- Consolidated Pre-season rankings - SECSports.com looks at the early polls from Lindys, Athlons, Phil Steele, The Sporting News and Blue Ribbon magazine. They have Georgia tied for third. I think that's about where we'll start the year. Maybe 4th. We'll get our chances to impress voters. No worries there.
- Uga VII - He won't debut at Picture Day. They're going to hold off until Game 1. I like the move.
- Barnhart Interviews the Man of Steele - Tony talks with Phil Steele about the Georgia Bulldogs, and he looks at the pre-season rags. It's good to have Tony back from vacation.
- Vegas Baby! - The odds on a Georgia Bulldog National title are currently 8 to 1 per this site. That's down from 10 to 1 a few weeks ago. Florida at 5 to 1 is a very, very bad wager. If I were a cheese head strolling through Vegas, Wisconsin at 30 to 1 wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to drop $20 on. Check out the Badger schedule some time. Very manageable.
- Urban Meyer's Recruiting - If pointing and staring aren't working, you could always lie and sneak. The Bleacher Report drops a heavy handed rumor mongering diatribe on Meyer. It's almost unreasonably harsh, but I did enjoy reading every word of it.
- Losing great beat writers - David Ching is leaving the UGA beat in Columbus to cover Auburn. It's part of a reorganization within his parent company. Unfortunately, Josh Kendall is also leaving the UGA beat. This will be the first year that I can remember that the AJC (Strickland left), Macon and Columbus papers were all breaking in new guys at once. Cross your fingers. It's an awfully big season to have a bunch of new guys running into each other over there.
PWD
(ht - DawgRun.com for most of these links. They were on fire tonight)
8 comments:
I'm a little sick and tired of the major inconsistency in the polls. No, I'm not talking about teams being ranked very differently from one source to the other. I expect that. I'm talking about what exactly the pre-season ranking means. Are you ranking how you think they'll finish or how good they are or something else entirely? Obviously Steele and the Sporting News are looking at two completely different things. All of those different rankings generally make sense once you know what each source is actually looking at, but using these 5 polls to determine some sort of composite is completely worthless.
Florida is a terrible pick for national title but there are enough Florida fans who drank the Tebow Kool-Aid to believe that Florida can blow by the SEC East without a defense. Even before the injuries Florida was in deep trouble on that side of the ball.
Where is Kendall going? Wish him luck, will miss him and Ching.
That Strickland left and had the AJC scramble to find someone to cover the CWS doesn't surprise me in the least.
The ticket cutoffs are announced. 27,007 points for the Arizona State game.
Paul,
You should follow the TradeSports market. A better indicator of the market's expectations of the Dawgs' chances at any given point.
I will miss Ching the most, mainly because I assume his blog will end. But, this part, "It's an awfully big season to have a bunch of new guys running into each other over there." What difference does it make who reports on it? Maybe we will even get three fresh looks instead of what tended to be shared material. And I am not dissing shared material since all sportswriters use a certain amount material handed to them (stats after a game, for example), but I always thought that if I read one article, I had read them all.
Anon - If we get a lazy clown or a bum, you'll care.
Carter was a snarky / condescending tool, but he was prolific in the amount of articles that he was writing.
The reason all the articles sound the same isn't that they share info. They compete with each other (well except Kendall and Ching).
They all sound the same because UGA does the bulk of its briefings via press conferences, media days and conference calls. So everyone is hearing the same sound bites most of the time.
PWD
The more I read about Urban Meyer the more striking the similarities in his career arc and that of his mentor Lou Holtz become: the snake oil salesman rides into town on a wave of much pomp and fanfare, promising a new team spirit/camraderie among the players and coaches and promising to care for and get to know every single player and their families. Career peaks in year 2 and declines- even if only slightly- before plateauing shortly thereafter, once the players stop buying into the schtick and realize that the only promotion or publicity the coach cares about is that which brings him personal and professional gain. The players are expendable collateral to them.
That goes on for 5-8 years before Coach wears out his welcome and moves on to the next town of suckers to which they can sell their magic elixir, when the cycle starts all over again...
As far as I'm concerned any ranking between 2-4 is fine with me.
I love the part about Florida recruiting Tebow for LB. :)
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