In advance of the SEC media days next week, the league has announced the coaches pre-season all-SEC football team. You’ll have to look hard to find the Georgia representatives.

Brandon Coutu and Mikey Henderson from special teams were Georgia’s only first-team honorees.

The Dawgs had just one offensive player on first, second, or third teams: offensive lineman Fernando Velasco was on the third team.

Georgia’s two defensive representatives were on the second team. Safety Kelin Johnson got the nod entering his senior season. Surprisingly, linebacker Brandon Miller was named to the second team before he’s even played a down at his new middle linebacker position.

I can’t quibble with much. Maybe Brannan Southerland should have been on there somewhere. But most of Georgia’s playmakers from last season have either graduated or left for the NFL. And there’s an awful lot of Georgia’s depth chart that hasn’t had enough playing experience to merit much recognition…yet.

I do expect the Dawgs to have a few more names on the lists that matter at the end of the season, and part of the fun of this year will be watching who emerges as those standouts.

The media should have their preseason honors next week.

Yes, it’s the middle of summer, but there is some basketball news and talk.

Kelly Quinlan of UGASports.com has a long feature up ($) that gets Dennis Felton’s thoughts on several current events. We’ll get to that in a moment.

One of the big takeaways of Quinlan’s piece was that Mike Mercer appears to be on track to play this season. My reaction isn’t so much cynicism as it is amazement. We all saw the injury. I don’t doubt Felton’s assessment of Mercer’s progress, but I’m going to remain skeptical anyway. With an injury that severe, I’m just going to be glad if he can contribute anything in the SEC part of the schedule. If before the end of 2007 he is able to be nearly the player he was becoming at the time of his injury, chalk one up for the miracle of modern medicine.

Back to Felton and recruiting. Felton has developed a bit of perspective aboout recruiting due to his relative longevity (already the longest-serving Georgia hoops coach since Hugh Durham), so it’s interesting to read him reflect on the landscape. Felton is concerned about the trend for earlier and earlier commitments for several reasons. Though physical development during high school is more of a concern for football than basketball, it’s still a factor in basketball recruiting. But Felton has a bigger concern. "The thing I am more worried about is decommitments because that is becoming more common," he said. "More and more kids are becoming comfortable with decommitting."

Though basketball recruiting can hardly be described as a clean business, commitments have traditionally meant the end of the process. That understanding might be changing. Decommittments are more of a concern in basketball because of the limited number of scholarships. If a football prospect decommits, that’s one of 25 spots that a football coach must scramble to fill. It’s a problem, but it can be absorbed through depth in an 85 scholarship situation. In basketball, that one decommitment might represent 1/3 to 1/4 of an entire recruiting class and affect, say, your point guard position for several years. "I hope we do not go to where football has been where commitments do not mean anything. It is more dangerous for basketball because there is a smaller pool of recruitable players at this level of talent," Felton continued.

Read the whole thing if you’re able. It’s a good read, and you can sense Felton becoming more comfortable in his position. "I am really excited and thankful for the support Damon Evans, our president Michael Adams, and our fans at Georgia have given me, our staff, and our players as we have rebuilt the program," he concluded.

Georgia Sports Blog has a look at the possible field in this season’s Rainbow Classic. Though none of the field really blows your socks off, it should present a decent slate of mid-level RPI opponents. In other words, winning the tournament won’t make many waves, and losing a game probably won’t be disastrous. Georgia will seek its real RPI impact games elsewhere – in Madison, Wisc. for example.

There’s an interesting discussion going on at the UGASports.com hoops board about the future of Stegeman Coliseum. With the practice facility project all but wrapped up, it’s time to begin thinking about what comes next. With SEC peers like Auburn looking at facilities improvements, the issue will start to heat up. While the breadth of ideas runs from simple remodeling to the pipe dream of bulldozing the site and starting over, the optimal plan will probably come from a convergence of money, timing, and grace.

Money – what’s available? Can additional private funds be raised? Naturally the scope of the plan will be limited by resources. With athletic association debt near $100 million recently, is more debt financing out of the question? Timing – is the program at a point where it’s easy for enough fans to get on board with the chosen plan, and will the support be resilient enough to survive the possibility of something like a year or two in Gwinnett? Additionally, will the timing be right relative to other athletic department projects and priorities? Grace – the most recent (and most expensive) major expansion to Sanford Stadium cost $33 million over two years. With $30 million already spent on a practice facility, an additional investment in a major coliseum project any time soon would be an act of incredible vision and investment in a group of sports that have historically fought for scraps not only from administrators but also from Georgia fans. A positive in this area is that it seems as if Damon Evans could be the right leader for this kind of vision and commitment down the road.

Rather than get into long and protracted conference arguments, I’m just going to apply the Stewart Mandel rule whenever an SEC coach tries to lean on the strength of his conference relative to another: he’s just laying the foundation for an excuse. Mandel writes…

So what, then, was the motivation behind his unexpected boisterousness? Here’s a guess: He’s covering his butt.

Yep. That’s right. Miles’ comments were one big excuse-in-the-making. He’s seen the prognostications. He knows the experts are projecting a USC-LSU matchup. He knows his fans are foaming at the mouth for just such an outcome. And he’s trying to diffuse those expectations — and temper the possible letdown — by saying, “Hey, I’d love to play USC, too, but if they get there and we don’t, it’s because we had to play Florida while they got to play Stanford.”

Now Nick Saban’s joined the club. Saban’s under tremendous pressure at Alabama. The man who only once lost fewer than three games at talent-rich LSU is expected to start bringing conference and even national titles back to Tuscaloosa. I’d want the job to appear as challenging as possible too.

I guess the AJC felt as if they couldn’t let Mark Bradley’s column go unanswered, so they woke Furman Bisher up to write some sort of response. The result is one of the more timid, mealy-mouthed, and noncommittal columns you’ll ever read from someone paid to be an opinion columnist. Of course it’s July and we don’t know what Tech and Georgia will look like in November. Who cares about Saratoga? This is the South, the preseason magazine have hit the stands with their prognostications, and we’re talking college football a month before practice starts. Either dive in and embrace it or go into hiding until the British Open.

But Bisher quickly leaves the subject of this year’s Tech-Georgia game and turns wistful as he joins in the "what if Taylor Bennett had played more" fantasy. It’s not the first time Bisher’s been down this road. He declared that Chan Gailey owed the Tech old guard an explanation after the Gator Bowl.

In Bisher’s efforts this time to paint this picture of a golden arm left "chained to the sideline", he takes some pretty big liberties with recent history. First, he lauds Bennett for "(keeping) the ship afloat against Connecticut," a game in which Bennett completed 11 of 30 passes for 142 yards against the formidable Husky defense.

I can’t believe that I’m not piling on Reggie Ball here, but it’s not as if he was without accomplishments after his freshman season. It’s true that he didn’t have the expected progression from that impressive debut to a mature, consistent, and efficient signal-caller. He was famously bad against Tech’s most important opponent. He did manage to beat teams like Clemson and Miami twice, added a win this season on the road over Virginia Tech, a second win over Auburn, and got his team into the ACC Championship Game. He reminded no one of Vince Young or even Joe Hamilton, but Bisher’s claim that Ball "was better when he got there than when he left" doesn’t stand up.

Bisher makes a reference to the 2004 Georgia game. "When Ball was crashing — and oh, how many crashes he had, not the most crucial of which was losing count of the downs and making a throwaway pass against Georgia — why not Bennett?" Well, for one, Bennett was redshirting in 2004 as a true freshman. He didn’t see his first game experience until 2005. Placing that "crash" completely on Ball is another questionable recollection. That series was a meltdown of the entire Tech offense, culminating in Ball’s blunder but highlighted by confusion on the sideline where offensive coordinator Patrick Nix inexplicably ordered Ball to spike the ball on third down.

That 2004 Georgia game does provide a good lesson in this grass-is-greener game. Bisher asserts that "Chan Gailey stubbornly stuck with Ball," but Gailey did try someone else when Ball was struggling, even if it wasn’t Bennett. Damarius Bilbo got a chance against the Dawgs and was even worse. 3 completions, 10 attempts, and 29 yards. Gailey eventually gave up and went back to his starter. The quarterback position was up for grabs several times during Ball’s four years, and each time he held off the competitors. Against challenges from Bilbo, Pat Clark, and Bennett, Ball stood out time after time. Tech’s own official site declared the position up for competition entering the 2005 spring practice, but Ball emerged again with a clear-cut victory.

We finally come to Bennett’s masterpiece – the 19-for-29, 326 yard performance in the Gator Bowl. I’ve talked about that game here recently, so we’ll avoid going back over that ground. What Bisher doesn’t tell us is that Bennett’s "dazzling day" in the Gator Bowl fizzled as the game went on. The nascent Young-to-Rice of Bennett-to-Johnson combination was held scoreless for the final 28 minutes of the game.

Bisher believes that "Georgia Tech hadn’t seen a passing combination like (Bennett and Johnson) since Joe Hamilton and Harvey Middleton." Hmm. Johnson’s performance against West Virginia certainly was a great final performance. He had 9 receptions, 186 yards, and 2 touchdowns. It was also hardly his only explosive performance of the season. He had six receptions for 115 yards and 2 touchdowns against a much better Virginia Tech defense. He had 9 receptions for 168 yards against NC State. He shredded Virginia for 165 yards and 2 more touchdowns. Was it really the quarterback?

We’ll let Bisher build Bennett up and watch Tech fans cling onto the hope that it just has to get better with Bennett. Behind Choice and another quality defense, I think they’ll be rather good actually. Bennett might just turn out to be better by default if he avoids the disasters that plagued Ball, but I’m not convinced that Bennett will be the right answer in those times when Tech needs the quarterback to carry them. It will be an entertaining story to watch in the fall especially knowing that the best quarterback in the state still is in Athens.

Why is everyone so hung up on schedules?

No, I know it’s July and we have little else to talk about. Scheduling debates are right up there with playoff proposals when it comes to pointless offseason parlor games. This week alone, scheduling – weak, strong, or otherwise – is mentioned in no fewer than three pieces in CFR’s weekly must-read Pundit Roundup.

So what is it about scheduling that has everyone weighing in? For most, I think it comes down to plain, old machismo. Manhood. Basically you have fans and pundits across the country calling each other chicken.

"Playing NW Georgia State, huh? Must be afraid to go outside your ZIP code for a real opponent."

"Oh yeah? At least we’re playing someone else who’s seen the Top 25 this decade. When was the last time that Wyoming Tech beat anyone?"

"We have to play them. They’re our traditional rival. It’s not our fault that they’re not Miami. ESPN still says we have the #20 schedule."

And so it goes. You’ve seen or heard that same "debate" countless times on message boards, talk radio, and so on, and now it’s bleeding into the punditry. Challenging a diehard fan’s manhood (in this case, their team’s schedule) is a quick and surefire way to provoke a response and generate some spirited discussion. But does it really change anything if you’re able to prove to the world that you really do have a tough schedule?

Who you schedule really doesn’t matter nearly as much as winning. Unless we’re dealing with a true BCS outlier like Boise, Utah, etc., an undefeated team from a BCS conference will almost always trump a team with a loss regardless of who the undefeated team scheduled out of conference. The quality within most any major conference (yes, even the PAC 10) will take care of that. Even when two teams share the same record, it’s my belief that their relative preseason rankings matter more than a strength of schedule metric.

A team certainly doesn’t need a grueling schedule in order to win the national title. In fact, Florida is the only champion in the 2000s with a Top 10 schedule. Most of the others were in the high teens to 20s. It should be noted that the strength of Florida’s schedule last year came from its conference schedule which required the Gators to play LSU, Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia (plus two other bowl-bound teams in Kentucky and South Carolina). Florida’s nonconference schedule in 2006 was quite unremarkable with a struggling FSU as its highlight.

With that in mind, why aim to have a tough schedule at all? In terms of the goal of winning a national title, what is the payoff versus the unnecessary risk of a loss? If Texas can go through the Big 12 undefeated this year, I can virtually guarantee them a spot in the national title game even though their nonconference schedule consists of Arkansas State, TCU, Central Florida, and Rice. Sure, they’d have to have someone like LSU or Southern Cal lose along the way, but we rarely have multiple undefeated BCS teams. With this year’s Narrative already shaping up though ("USC and LSU have to play for the national championship this season. It is no longer possible to envision any other satisfying conclusion,") would bulking up the Texas schedule really do anything to sway a punditry already selling us on an LSU-Southern Cal title game? Nope.

So what does Mack Brown care if Mark Schlabach or I or some Dallas talk radio station or Raleigh sportswriter thinks that the Texas schedule is weak? All he knows is that if he wins, he’s in the national title game. Texas or any other major program won’t be lacking for exposure and airtime. What’s his incentive for another series with Ohio State or a similar team? Put in another light, if "the regular season is our playoff", why wouldn’t you make your "bracket" as easy as possible?

I will admit that I’ve come around just a bit on this subject. Though I still think that seeking out a regular season matchup between two Top 10 teams isn’t very rational (though it might be great for fans), I’m no longer 100% sold on the "path of least resistance". I can see the place for regional rivalries. I accept that you do have to placate the fans sometimes and schedule a game in South Bend. I can even buy that a tougher opponent might prepare you for other challenges down the road – perhaps even in a different season. Is it coincidence that Georgia’s three recent SEC Championship appearances have come in years when they’ve had a "real" opening game opponent? Probably, but I’m hoping that’s the case again this year.

Those unhappy with this scheduling reality can complain about weak schedules all they like and try to change things with a campaign of shame, but in the end we have to get down to talking about incentives. Which behaviors get rewarded (in terms of titles and money), and which are penalized?

Everyone’s pointing to Mark Bradley’s latest (and greatest). I agree that it’s more flamebait than anything else, but it’s still our flamebait, and the replies from Tech fans are pure gold.

I’m glad to see someone a little more high-profile than I questioning the popular assumption that things can’t get worse than Reggie Ball. "Georgia’s No. 1 quarterback beat out three teammates for the job. Tech’s No. 1 quarterback couldn’t beat out Reggie Ball." Yep.

While we’re enjoying the current of muck flowing in the other direction, Dawg fans should pay close attention to Bradley’s point #7.

For all the fuss made over Jon Tenuta’s defense, it should be noted that the Georgia D, coached by the unappreciated Willie Martinez, finished ahead of Tech last season in total defense, scoring defense, pass defense and turnovers created.

Tenuta is a very good defensive coordinator, appreciated by both Tech and Georgia people. But many Georgia fans would take Tenuta (or just a car Tenuta once owned) over Willie Martinez in a second. They’re morons.

Hiding just beneath the surface in this whole Les Miles / Southern Cal dustup is the story of the 2004 Auburn team. That team of course finished the season undefeated but neither played in the BCS championship game nor finished first in a major poll.

It bugs me a bit whenever I see the story of that Auburn team used in the context of conference strength or strength of scheduling discussions. To me, Auburn’s story is simply a lesson in the value and importance of preseason polls. This sidetrack into recent history might be a little random, but I might as well get this out while it’s at the top of my stack.

It’s not that I think that the 2004 Auburn team wasn’t deserving of a shot at the national title. Of course they were. I’m not going to say that they were better or worse than Southern Cal or Oklahoma because reasonable arguments could be made either way. But watching from my perch at Jordan-Hare Stadium while Auburn rolled over a Top 10 Georgia program, they looked pretty damn good to me.

The whole Auburn strength of schedule thing is the part that always rings very hollow with me. There’s the implication that Auburn was punished for a weak nonconference schedule, but I have never bought it. To understand why, you have to go back to the end of the 2003 season. LSU beat Oklahoma in the BCS Championship game and earned the #1 ranking in the ESPN/USA Today coaches poll. Meanwhile, Southern Cal beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl and claimed the #1 ranking in the AP poll. It was a split title. Auburn, on the other hand, had what was considered a disastrous 2003 season and nearly fired coach Tommy Tuberville (remember that whole Petrino debacle?).

That 2003 controversy aside, the results meant that Southern Cal, Oklahoma, and LSU started the 2004 season at the top of the polls. Pretty reasonable, right? Southern Cal was #1, Oklahoma was #2, and LSU was #4. Auburn started the season around #10. OK so far?

So SoCal and Oklahoma started the year #1 and #2 and went undefeated. Not only that, but SoCal had been left out of the BCS Championship in the previous season, and Oklahoma was a title game participant. With those facts in mind, I maintain that Auburn could have played three NFL teams as its nonconference opponents and still not have jumped Southern Cal or Oklahoma. There was no way that an undefeated Southern Cal team snubbed the year before was going to be left out. That left Oklahoma, and as a runner-up the previous season and preseason #2 in 2004 they got the benefit of the doubt and got another crack at the title game. That’s it. It had nothing to do with conferences and nothing to do with the quality of the teams’ respective schedules.

Does that mean I believe that Oklahoma and Southern Cal were better than Auburn or that Auburn’s perfect season was less impressive than any we’ve seen in the past decade? Again, no. That’s what sucks about the whole thing. The table was set for the national title game in July and August. As long as the preseason favorites kept winning, there was nothing that Auburn or any team behind them could do to have a part in the process. You know where this is headed. "Every game counts," my ass.

When Les Miles "said Auburn was the victim of an injustice and repeated his assertion that an unbeaten SEC champion should play for a national championship," we have to be careful just what kind of "injustice" we’re talking about. Auburn didn’t get jobbed because they were Auburn or from the SEC or played some directional Carolina schools. Interestingly, LSU might be the beneficiary of a similar outcome this year. We have a while until the "real" preseason polls come out, but if the consensus holds LSU appears to be #2 heading into the season. If they and the Trojans just win, it won’t matter what West Virginia or Michigan or anyone else does – Miles will see Southern Cal up close and personal, and it won’t be because he’s coaching an SEC team. But there’s a lot of football between now and then.

In hindsight, I’m just glad that it was Auburn and not Georgia. The Dawgs started the 2004 season at a consensus #3 and would have been in the same boat as Auburn had the Dawgs won out. That’s not a pain I would have liked to have known.

We all like to pick on Reggie Ball, and he’s an easy target. But as poorly as he played against Georgia over his career, he was still a four-year starter with wins over teams like Auburn, Miami, and Virginia Tech.

So for all of the amusement we get reading lines saying that Tech has to be better in 2007 now that Reggie Ball is gone, is it really a given that Taylor Bennett will be markedly better?

Bennett is getting a lot of mileage from the first half of last season’s Gator Bowl. As Bennett threw jump ball after jump ball to Calvin Johnson en route to a big halftime lead, it was natural to wonder why he wasn’t tried before Ball became ineligible.

But I am not yet a believer that Bennett will be an improvement at quarterback over the long term. You’d expect a QB to improve over the course of a game, but Bennett did not in his moment in the spotlight. Tech went from 340 yards of offense in the first half of the Gator Bowl to 133 in the second half. They had four drives of 60+ yards in the first half and none in the second half.

It could be argued that West Virginia wasn’t expecting a backup to find Johnson with such ease, but he did. Once they adjusted and realized that Bennett could throw the ball, he wasn’t as effective. After the world gets a few games of film on Taylor Bennett this fall, we’ll find out if he really is an improvement over a four-year starter.

With the 2006-2007 academic and athletic year completed, Georgia finished a respectable 12th in the 2007 Director’s Cup – not the best showing in recent years, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Two national titles (gymnastics and men’s tennis) were at the top of the highlights, and we’ll get to those top stories soon. But first, we’ll take a look back first at some of the lower points from the past year.

10. "I’m Georgia!"

OK, I understand the proceeds went to a really, really good cause. I bought a few towels myself for that reason alone. But manufactured enthusiasm always seems a little artificial and often cheesy. The "I’m Georgia" campaign was both. It became painful watching former Georgia greats trying to rally the Sanford Stadium crowd in their middle-aged monotones. "You want me to wave this towel and say what?!" But because they distributed so many towels and the kids love them – kids love anything free – the "I’m Georgia" towels are barnacles on the Georgia program that will be hanging on for several years.

9. Basketball collapse at Alabama.

It’s unfair to label any particular game as the reason why Georgia missed the NCAA basketball tournament. It’s not even clear that another win would have made the difference. Still, a double-digit lead against Bama represented a rare chance to get a quality road conference win. The questionable finish only made the missed opportunity more painful. This game wasn’t the only time that the Dawgs blew a decent lead late in the game; Western Kentucky handed Georgia its first loss of the season with a late rally from ten points down. Either one of those wins would have been nice to have. Both together might have earned the Dawgs a bid.

8. Women’s golf embarassment.

The mysterious resignation of women’s golf coach Todd McCorkle turned into an uncomfortable if not creepy story filled with charges of harrassment and other conduct inappropriate for someone in his position (and most anyone over the age of 14). McCorkle resigned his position but remains with the athletic association, an arrangement that I agree creates a lose-lose situation.

There’s another angle to the story that didn’t get much play – the spokesperson-parent. Art Leon, father of star player Taylor Leon, triggered an investigation by complaining to administrators "after his daughter said she was berated by McCorkle at the Bryan Intercollegiate (tournament)." While I consider the harassment charges very serious and worthy of the reaction they received, I am not so quick to sympathize with parental claims of "verbal abuse" that resulted because a coach got in a player’s face.

Mr. Leon comes across a bit differently in this quote from the AJC following McCorkle’s resignation: "I’m shocked, surprised, just flabbergasted…Todd’s a great coach. I just saw him at SECs and everybody was happy and jubilant." A week later, Leon told the ABH, "He’s the type of guy you feel like you’d like to have a beer with, but he has no place being a coach of women’s golf." Hm. OK.

7. UGA: home of the minor alcohol-related incident.

From Akeem Hebron to Ian Smith to Tasha Humphrey, the campus crackdown on underage drinking left its mark on Bulldog athletics. For the football team, the incidents resulted in another round of early-season suspensions, and Hebron was suspended by the University. In the case of Humphrey, her suspension led to chemistry issues on the team that weren’t really sorted out until the final month of the season. Given the climate withing the campus administration, the overzealousness of local police, and the automatic suspensions mandated by the athletic department, you’d think the message to be smarter about drinking might be getting out to student-athletes. But this next academic year hasn’t gotten off to a great start either.

6. Quarterback indecision.

A year later, it seems like a hazy dream. But a year ago, Georgia fans were debating whether or not Joe Tereshinski’s unproven ability to "manage the game" (whatever that meant) was enough to give him the nod at quarterback over less-experienced but more talented options. Ideally, the question would have played itself out in August. Unfortunately, the quarterback question ended up dragging into the middle of the season and not settled for certain until the Mississippi State game, the eighth game of the season. Along the way we had an injury to the starter, a solid debut from the freshman phenom, an off-the-bench rescue by a third quarterback, and several close calls. Eventually the job was won by Matthew Stafford, but his on-the-job training during the middle part of the season included some very harsh lessons. It’s impossible to say how the season would have turned out had Stafford started the whole time, but that doesn’t keep fans from wondering.

5. Big Three vs. Florida.

0-fer. Sweep. Georgia’s "big three" men’s sports of football, basketball, and baseball all played their part in the Year of the Gator. The Gator football team held off a second-half comeback from the Dawgs en route to SEC and national titles. Florida’s outstanding basketball team was never seriously challenged in three games against Georgia including the quarterfinals of the SEC Tournament. Georgia’s best chance for a win was against a struggling Gator baseball team, but even a Florida team that would finish under .500 and fire its coach managed to sweep a three-game series in Athens. Thank goodness for other sports like tennis, gymnastics, and women’s basketball which took care of their own business against Florida, but a turnaround in the "big three" can’t come quickly enough.

4. Baseball roller coaster hits bottom.

I guess we should have seen it coming. Georgia baseball has had a strange pattern of feast and famine lately, and the calendar said that they were due for another downturn in 2007. But the severity of the downturn was the news this year. The talent drain after the 2006 trip to Omaha hurt, and those expected to carry the team this year didn’t. Georgia produced no all-SEC players this season, and they clearly lacked the clutch star power they’ve enjoyed recently. Georgia finished the season under .500 with their worst record in several years and far out of contention for the postseason.

The season was in trouble out of the gate as the Dawgs dropped early series to PAC 10 members Oregon State and Southern Cal. A sweep of Auburn to start SEC play provided a small glimmer of hope, but reality set in quickly. Taking two of three games from Georgia Tech was one of the few bright spots of the season, and those two wins might have had the added benefit of keeping Tech out of the NCAA Tournament.

The odd-even schedule that seems to rule the Diamond Dawgs lately says that Georgia baseball should be back on top next year, but they’ll be looking for answers and improvement at nearly every spot.

3. Mike Mercer’s season-ending injury.

Ouch. You knew the moment it happened that Mike Mercer’s knee injury at South Carolina was severe. In fact, it was considered "good" news that the injury was only season-ending. Similar injuries have ended careers. A lot of Bulldog programs had significant injuries last year, and some like Thomas Brown’s were season-ending too. But a major injury to a basketball starter is magnified, and Mercer’s injury turned out to be too much for the fragile Georgia depth to handle down the critical stretch run. Though they fought until the regular season finale against Tennessee, Mercer’s injury gave them very long odds for a postseason bid with no margin for error. Still, the team scrapped by and were able to record their first postseason win in nearly five years.

2. Football losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky.

We sensed that inexperience at the quarterback position would cause problems, but few would have guessed that the defending SEC champions would fall to the traditional doormats of the SEC East. Even worse is that Georgia held the lead in each game but saw Vandy and Kentucky drive late in the game for the winning scores against a relenting Georgia defense. Following the loss at Kentucky in November, things were as bleak as they’ve looked at Georgia since 1996. How the Dawgs turned things around to beat three consecutive ranked teams is an incredible story, and I don’t think we’ll ever know just how much negative momentum the team had to overcome in order to make that turnaround happen.

1. The death of Kevin Brophy.

The Georgia basketball world was rocked in July when point guard Kevin Brophy was killed in an auto accident. The Australia native was driving to Savannah when he wrecked during a rainstorm south of Athens.

Though I consider the death of Brophy the bottom story of the past academic year, the response by the team and the fan base was far from a low point. The team embraced the memory of the popular player, and an emotional win over LSU in the presence of the Brophy family topped off a season dedicated to Kevin. Fans and the University worked together to start a Kevin Brophy Memorial Scholarship Endowment Fund, and its trademark circular "3" patch was a ubiquitous reminder all season on the court and in the stands.

UGASports.com has a piece today looking back at UGA’s role in past NBA drafts. It’s a good read. But at first glance I had to think that something about UGA and the NBA draft seems as if it would rank just behind Famous Jewish Sports Legends on the "light reading" list. Hopefully that will change down the road.

First, a bit of unsolicited travel advice:

Visit Nova Scotia. What an incredible place. You can just drive around the corner and come out at a spot like this:

Now, on to some of the Dawg news that caught my eye after a quick scan:

Munson cutting back

Count me among those who feel that Larry has earned the right to call as few or as many games, quarters, or plays as he wishes.

At the same time, we have to consider the role of the broadcast in the first place: telling the story of the game. John Kaltefleiter of the ABH took a little heat last week when he suggested that Munson was slipping badly in this area, but is that really news to anyone? "We’ve got a guy in the corner" has become the default call for any play now. But Munson isn’t there for that anymore…his presence is almost ceremonial like British royalty, and the fact that the broadcast team can so easily adapt to Munson’s reduced schedule this year is evidence of that. No one expects Roger Clemens to go 9 innings anymore, but it’s still a special thing to see him on the mound. The rest of the broadcast team is capable of picking up the slack.

To me, the question isn’t who replaces Larry. It’s who replaces Scott Howard when Howard moves into the lead role.

Mark Richt’s Summer Vacation

College football coaches don’t have much down time, but this time of year is about as close as it comes to R&R before the staff begins intense preseason preparations in a few weeks. Coach Richt and his family spent some of their summer recently checking up on a mission they support in Honduras. He kept a journal for UGASports.com, and they’ve put it up as free content. Read here:

• Richt heads to Honduras
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Richts leave Honduras

Besides the virtue of the mission work itself, I find it admirable even in a "safe" situation like this that Coach Richt would engage the online community in such depth. He also took questions directly from the DawgVent. It goes with the understanding that these same people will be cursing him again after the next loss, so it’s very gracious of him to take the time to put these entries together and share this very important work.

Andy Landers’ June

First, thoughts and prayers are with the Landers family as Drew recovers from an automobile accident earlier this week. Unfortunately, the accident cost the life of a North Oconee coach, and we can’t begin to imagine the toll that has taken on that community and his family. The relatively good news from this tragedy is that the others in the car survived, and Drew seems poised to recover. It’s still touch-and-go for a while though, and Andy Landers can’t help but feel helpless as he watches and waits down at Grady.

It’s been a tumultuous month for Landers. The highlight clearly was his induction into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville. It was fitting that a large number of former players and friends were on hand to help him celebrate, because as he is so quick to point out they played a large role in building the program to this point. But make no mistake that it takes a special person to build and sustain an environment where such great players want to come and can excel. If you’ve ever heard him speak, he certainly doesn’t come across as shy, but he is modest when it comes to his own accomplishments. Had he blown his own horn or pulled some strings, he surely would have made the Hall of Fame much sooner.

He’s also completed a pretty significant shakeup of the staff. Cameron Newbauer filled the final assistant coaching vacancy. On the surface, the hire raises some eyebrows. He has very limited coaching experience, and all of his work to date is on the men’s side. He’s expected to help in recruiting. Cameron will no doubt draw comparisons to the chance that Landers took on Michael Shafer. With the changes to the staff complete, the three assistants are now much younger but not necessarily less experienced. Kim Hairston seems like a nice addition. La’Keshia Frett, recently 32, is now the senior assistant. Hairston and Newbauer both graduated college in or after 2000. Will the young staff be the injection of new blood that gives both team performance and recruiting a boost, or will they be an ankle weight to the program as they come up to speed?

If you read David Ching’s blog (and if you don’t you should), you noticed last week that he live-blogged Columbus State’s appearance in the Division II baseball championship. You probably skipped over it if you’re just there for the Georgia stuff, but the posts were a great service to a local (Columbus) readership in a situation where TV and radio coverage was spotty or nonexistent.

It turns out that Ching was an outlaw.

Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Brian Bennett was tossed from the press box during Cardinal’s historic Super Regional performance over the weekend because he was blogging during the game. The NCAA decided to enforce a new policy in order to protect the broadcast rights of "the NCAA’s official rights holders".

Josh Centor has a really tough job. Being a public face of the NCAA must be right up there with IRS public relations and Georgia Tech football marketing in terms of its thanklessness. In the times I’ve seen his responses to some pretty controversial issues (including the football clock rules debacle), he’s always been professional, level-headed, and informative even when the critics of the NCAA aren’t. He has some quality thoughts on the subject while disagreeing with the policy, noting in particular that no one is going to prefer sporadic blog updates to a high-def ESPN television broadcast if they have that option.

For now, I agree with Deadspin’s observation that "the NCAA has now, by definition, given the proverbial guy in the basement better access to his/her readers than someone in their own press box." Just over on the DawgVent we see this very practice almost daily now as people provide running updates on everything from NASCAR races to Georgia’s national championship tennis match. The NCAA holds that blogs are a "live representation of the game", a concept I find pretty absurd unless you can type really, really fast. The Courier-Journal’s attorney is right on here: "Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV, everybody sees it. They (the NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis."

If you follow the NCAA’s memo and policy to its logical conclusions, every SMS message, phone call, or e-mail you’ve sent from a game describing the action is a violation of the rights of the official broadcast rights holders.

It was around 1998 that I remember seeing live fan reporting in action. A guy with a cell phone at Will Witherspoon’s press conference reported Witherspoon’s commitment to someone on the other end of the call who was in a Dawg chat room. Those people reading knew the news before anyone at the press conference had left the room. The immediacy (not to mention unlimited column-inches) of the Internet is a big problem for print journalists. They’ve responded with blogs and updates to their own Web sites between publications, and someone like Ching live-blogging a local event of interest is yet another innovative way for a print journalist to serve a readership looking for near-real-time information.

A properly credentialed journalist providing these brief updates to their readers should be encouraged instead of punished. They are doing nothing to diminish the value of the broadcasts. If anything, they are creating more exposure for and interest in the event, and it’s likely that a few of those readers will tune in to the broadcasts when they can.

UPDATE: As I hoped, Ching has his own comments up now. Read the whole thing. Two great points: 1) the rule was applied capriciously – no one cared if he live-blogged an event that ESPN wasn’t covering. 2) this is an issue fans should be interested in because it affects the quality and quantity of options for following their teams.

They said it couldn’t be done, but I found a wonderful woman with better season tickets than mine. We’re set to be married this weekend, and this site won’t be high on my list of priorities for a couple of weeks.

I have some things set up to auto-post over the next couple of days, but after that it’s going to be quiet for several days.

Any relationship where Allen’s, Stegeman Coliseum, and the Dawgs play central roles can’t be that bad. Then again, we lost to Vandy the day after I proposed.

Doug over at Hey Jenny Slater has done the work of combining the preseason rankings to date. Southern Cal seems to be the favorite, and the Dawgs come in around the low teens. As the senator reminds us, a lot of these early preseason rankings don’t take into account the Paul Oliver news or any injuries and suspensions that might come up between now and the season.

Chris Stassen has been tracking this kind of thing for over a decade now, and it’s interesting to look back at Georgia teams over that time and see how they did relative to expectations.

The overrated/disappointing season that most remember is 2000, and sure enough the eleven position slide from the preseason ranking is the largest drop on the chart. 2004 might also be considered a disappointment because the Dawgs were overshadowed by Auburn and even Tennessee, but a final ranking of #7 isn’t a bad year. Losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky meant that the 2006 team also turned out to be "overrated", and it took that great finish to the season to only drop seven spots from the preseason.

It makes sense that the 1997 and 1998 teams were two of the most underrated Dawg teams. The 1997 team followed a 5-6 1996 team that itself followed the unspectacular end of the Ray Goff era. A 10-2 record and #10 ranking after all that shocked many of us. The Dawgs lost a lot of key players after 1997, and it was easy and reasonable to write them off in 1998. Richt’s first three teams were slightly underrated. Doug’s work seems to tell us that pundits aren’t particularly worried by last year’s slide, but it will be worth watching if the later preseason polls include a correction for Oliver and anything else that comes along.

Since the polls play a part in determining the national champion, it’s also worth looking at where the past eleven national champs started out.

(LSU started at #14 in 2003 for those in the one-peat crowd.)

So as you might expect, you don’t have to start in the top 5 to win the national championship – just five of the last eleven did. Four champions started outside of the top 10. The teams that came the longest way to win the title (Michigan, Oklahoma, SoCal, tOSU, and even LSU) are all traditional powers who came off sub-par seasons. Of those teams, only SoCal did not have a four-loss or worse season before their national title.

I look at preseason polls a lot like qualifying for a race. You don’t have to start on or near the pole to win a race, but it does help. The further back you start, the more help you need in front of you and the more traffic you have to work through on your way to the front.

Actually, the Dawgs got yet another verbal commitment yesterday from Ft. Lauderdale DE Jeremy Longo. Longo had offers from schools like LSU, Auburn, and hometown Miami. Not bad at all. He’s a teammate of another Georgia commitment, kicker Blair Walsh. Longo gives the Dawgs three defensive line commitments.

PS…Ching’s dead-on when he says that Georgia will hear the “doesn’t close well” griping from our own when the Dawgs have just one or two scholarships left on the table in January and other programs are getting the recruiting headlines. Like clockwork.

But just look at the separated-at-birth photos of Longo and his future defensive coordinator: