the Rainbow Classic field, Georgia has as good of a shot as anyone else at winning this event, and we should expect them to have a good showing. It would be interesting if Georgia and Hawaii faced off on the court before the schools meet in the Sugar Bowl. The hometown teams are known for getting every possible break in these Hawaii tournaments.

Lady Dogs

Andy Landers’ team is 9-0 as things begin to wind down for the semester. After a comfortable win over Davidson on Sunday, the Lady Dogs have a single game against Mercer between now and a year-end tournament in Florida.

Though the team is undefeated and in the top ten, they’ve hardly looked dominant. Near-misses against unranked Temple, Southern Cal, and Georgia Tech have raised some questions about Georgia’s ability to challenge better teams for an SEC title. Unlike recent seasons where the team has faced national powers such as Rutgers, Stanford, and Texas, the non-conference fare is relatively light this year, and the Lady Dogs have yet to be tested by a ranked opponent. A game against FSU should be the last significant challenge before the team begins SEC play in January.

The biggest concern so far is bench production. In some of Georgia’s closest contests this season, they’ve gone the entire second half with just a single substitution. One consequence of this development is that some of Georgia’s most explosive scorers are out of the game. Christy Marshall, who proved to be a spark off the bench last year, has struggled so far and only recently showed signs of life with 12 points against Davidson. Heralded freshman Brittany Carter hasn’t seen more than spot duty so far.

We’ve become used to the Lady Dog backcourt being full of playmakers and scorers, but that really hasn’t been the case this year. Ashley Houts is a fine point guard of course but usually doesn’t look for her shot. Senior wing Megan Darrah can be streaky. Landers is starting freshman Angela Puleo as the shooting guard, and her offensive production has been sporadic. As a result, the Lady Dogs have been in a number of tight games where the totals are closer to 60 points than the 80 points that Georgia typically prefers. To their credit, Georgia has won every one of them so far, but the quality of competition hasn’t been close to what they’ll start seeing in a month.

It’s our first football-free weekend in over three months. It’s supposed to be in the 70s here in Georgia, so get out there and get reacquainted with things like your yard (and spouse).

The main event in Athens this weekend is a basketball game against Wake Forest (2:00 Saturday, Fox Sports South). The Dawgs will try to get their first significant win of the season against a Wake team that took Vandy to the wire earlier in the week in Nashville.

In other news, it looks as if Paul Johnson is Tech’s man. Though we won’t see as much of the triple option as personnel forces him to use at Navy, Josh Nesbitt is still probably a very happy quarterback. As with most college coaching jobs, his success will ultimately come down to recruiting. Tech still has the question of Jon Tenuta in front of them. Does Johnson convince Tenuta to remain on the Tech staff, or does the defensive mastermind head for LSU or other pastures?

Johnson’s deal is reportedly worth $2.3 million per year. Mark Richt, by comparison, earns about $2 million per year and isn’t actively seeking a raise. Will Tech get the same return on investment?

Otherwise, have a great weekend.

Beginning with Gameday at 10 and ending as Hawaii held on at 3:30 in the morning, it was a great day to watch the end of the college football regular season. We sat through 482 showings of the same Dr. Pepper commercial, watched the drama of the Michigan coaching position unfold, and saw outcomes worthy of this unpredictable season. We also saw…

• Dr. Pepper in a single weekend has made me hate Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Bastards.
• How’d you like to be the sophomore defensive end that always gets skipped when the ABC/ESPN lineup introduction spends all its time highlighting the middle linebacker?
• Football tip of the day courtesy ABC and Boston College coach Jeff Jagodzinski…yes, it is easier to throw and catch the ball on a calm, sunny day.
• Either Ryan Perrilloux is the most emotionally fragile redshirt freshman ever, or CBS was overdoing it a bit with their appreciation for how LSU was managing their barely-adequate offense.
• Good job by the ABC cameramen keeping the ACC Championship crowd shots nice and tight. Just go ahead and move the game to Lane Stadium.
• Some thought Tennessee’s all-orange uniforms looked like prison jumpsuits. I just thought of Bill Bates.
• I really want Army-Navy to mean something, but it’s becoming harder and harder to watch each year. The highlight of the day remains the entrance of the cadets, and it goes downhill quickly.
• Other than skin color, I’m not sure what’s supposed to make Jacob Hester a "throwback" player. He’s a good running back, runs hard, makes plays. Otherwise, does he play with a single-bar facemask or something?
• Fox’s BCS selection show reminded us of the "love" part of the love-hate relationship we have with ESPN. For all of the nitpicking we do with the WWL’s punditry, it is miles above the clownish show we got from Fox. Right out of the NFL pregame show model, we got Barry Switzer on laughing gas plus 17 other useless talking heads dragging out 45 seconds of information into a 30-minute show. Bring on the exploding robots.
• It had been a while since I had seen Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year Curtis Lofton, but the Oklahoma junior linebacker was the best player I saw in any game on Saturday.
• Good Lord, what’s happened to Cal?

For all the talk of parity this year, the two teams playing for the national title are a participant in last year’s title game versus a team picked #2 at the beginning of this year. Four of the six BCS conference champs were preseason favorites, and Oklahoma and Ohio State were hardly out of left field. The traditional power is still alive and well.

I understand the sentiment that this was an incredible season with upsets and turbulent polls and a cliffhanger of a final weekend. It was. Still, I admit that I prefer to see the triumph of excellence. I don’t know if we’re going to see a championship game of the quality of the 2006 Rose Bowl any time soon, but that’s what does it for me.

It’s a lot easier when excellence makes the decision obvious, but that wasn’t the case this year. There are several teams with impressive accomplishments and a few blemishes. I don’t envy the job of those who had to sort them out. Were the best teams the ones who were strongest at the end? Do you subscribe to Les Miles’ "body of work" criteria? If the regular season is our playoff, what does it mean to lose?

You hear it repeated often that Georgia is playing the best football of any team in the nation right now. It might well be. At the very least they’re among a group of strong teams that includes Virginia Tech, LSU, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, and Ohio State.

I will say this: I think that a healthy LSU and Oklahoma were the two best teams I saw at any one point in this season. That’s not an argument that those two should play for the title, but if we’re talking about which teams blew my socks off, I think it’s those two. Southern Cal and Georgia aren’t far behind.

Of course trying to rely on anything but results can lead us astray. Last season the case was made for an Ohio State – Michigan rematch because the "best two teams" should meet for the national title. Florida backed into the title game only after Southern Cal fell to UCLA. After Florida humiliated the Buckeyes and Southern Cal dispatched Michigan, it’s possible that everyone was talking about the wrong two teams. Fans of most BCS teams probably feel that their team could beat Ohio State if given the opportunity. Don’t bet the house on that.

Could even an 8-team playoff solve this problem? A playoff of the BCS conference champs plus, say, Georgia and Hawaii, leaves out an arguably worthy team like Kansas. A favorite solution, the "plus-one", would leave out Georgia if based on the final BCS rankings. You’re always going to have someone pissed off and jilted, and engineering a solution to fit the outcome of a specific season won’t mean that all other potential problems are solved.

So Georgia will play in the Sugar Bowl against Hawaii.

After a 20-year absence, this will be the third sUGAr Bowl and BCS appearance in Mark Richt’s seven seasons at Georgia.

There definitely was the case for Georgia to play in the BCS championship game, but there was the case for several other teams as well. I’m disappointed but not devastated. Naturally we are most disappointed for the seniors who will not get another shot at playing for the title. If we dwelled on the inconsistencies and double-speak that played a part in the final rankings, we’d run out of bits and bytes. It could be worse – we could be Missouri dropping out of the BCS completely after entering the weekend ranked #1.

Georgia and their fans have two choices now:

One – we can mope about the process and the perceived quality of the matchup. That worked out real well for us in the 2006 Sugar.

Two – we enthusiastically give our best effort and support and take care of business as if we were playing LSU, Southern Cal, or Ohio State.

I don’t buy that this game is a no-win situation for Georgia. At the most basic level, it’s an opportunity for our 11th win and another Sugar Bowl title. Even in this relatively high-water era for Georgia football, a BCS bowl victory is nothing to sneeze at. Beyond that, we must consider positioning for next year. A win in New Orleans puts Georgia in all likelihood among the top three at the end of this season and among the top five starting next season. Oklahoma dropped their BCS game with Boise State and began this year ranked around #10. LSU won the Sugar Bowl and started 2007 ranked #2 even after losing the top draft pick. Starting position matters if Georgia plans on being in the national title picture again next year.

Hawaii is a great story this year and will draw a lot of viewers to see if their pass-happy scheme and players can match up to an SEC power. A lot of people seem to think that Georgia is one of the best, or at least the hottest, teams in the nation right now, and they can add to that momentum and carry it on to next season by winning the Sugar Bowl.

A big part of the challenge against Hawaii will be matching their intensity. If you saw the bowl selection show last night, you saw a Hawaii team and fan base genuinely excited by the opportunity. That will carry over to their bowl preparations. Like West Virginia, Hawaii’s not a team you want to get very far behind out of the gate.

Saturday started with Kirk Herbstreit making himself part of the Les Miles – Michigan story.  Herbstreit cited “sources” telling him that Miles would accept the Michigan job with Jon Tenuta joining him as defensive coordinator.  Whether simply untrue or whether the leak forced Miles’ hand, Miles announced at an afternoon press conference that he would remain on as LSU’s coach.  Herbstreit, in a comment during the evening, stood by his sources and speculated that his announcement gave LSU a chance to counter Michigan’s offer or that Miles’ announcement was a “smokescreen” until his real decision could be made.  (Miles has since confirmed that he will return to LSU next season.)

Now on to tonight’s BCS discussion.  Herbstreit was quick to discount Georgia and Kansas, emphasizing that a team that couldn’t win its conference doesn’t belong in the national title game.  He acknowledged that the rules did not require a conference championship, but it would be a requirement if he made the rules.

Say what you will about that, but Herbstreit had no problems campaigning for an Ohio State – Michigan rematch in last season’s title game.  Making the case that the voters should select the two best teams regardless of conference hardware, he dissented when the BCS voters placed the Gators in the 2006 title game.

I appreciate the Gators. They had a great year, and they deserve to be there. It’s just my humble opinion that I still feel that Michigan is the second best team in the country. The voters clearly did not want a rematch.

Does Kirk just make up these rules as he goes? “It’s down to who the two best teams in the country are…forget about who’s played who…who in your mind are the top two teams right now in college football?”

A chance at the national championship is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many programs and coaches.  When it presents itself, there is no choice but to go for it.  Now that the politicking has begun for BCS positioning, Mark Richt has jumped in with both feet tonight with an aggressiveness that befits the team we’ve seen this season.  No matter the outcome of the number-crunching, there is no question that Richt is fighting for this chance for his team.

In a Saturday night media teleconference, Richt touched on several of the points he made on ESPN earlier in the evening.

“I think we are one of the two best teams in the country right now. If the rule stated we had to win a conference championship, then that’s what we ought to do. But that’s not what the rules state.”

He also spoke directly to the SEC champions:

“I think if we could have gotten to play in the championship we certainly could have won that game, yes,” Richt said. “I think we could beat LSU.”

Richt continued to make the case that pollsters should show some consistency from last week:

“We were ranked 4th in the BCS this week for a reason. (Voters) believed we belonged to be there,” he said. “Everybody knew last week that we weren’t going to win the conference championship but they voted us ahead of other people anyway. They voted us for a reason and I don’t see why that would change.”

“Georgia one of the two best teams in the nation today? We were voted No. 4 last week in this doggone thing. Two teams ahead of us lost, so why would that change?”

Mark Bradley also goes to bat for Georgia in Sunday’s AJC, making this key point:

The greater injustice would be for LSU to lose its final regular-season game and then be allowed, on the strength of a seven-point victory in the conference title game, to pass a team that has won its past six. The greater injustice would be for the Tigers to get a third shot to prove it’s No. 1 when Georgia hasn’t yet had one.

LSU has been to the top of the mountain twice and couldn’t hold its footing.  It’s time to make way for another team.

First, a word to those who might have found this site in the past few months. I grew up much more of a college hoops fan than a football fan. That’s changed, but I still love to talk basketball – mens and womens – here. Being a Georgia fan makes that tough sometimes, but we get through it.

Yesterday’s article by Chip Towers detailing the academic mess in the men’s program illustrates how at times it can be so trying to follow this program.

(The headline has been changed from “Basketball academics ‘a slow-motion train wreck'” to “Dogs addressing basketball ‘train wreck'”.  Paints a little different picture right off the bat, no?)

As Georgia basketball has struggled towards respectability on the court, we took some comfort knowing that the coach was at least committed to doing things the right way. If you read just the first bit of Towers’ story, you probably get the contrary impression – things are out of control. But as we read on, we learn that the staff and administration was aware of the issue, stayed on top of it, tried several times to address it, and finally just had to cut their losses.

To put it a lot more bluntly: Georgia had a couple of guys who blew off their academic responsibilities. If you read between the lines, some of them are no longer part of the team. The problem was not one of oversight, neglect, or program priorities – it was all about players who didn’t give a damn.

In fact, Georgia’s efforts in academics will result in the second-best APR in the SEC for basketball programs. Make no mistake, Felton is still ultimately going to be judged by his ability to deliver a winning product on the court. But my faith in his approach and priorities off the court is not shaken one bit.

Scoring drought hits Athens

Felton’s first few teams set the standard for offensive futility, but points are also proving scarce for this year’s team. That’s reasonable given the unexpected departure of the team’s top two returning scorers. Sundiata Gaines is a wonderful point guard, but he hasn’t yet settled into the scorer’s role into which Rashad Wright transitioned as a senior. The trio of Gaines, Humphrey, and Woodbury now must be the scoring core of the team, and they’re not there yet.

As a result of the attrition, Georgia has used its five freshmen liberally. They’re as promising a group as Felton has had, but of course they’re still freshmen. Price, Jacobs, and Swansey look the most polished so far, but Barnes and Brewer will have a role this year too.

One area in which the Dawgs will especially miss Mercer and Brown is assertiveness on the offensive end. Offensive rebounds and trips to the foul line came easily against lesser competition, but crashing the offensive glass and drawing fouls has been much more difficult in the past two games against better teams.

Much of November and December will be about finding out what kind of team we have without its two leading scorers. As you might expect, so far it looks like a team of role players without that consistent leading force. Gaines might be the player most likely to be that force, but he’s not going to be able to do it all every night.

Lady Dogs

Consistency on offense has also been a problem for the women. Two of the team’s better outside weapons graduated, and Andy Landers is starting a relatively unheralded freshman, Angela Puleo, at the shooting guard. Though the Lady Dogs have several players who can hit the outside shot, they haven’t been consistently effective enough as a team to distract defensive attention away from Tasha Humphrey. They shot just 3-of-16 against Temple and 2-of-21 against Southern Cal.

It’s no coincidence that Georgia has scored under 60 points in their two games against quality opponents, Temple and Southern Cal. Fortunately Georgia played well enough on defense to win both of those games, but neither team will be mistaken for the top competition in the SEC. The Lady Dogs survived another close game against Oakland last night.

Georgia’s toughest test to date comes Sunday against Georgia Tech. The Jackets are coming off arguably the best season in program history, and most of the key pieces return. Stopping Tech means stopping two seniors – forward Janie Mitchell and sharpshooting guard Chioma Nnamaka. Freshman guard Alex Montgomery, at 6’1″, was one of the top prospects in the nation and will be a matchup problem for the small Georgia backcourt. Georgia should have a serious advantage inside and on the wing, and Tech will rely on pressure defense to keep the ball from going to Robinson and Humphrey. Christy Marshall shone as a freshman against Tech last year, but she has struggled to find minutes this year.