Georgia basketball signee Wayne Arnold is used to winning championships. His Berkmar team has won consecutive state titles largely due to his contributions. That streak may or may not end this season, but Arnold has had to focus on mastering life off the court during his senior year. The death of his mother earlier in the season has far overshadowed basketball. School Sports has a nice look at Arnold’s frame of mind as his high school career comes to an end.

It’s hard to read the media sometimes. Harrick can get left off of a list for National Coach of the Year, but then some just and good recognition can follow right behind it. Jarvis Hayes has made Dick Vitale’s all-newcomer team. Vitale, to his credit, has been talking up Harrick and this Georgia team since early January.

ESPN.com: Finalists for Naismith coaches awards This is rich. Apparently there are 20 coaches out there who have done a better job than Jim Harrick this season. Apparently these other coaches have taken a preseason consensus last-place team and have their squads in good shape to win a division in the toughest conference in college basketball. Apparently all of those coaches also only returned four players with mostly reserve experience and turned them into the core of a Top 25 team.

For safe choices like Tubby Smith and Pete Gillen to make this list over guys who are producing better results with much less like Jim Harrick and Herb Sendek is a travesty. Gillen has only driven a top 10 team into the ground with a 6-6 ACC record.

Harrick doesn’t need other people letting him know how good of a coach he is – after all, he has already won the National Coach of the Year award in 1995. It would have been nice though to see him and the University get a little more attention for the job Harrick has done this season.

(ABH) Jacobs keeps taking strides in recovery
Loran Smith takes a walk with David Jacobs.

A great feature on Jarvis Hayes in the Augusta Chronicle.

Georgia’s basketball team got its first commitment among the current crop of HS juniors from PG Jordan Howell of Madison, AL. The timing will be great as Howell will come in as a freshman during Rashad Wright’s senior year – the perfect setup for a changing of the point guard.

The Banner-Herald has news on that and other basketball tidbits this morning including an update on Larry Turner.

A first, as far as I’m aware…. the father of Michael Turner posts to the Vent about his son’s commitment to UGA. You’d have to be braindead to miss the pride and emotion in this man’s words. As often as news on recruiting pours in and how commitments are chalked up like an order on Wall Street, it’s sometimes easy to miss the significance of these decisions on a family and foremost on the life course of the kid himself. There are a few times in life when your road can fork drastically depending on the choice you make, and college is one of them for a lot of people.

A huge weekend in Athens – basketball team gets past the Vols, Gymdogs roll over #1 UCLA, marquee recruits on campus…it was a fun scene to be around.

The football team got four commitments out of the weekend: TE Martrez Milner, DT Randall Swoopes, TE Leonard Pope, and TE Michael Turner. Don’t worry about the number of guys committing that are listed as TEs…some are intended to be developed for other positions.

Bierria joins Grant and McMichael in the NFL draft. Bierria said he’s still a year and a half from graduating and since he wouldn’t have been able to earn a degree even if he returned for his senior year he saw no sense in returning. I guess one can see his point, but if a degree were his goal, finishing it in two years rather than one isn’t a showstopper – that his athletic scholarship would run out is the real issue. Just because Bierria’s announcement was a little bit of a shock, don’t take that to mean he isn’t well-thought of by pro scouts. He’ll likely get drafted and has the good size and speed they look for. You can never fault a kid who came from very little jumping at the chance to live his dream of playing in the NFL. Hopefully Terreal will have made the right decision for himself, and the large improvement he would have made in his draft status by returning for his senior season won’t turn out to matter much.

The Cycles of Change in the SEC…. a great historical perspective by Dawg151 of the Vent on the resignation of Steve Spurrier and what it might mean to the conference. Now of course a new coach does not by any means imply that Florida is going to be mistaken for Vandy, but can anyone sustain the success of that program especially 1) under the shadow of the Spurrier legacy and 2) with the immediate expectations that will come with a $2.5 – $3 million salary?

Why links to the AJC will be few and far between here…

If you look down to Thursday’s entry about Fred Gibson, you’ll see a link to an AJC article. Of course, the link is no longer valid. The AJC cannot get a system in place to provide permenant links to its content. Yet I can go to an article in the Athens paper from 1997, and the link is as valid as ever. That kind of archive and durability is very important to the online researcher and to aggregators like this site, and it’s why other sources whenever possible will be linked here instead of the AJC.

DawgChat has popped up on the Anti-Orange page as a useful alternative for those seeking as real-time discussion.

The #7 Lady Dawgs put their undefeated record on the line tonight against #23 LSU in Athens. Because of the inclement weather, UGA has offered free admission to the game.

Fred Gibson will be joining the basketball team, and Coach Harrick is ready to get “the real deal” onto the court. Of course Gibson will have to be eased into the lineup, and that’s made easier with Georgia’s stockpile of talent at the wing position. If there’s one area of the team where the Dawgs can rotate a player in gradually, it’s at small forward.

So it seems that Grant and McMichael will turn pro. For McMichael, it’s pretty understandable. His production has dropped off somewhat this season in the Richt offense, and he has to ask himself if an additional year with likely lower numbers again would enhance his status. Probably not. Also, with a redshirt year and medical redshirt year, Randy has been in the program for five years now. He now has to turn to the issue of where he will fit in on an NFL roster as a ‘tweener – will he play tight end with a slighter-than-desired frame for an NFL tight end or will he be a possession receiver as he was in college, and if so, can he improve the consistency of his catches?

Grant is more puzzling. True enough, he has shown plenty of times what he can do and he has also been out of high school for four years. He’s not getting younger. But he has been far from consistent, and there is question if he has really shown enough over three years to convince a team that the dominating Charles Grant is more likely to show up than the non-factor Grant. In the back of his mind, Grant may be thinking of the knee injury from his freshman year and that a repeat of that injury would be devastating for his pro prospects.