I was beginning to get the shakes it had been so long since anything interesting was said about the football team not involving finances or recruiting.
- Joe Cox -- David Hale has a profile of Cox up on his site. I may have said this already, but I'm coming around on Joe. I think it was Buck Belue who said Joe is probably the #3 QB in the SEC right now. Hard to disagree on that one. The only other viable candidate for #3 QB is Jefferson at LSU. If you've got one of the Top 3-4 QBs in the SEC and a veteran OL, you should be looking at 10 wins. Not a rebuilding year.
- #2 in the East - Dennis Dodd has us as second in the East behind the Gators (ht - Bill). I have to take issue with his selection of South Carolina at #3. Who is a playmaker for the Gamecocks? Their QB is a headcase who committed about 11 turnovers in the loss to Iowa which is the same number of times he's been arrested. Name a WR...Moe Brown? Yeah...he's fast, but those hands aren't sponsored by Palmolive. Cook is gone. Three of their top 4 DBs are gone, and so is Brinkley. You've basically got Norwood (a DE playing linebacker) and a bunch of maybes. They look like the least talented Gamecock squad since 1999, and Spurrier is almost a decade removed from being a genius. I'm thinking we beat this group about like we beat that '99 crew 24-9. My pecking order is:
1. UF
2. UGA
3. UT - that defense can stop AU, SC, UK and VU.
4. SC
5. UK
6. Vandy
- SEC West - I'm with Blutarsky in that I don't know who to pick in the West. I just know it's not Nutt. He's at his best when the least is expected. Worst front runner ever. I'm really leaning towards LSU because they added Chavis and removed the 10 points per game in turnovers from the pre-Jefferson QB Collection.
- Recommended Reading - Bulldog Illustrated recommends some non-UGA SEC Blogs. To his list, I would add RockyTopTalk, RollBamaRoll, AL.com/Sports (great aggregation of Bama and AU news), and the Joe Cribbs Car Wash.
- The Top 10 Games of '09 - Bruce Feldman list his Top 10 games, and the Dawgs aren't in there. I'd obviously remove the USC vs. ND selection in favor of UGA vs. Ok State. Something special is going to happen in that game. One of those two teams is going to start a pretty interesting season on Sept. 5th.
PWD
I was beginning to get the shakes it had been so long since anything interesting was said about the football team not involving finances or recruiting.
15 comments:
Update -- Per various sites, Tanner Strickland is out for the '09 season with a shoulder injury that happened while lifting weights.
I *think* this is the first shoulder injury of its type since Coach Callaway left and took his pre-historic sled work with him.
PWD
When Hale did the thing about returning % of offense coming back, LSU stacked up very favorably with UF. I think they are the runaway favorite in the West and may win by 2+ games.
Ole Miss lost two first round linemen. The Rebs had never before produced multiple 1st rounders in the same season, had never had a 1st round OL and the last 1st round DL they had was Tim Bowens in 1994. I just do not think a school like Ole Miss can overcome significant losses like the big boys of the SEC can.
Also, the top 10 games is a joke. That UF/Ufk game will be like watching paint dry. Non-competitive.
Charlie Weiss has real expectations for the first time in his tenure. He also has Jon Tenuta at DC. Seems volatile. Hope it blows up.
Well sure ND and USC is in there and UGA/OK St. is not. Because while the UGA/OK St game has two top 15 teams fighting it out with all their goals still available in a even game, the ND and USC game will be hyped up by the media because for the first time in years ND will be going into the game without a losing record by being a whopping 1 or 2 games over .500 and this time ND may be able to get a 1st down in the 1st half.
Is anyone keeping track of our injuries this year to see how we compare to last year?
"UGA may have won 10 games, but the Bulldogs didn't play like a 10 game winner (and haven't since 2005, incidentally)."
Wait a minute, what? The 2007 Dawgs were the best team in the country at the end of that year.
Its amazing how many of the uneducated are assuming Cox will suck and Mallett and Jefferson will be awesome. I expect Cox to be in the top 4 in the SEC.
Please note that I don't think Georgia is in for a rebuilding year. I just added an update to that post to clarify that.
Also to your point, Joe: Georgia played like a 10 game winner for about half of the 2007 season. It played like a seven or eight game winner for the first half. When you take the season as a whole, Georgia didn't play like a ten game winner and the efficiency stats back that up. Teams can definitely win more games than what those efficiency stats predict (as Georgia has in fact done the past two seasons), but it's not sustainable in the long run.
Uh, you play like a 10 game winner when you win 10 games in a season. Doesn't matter how you get there.
The Chickens at 3rd in the East...now that's funny.
"Also to your point, Joe: Georgia played like a 10 game winner for about half of the 2007 season."
Florida played like a national champion for about half of the 2006 season.
Year2 is still sore about us planting Tebow upside down in Duval County in 2007.
"Also to your point, Joe: Georgia played like a 10 game winner for about half of the 2007 season. It played like a seven or eight game winner for the first half."
Georgia had some pretty good performances even in that middling first half. Beatdown of OSU, beatdown of Ole Miss (who took Florida to the wire FWIW), OT win in Tuscaloosa. Also, a practice game against a cupcake. Not bad. USC/Vandy were middling, yes, and the UT game was pants-crapping, yes, but it's not like the team was stinking up the joint.
Let's also consider the '02 Georgia team, long considered Mark Richt's gold standard. Down to the wire in the opener against Clemson (with the second-least yards a Richt UGA team has ever put up). An absolute stinker of a win against USC. Two cupcakes in a row, one of which (NMSU) was a fairly lousy performance. I was there. Man Enough at Bama, then a defensive struggle at home against a UT team we probably should have destroyed.
Was *that* team playing like a 10-game winner? Probably not, honestly. And yet, boom, a couple of months later and they're #3 in the land.
All I know is 2007 Georgia, at the end of the year, was playing some brutally good ball. And for what it's worth, the two MNC participants were not. At least not then.
11 wins is 11 wins. And as far as the "since 2005" part of the argument goes...do you really want to stack up '05 Georgia to '07 Georgia? I love the '05 team, but I'm taking '07, thanks.
If it makes you feel better, Florida didn't play like a 13-game winner in 2006. In fact, UF should have been about 5-3 or 6-2 in conference play instead of 7-1.
We're coming at this from two different places. As long as our preset definitions are going to be different, let's just agree to disagree.
Would you agree that Richt probably does better than efficiency stats would allow?
Best as I can tell, Mark Richt's teams have had a meaningfully higher record than the efficiency stats would predict three times: 2002, 2007, and 2008. He has yet to have a team with a meaningfully lower record than what the efficiency stats would predict.
So yeah, three times he's done better. The five other seasons, he's been roughly right on.
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