After an offseason of obsessive reading and discussion about the 2011 edition of the Dawgs, I want to officially register that I "know" less about this team than I did before.  All the reading and talk simply added questions to questions.  Will Crowell be another Lattimore or another Sanks?  Will Samuel be the butter-fingered TB who couldn't break a tackle in 2009, or the supreme 5-star Man of Character he looked like coming out of high school?  Will anyone "step up" at WR?  Is the obscure Will Friend actually a much better OL coach than the much-lauded Searles turned out to be?  Was an old-school S&C program what we needed all along?  Is experience and a NG all that's necessary to make the 3-4 work?  Can our players learn to fall on fumbles?  Can Coach Bob-o call two straight solid games?  Can all this massive talent pull together and perform? 

I don't know, and neither do you. And like you, I could go on and on with two or three more pages of questions I can't answer.

I do know this, however.  There have been just three occasions in the last four years where I have been pleasantly surprised by the outcome of one of our games: Florida 2007, Tech 2009, and Tennessee 2010.  I won't go into how many games have not met my expectations. 

So I won't have any.  What I see is what I will get, and I won't whine about it anymore.  We'll see how the season unfolds, and at the end of the year I'll make up my mind, like everyone else, how I feel about it. 

This attitude actually makes anticipation of the first game with Boise sweeter for me.  I've lost all my anxieties about the 30 or 40 factors that could go right or wrong.  I'll watch this team play like it's entirely new to me, which, matter of fact, it actually is. Yes, I recall this fine Murray fellow, and there's a tight end who looks familiar, and my, that LB knicknamed Tree does hit very hard.  But it's pretty much a mystery til the final horn sounds, and that's all right.

Go Dawgs!  Whoever you are!

Dr. Saturday's Matt Hinton reminded us today that college football is a very different phenomenon in the South than elsewhere--with "elsewhere" being typified by the West Coast, where powerhouse Stanford was happy with a turnout for its Spring Game that would have been beyond scandalous anywhere in the SEC.  Since I live less than two hours from Palo Alto, this post certainly resonated with me.  To tell you the truth, I don't know who shows up at Stanford's actual regular season games, because there are no visible signs of popular support, even in the midst of the football season, for the Cardinal or, really, any other Pac-10 (or Pac-12, I guess it is now) team.  No game day banners; no car horns bleating out the Stanford (or Cal) fight songs, whatever they are.  There are sports bars, but best I can tell, the crowds there on autumn Saturdays are typically present to root for teams far, far away. 

I'm sure alumni turn out for Pac-10 games, but what's missing here is broader public allegiance.  Some of it may be academic selectivity: totally aside from quasi-Ivy Stanford, it is really, really hard to get into state schools in the UC system (Cal or UCLA).  And in fact, the only semi-local college sports regalia you ever really see on the central coast belong to Fresno State (from the more accessible Cal State system) which is quite a distance from here.  But still, there is nothing like the common phenomenon in Georgia of the most fanatical Dawg fans being folk who never went to college, and/or who couldn't get into UGA (particularly after the HOPE scholarship vastly boosted entrance requirements).

Matt's right: it's a cultural difference, and one that I hope people in SEC country fully appreciate.

I'm guessing a lot of readers have seen the story about Isaiah Crowell's mother expressing anger at the possibility that UGA offered her son's best friend in order to influence his decision.  She won't "sell my son's soul to the devil," as she put it.  She also said she intends to raise this with the UGA staff on Isaiah's upcoming official visit, right before she talked about how swimmingly well the visit to Tuscaloosa went. 

Have any of you heard of this type of reaction to a "buddy" offer?  I mean, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but if it actually hurts the recruiting effort, that's pretty bad.   

Now for all I know, Crowell and his family have already decided (as we've heard rumored often lately) he's going to Bama, and she's mad at the Georgia staff for trying to go around her and appeal to her son through his best friend.  Or maybe he's going to Bama and she's looking for a good rationalization to give to disappointed Georgia fans in her circle and community.  I can't quite think of anything good about the situation, unless she's just joshin.'  Man, recruiting is a tough business. 

We're already in the heat of recruiting season, with several Dawg prospects due to make verbal commitments at tomorrow's UA game.  So the urgent issue of the day is whether the Winter of Discontent so apparent among Dawg fans, and the perceived probation status of the entire Georgia coaching staff, will have a bad effect on Signing Day. 

I don't have an occasion to spend time with high school football stars, so I ask the more knowledgeable fans some pertinent  questions:

Do these kids pay attention to fan-base unhappiness at various schools?

Is the possibility of a HC, coordinator, or position coach hitting the skids after a year a major factor in where they will go?

Do any potential freshmen welcome the challenge of helping a coach they personally like survive?

Does the Georgia program's prominence and financial strength serve as a firewall against recruting losses, reassuring prospects that even if the current staff is fired, the school will hire a new one just as attractive?

Has the growing instability of the CFB coaching profession made prospects cynical about the likelihood that any coaches at any school may be gone before long, voluntarily or not?

And the biggie: how important is a good Signing Day to your own perceptions of the program?  Would whiffing on the remaining big targets and losing a couple of the verbal commitments received earlier represent a final straw for Richt and company, or is the freshman class largely irrelevant to their ability to achieve a turnaround in 2011?

I'm all ears.

There's not much question that the AutoZone Liberty Bowl pushed a majority of serious Dawg fans across the line into the ranks of rebellion against the program.  But let's get real: Richt isn't going anywhere before next season; nor is Bobo.  There is no quick fix in sight.  Sure, next time Richt faces a fourth-and-inches on the opponent's two yard line, maybe he'll go for it.  Maybe some of our eligible pro draftees will stick around.  And maybe Richt will bring in some impact players, though I don't quite see how a staff that can't confidently assume it's going to be in Athens in 2012 is going to recruit a Dream Team. 

So any improvements we see in 2011 will probably involve adjustments to this team by this staff.  After we've all vented about the record of the last three years, what then?  Is there anything constructive we can suggest or hope for, other than firings that aren't going to happen?  Or do we go through the year like Vol fans did in the latter stages of the Fulmer regime, half supporting the team, half hoping for a level of disaster that produces an early clean sweep? 

We'd better start asking ourselves this question pretty soon.  It will be a long offseason. 

My Dawgography differs from most others for two basic reasons.  First, I’ve lived outside the Empire State of the South since 1995, and now reside in central California, a notably different cultural outpost of the Dawg Diaspora. 

Second, I’m a lot older than most of you who are reading this post.  How old am I?  Well, I personally remember the time when the forebears of a majority of today’s Bulldog players had to use separate restrooms and water fountains at every public facility, or at least those they were even allowed to patronize.  How old?  My first fond remembrance of the radio Voice of the Dawgs was of Ed Thilenius, not that parvenu Larry Munson.  How old?  I went to college at Emory because it was affordable for my family and UGA wasn’t. 

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It's official; Logan Gray will stick around and split his time between QB and WR duties.  This is good and important news for those of us who didn't want to spend an entire season reaching for the heart pills every time Murray got hit.  It's also a bit surprising, since Gray could very well be looking at number three or even four on the depth chart next year.  We owe him a double debt of thanks, since his unhappiness at the end of last season is what apparently led the coaching staff to recruit Mason at the last minute.  Otherwise, if Gray had left, we'd be dealing with the awful specter of a walk-on true freshman trying to run an offense in the SEC.   

So we're into that terrible time of year beween the Spring Game and the publication of Phil Steele's annual tome, with 2011 recruiting, the harrowing of Georgia's QB corps, and off-field infractions being the only hard news.  Recognizing Mr. King's encyclical prohibiting optimism, I guess there's a still a little space for non-predictive speculation.  (FWIW, I was a pessimist in 2008 and an optimist in 2009, so I'm batting .500). 

And in fact, even if we weren't superstitious about optimism, this could be the ultimate Unpredictable Season.  The two things that really stand out about the 2010 edition of the Dawgs at this point are (1) remarkable strengths yoked to potentially fatal weaknesses, and (2) a large number of intangibles affecting both the team and its opponents. 

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Double-T Nation:

I'm posting here on behalf of the hard-to-define but considerable number of football fans from across the country who have been haunting your sites (particularly this excellent site) the last week, because we shared your agony.  As I am sure most of you are aware, Texas Tech football, and your former coach, have been a source of great fascination for thousands of us.  And as Andrew Sharp so brilliantly explained on December 31, it's not that we are obsessed with Xs and Os, or the spread offense, or for that matter, pirates or "quirkiness."  Mike Leach was the eternal Outsider--like virtually all of us--who took on the most inbred fraternity (college football coaching) imaginable, and won, not all the time, but enough to cast a bright spotlight on the dubious claim that the coaching guild is any sort of meritocracy. 

The limits of Leach's accomplishments, extraordinary as they have been, were illustrated less by this week's events than by the disdain expressed for him last year when he was scouting around for a better situation.  I'll never forget the moment when Tennessee's AD rejected any talk of Leach coming to Knoxville on grounds that he "wouldn't fit" the program or the SEC.  It was at roughly the same time that Auburn refused to give an interview to Turner Gill, and when both Auburn and Tennessee never even considered Charlie Strong, who has deserved a HC job roughly as long as Tony Dungy deserved an NFL HC job before he was finally hired.  In those cases, race was only incidental to the larger reality that the coaching guild is one of the most rigid good-ol-boy networks left in America.  Leach was to college football what Elvis was to popular music: very unwelcome, unwholesome News from Nowhere, representing a long-overdue revolution aimed at a stale and unworthy establishment.

And now he's gone and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to get another coaching position of any prominence. Maybe he partially brought this on himself; if I were advising him, I would have urged him to put out a statement well before the suspension disclaiming any intention to discourage careful treatment of concussions, and making this a general disciplinary issue between a coach and a difficult player.  But to Mike Leach's broader community of fans, it's all a bit beside the point.

Tech fans obviously have every reason to care about what's next in Lubbock, and perhaps your larger audience in recent years doesn't, and shouldn't, matter to you.  But even with the best intentions, us Outsiders to the Texas Tech saga will soon think of Tech like any other good football program--worth following, perhaps, in big games, but no longer the special place where Outsiders feel at home. 

Thanks for letting us share your program for the last few years.  It was truly a special time.

I've just discovered I am spending much of Saturday flying across the country to attend a funeral.  Yes, that's more important than football, but I'd still like to watch some of the game if possible, and am pretty sure my cross-country flight has internet access (for a price, of course).  But since the game is on CBS, the usual internet outlets for video (ESPN360, GeorgiaDogs, Yahoo) aren't available.  Am I missing something?  I'll still listen to the game via GeorgiaDogs, but video would be nice.  

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Since I waste an inordinate amount of time reading post-game analyses, thought I should waste a bit more with some observations that I didn't much see anywhere else:

1) PBO (Penalties By Opponents):  Like all Dawg fans, I'm disturbed by the persistence of our team's Plague O' Penalties this year (particularly by the O-Line in the Arky game).  But after three games, it's worth noting that our opponents are getting flagged even more.  The Dawgs have 32 penalties for 249 yards through three games.  Dawg opponents have 39 penalties for 314 yards.  On three straight occasions, teams playing Georgia have racked up more than 100 yards in zebra sanctions.  That's a lot, and after a while, this stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern.  Is there something about Georgia's play, or the kind of games our play produces, that makes our opponents shoot themselves in the foot even more than we do?  I dunno, but it bears watching. 

2) Dropsies Gone?: In losses over the last three years, in the spring game, and in the Okie State game, our offensive struggles were significantly magnified by dropped catchable passes.  Indeed, this has been a chronic complaint off and on about Georgia's receiver corps.  The problem seemed to abate significantly against South Cacklalackey, and with the exception of one drop by Taverres King, I don't recall a single muffed catch by a Dawg receiver against Arky.  Is this a coincidence, luck, player determination, or coaching?  I dunno the answer to this one either, but it's a pretty big deal when you are in shootouts.

3) Opposing QB Heroics: We've now played back-to-back games in which the opposing QB had a breakout performance.  As it happens, both these gents were VHT prospects who for various reasons never much got it done until they played the Dawgs.  There are possible explanations other than Georgia defensive ineptitude or the shootout character of the games: the notoriously immobile Mallet gave up the chili-cheese-fries and lost about forty pounds, and Garcia seems to have, you know, grown up.  If they go on to become big program-defining stars, then perhaps our defensive performances in these two games won't seem so damning.  We'll have to wait and see.

4) Most Underrated Big Play: One very big play in the Arky game that I haven't seen anyone mention was when Richard Samuel snaked his arm underneath a ton of Hawgs to recover his own fumble deep in our territory in the fourth quarter.  There was confusion, since it appeared originally that the refs were calling him down, but the replay showed he fumbled and somehow recovered.  This was when we led 49-41, and right before the great Butler punt that led to our final FG.  I submit this is was as big a recovery as Thomas' in the Cackalackey game after Cox got sacked and fumbled.   Samuel, of courrse, shouldn't have fumbled in the first place, but I'm very glad he got it back. 

If I missed any other little-mentioned factors, please add some in the comment thread. 

Go Dawgs!

As it happens, I'm a blogger by trade, and just yesterday wrote five posts for three different national political sites.  But I've been as nervous and excited as a prom-night teenager about the invitation to do a guest post here at Dawg Sports.

The obvious thing to write about today is the Senate hearing on the BCS' alleged antitrust violations.  But that's too much like the day job, and frankly, the whole subject bores me to death.   I'm sure the Senator himself will cover that story with the requisite skill and skepticism.  Just wake me up when the whole issue is resolved. 

Instead, I'd like to ask everyone a question that's been on my mind as we look forward to this most unpredictable of Georgia football seasons: after eight seasons under Mark Richt, has the Georgia program formed a clear identity?  And if so, what are the characteristics of the Richt Era, beyond the Ws and Ls and the individual stars?  

I don't know when, exactly, the identity of Georgia football formed during the Dooley Era, but it was indelibly clear by the early 1980s.  It was summed up by two phenomena that we saw over and over on the field: the long, fourth-quarter drive that ate the clock, clinched the game and broke the spirit of many an opponent; and the defensive stand deep in Bulldog territory.  With that identity came three deeply reassuring features of the program that fans of less stable regimes had to envy: Georgia rarely lost to inferior teams, rarely blew leads, and rarely played poorly at home.  Yes, there were rare exceptions.  I was in Athens in 1977, and suffered through the previously unimaginable ignominy of a 31-0 loss to the snooty Cavaliers of Virginia at homecoming.  But soon Herschel arrived, and all was forgiven.

That's why the South Carolina game of September 30, 1989, so shockingly marked the end of the Dooley Era.  That day the Dawgs lost at home to a second-half Gamecock surge, and ended the game with Georgia QB Greg Talley being sacked three consecutive times.  It was deeply confusing; it wasn't Georgia Football; and it was a sign of very bad things to come.

So tell me, ye grey-headed Boomers who remember the Dooley Era, and ye pups who grew up with the depressing formlessness of the Goff and Donnen tenures.  What's at the core of the identity of Georgia football under Mark Richt?  Is it the remarkable road record?  The offensive innovation?  The dominant defensive line play epitomized by Pollack that briefly seemed to reemerge late in 2007?  Will we most remember the brilliant All-Americans and the stunning individual wins from the Hobnail Boot to Evil Richt and the First Blackout? 

I'm sure I don't know.  But I do think the program's identity may hang in the balance this coming year.  Richt's brilliant road record will be burnished or tarnished at Okie State, Arkansas, Tennessee and Tech.  We'll soon know if the inspiring defensive performances so common under Van Gorder are a thing of the past.  We'll find out if the Dawgs can excel without established superstars at the skill positions.  And by December, we should have a much better idea whether Mark Richt is building a perennial powerhouse or just a very good if somewhat erratic program whose low points (Tennessee in 2006 and 2007, and last year's three losses) are offset by moments of greatness that will nourish our memories for many off-seasons to come.

Go Dawgs!

I've been bullish about the Dawgs for 2009, but in an effort to curb my enthusiasm, I've been looking at the dark side, with some help from Phil Steele (though he is also relatively bullish about Georgia this year). 

The thing that really jumps out at you when you survey the schedule is how many opponents are expected to be better than they were last year. 

By Steele's assessment, no fewer than eight of our twelve opponents (Okie State, Arkansas, Arizona State, LSU, Tennessee, Florida, Auburn, and the Dirt Daubers) are likely to improve this year.  Three (Arkansas, Tennessee and Auburn) make Phil's Most Improved Teams list.   And LSU ranks eighth in Steele's Power Poll of the best teams (above Georgia, which ranks eleventh). This is probably why Steele rates our schedule--which is generally regarded as significantly easier than last year's, certainly once we leave Stillwater--as the seventh toughest in the country.  Given the teams on last year's schedule who wound up more or less imploding--notably Arizona State, Tennessee and Auburn--this may actually be the toughest schedule the Dawgs have faced in a long while.

Moreover, one of the teams that isn't expected to improve--SC--has been a difficult team for GA since Spurrier arrived; just ask the 2007 Dawgs whose loss at home to SC ultimately cost us a national title shot, or the 2008 Dawgs who nearly lost in Columbia. 

Yes, even an improved Arkansas on the road will be easier to beat than last year's Alabama team, and yes, the pace and home/road profile of the schedule are better than in 2008.

But the Dawgs really do need to step it up to beat an improved competition in and out of the SEC.  In looking back at last year, there's a tendency to focus on the two blowout losses and the frustrating loss to the Daubers.  But we also won three games (SC, KY, and Auburn) that could have easily gone the other way.

The 2009 schedule doesn't provide a lot of room for "letdowns;" the closest thing to an early gimme is Vandy in mid-October, and that's on the road where we damn near lost to the 'Dores in 2007.

So there's my one--and I hope, the last--expression of pessimism for 2009.

I hope I'm not violating some sort of unspoken taboo against early discussion of some of the stuff in Phil Steele's new preview.  In case there is, I'll  avoid spoiling too many things for those who haven't gotten mitts on it yet, and limit this to one issue: are there any grounds for optimism in the 2009 Georgia-Florida game, given the Gators' scary return of talent from a championship team, and the results of that horrid contest last year?  

There appear to be two, aside from Steele's positive assessment of Georgia's potential this year.   One, of course, is the bye week before the Gator game; the Dawgs are 10-2 in regular season games after a bye week since 2002, and one of those games was the big win in Jax in 2007.  The second is that Florida had a positive turnover margin of 22 last year.  And as Steele always argues, such large margins, positive or negative, have a tendency to reverse in the next season.  Given the role of turnovers in Florida's one loss last season, that's worth remembering. 

As I've said here before, some of us old alumni remember when Georgia used to own Florida as much as Florida has owned us since the arrival of Spurrier.  I have no superstitious awe of the Gators; just the realistic awe based on their performance last year and the players they have coming back.

Charlottedawg's post on in-state recruiting got me thinking about a related question: the health and breadth of UGA's fan base. 

I recall hearing some Dawg brass worry twenty years ago that the distribution of alumni wasn't keeping up with Atlanta's explosive population growth.  Then in the 90s the big leaps in admissions requirements at UGA created some talk that the school's small-town fan base might be affected, since lots of good ol' boys might be forced to go to Georgia Southern or Valdosta State.

I don't live in-state anymore, but I get the impression that Atlanta's a pretty big Bulldog town these days (and it really didn't use to be), while the few small Georgia towns I've visited lately are as red-and-black as ever. 

Our out-of-state fan base has certainly grown by leaps and bounds, but are there any other trends worth knowing about?

As we kill time before G-Day--which, in a rare inversion of the usual handicap of being a Dawg fan in California, I will get to enjoy over a late breakfast in my jammies--I have a basic and probably naive question that's been nagging at me: how big is the talent/cultural gap between sports blogs and what passes for MainStreamMedia sports coverage these days? 

I'm a political blogger by trade (and no, I won't talk politics here), and am familiar with the many arguments between bloggers and MSM types in that arena.  But as a relatively new consumer of sports blogs, I'm getting the impression that the divide is, if anything, larger in sports journalism and discussion.  By and large, sports blogs seem to have more expertise, better writing, and a vastly greater sense of style and humor, than sports pages or electronic media, even though sports blogging, other than in media-sponsored sites, seems to be almost entirely uncompensated.  And I also gather that print-based sportswriters are more likely to have completely atavistic attitudes towards this Internets Thing than their non-sports counterparts. 

Yes, there's the WWLS with enough money to produce occasional nuggets (just as there's the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the television networks in political news--though ESPN is sort of like a combination of all of them), and some of the better newspaper sportswriters do their better work online (viz. David Hale, whose writing makes you wonder how the Macon papers manage to keep him), which is also the case with most political reporters. 

But by and large, conventional sports coverage is often so bad, and online sports coverage is often so good, that I really do wonder if the balance of power is about to shift in some fundamental way.   I'm really interested to hear what other Dawg fans have to say on this subject.   

Like most Dawg fans, my main interest in the NCAA basketball tournament has been the potential impact on our prospects for hiring a top-notch coach to revive our sadly depressed program.  Now that the dominoes are finally beginning to fall in Lexington and Tuscaloosa, I, too, hope Damon Evans can land Jeff Capel or Mike Anderson, though I'm very skeptical that either will come to Athens or stay there for long. 

So: if those easy calls fall through, it's time to back up and ask what we most need, and that's even easier: a strong recruiter (Felton's main shortcoming in this prospect-rich territory) who knows how to rebuild a fallen program, and who won't be looking around for an opening elsewhere after that first trip to the NCAAs. 

And if you're objective about it, the very available coach who most fits that profile is--think about it before you scream--Billy Gillispie. 

Yes, I know, you hate to resort to a fired coach from another SEC team, but even Gillispie's detractors in Lexington keep saying, accurately, that his main problem there was that he was a "poor fit" for that insane atmosphere.  Stands to reason he might be a "good fit" somewhere else. 

And it well might be in Athens.  The man is without a doubt a great recruiter; his recruiting had a lot to do with Bill Self's success at Tulsa and Illinois, and he had nationally ranked recruiting classes at A&M and at Kentucky. 

Gillispie also has one of the best "rebuilding" records around, getting a completely moribund UTEP program into the NCAAs in two years, and lifting one of the most consistently underperforming programs in the country, at Texas A&M, to consistent excellence.  He was Big 12 Coach of the Year twice; think about the competition he had for that.  Clearly UK was too hasty in hiring him (after stupidly running off Tubby), but it's not as though his record didn't merit it. 

In terms of how he'd act in Athens: Gillispie is 49 years old, and would likely consider Georgia his last stop; he's just been humiliated by UK, and I suspect he'd love nothing more than the chance to coach at a competing SEC school.  The factors that made him a "poor fit" at Kentucky--crazy expectations, and an imperious group of big donors--won't be an issue at all at UGA.  His occasional over-zealousness as a recruiter worries me a bit, but he's never gotten a team on probation.  And his work ethic is undoubted by anybody.

So think about it, Dawg BB fans.  Yes, it's nice to hope that we can outbid other schools for the current Big Names, but if that doesn't work out, we could almost certainly hire someone without a lot of trouble whose Big Name may have gotten tarnished for reasons partially beyond his control, and for other reasons he can correct.

And as a bonus, it would be nice to have UK subsidize a basketball revival at Georgia with that buyout they are going to eat. 

Just thought I'd throw this out for brainfood and as a conversation starter as we wait for the Spring Game. 

I follow women's basketball only sporadically, but did see that Pat Summit failed to get win #1000 at Oklahoma tonight.  That means her next shot is at home, on Thursday, against Georgia. 

Over at GSB, Paul Westerdawg has a good post alluding to the brilliant career Andy Landers would have had if not for Summit's virtual ownership of Georgia over the decades.  It would be painfully fitting if he had to give up #1000 to her. 

Maybe he'll pull off the upset as a late gesture of defiance.  Sure would spoil a big party at Thompson-Boling, eh? 

I know as a Georgia fan I'm supposed to support every SEC team in every bowl game. I know that the University of Alabama is not one of our Certified Rivals (though us older Dawgs have some residual resentment left over from the Bear Bryant years).

But still, during tonight's Sugar Bowl I found myself cheering for Utah.  And upon examination, my attitude was based on how much I enjoyed watching Nick Saban's unhappiness on the sidelines, much as I enjoyed the Ball Coach's displeasure during his Iowa beatdown. 

Saban's a great coach, to be sure.  But he's one of those great coaches who is an admitted, outfront, unapologetic a-hole.  One of the abiding pleasures of being a Georgia fan is that we haven't had this kind of coach, well, ever. 

I also admit that I've been worried that Saban would have five straight #1 recruiting years and dominate college football for a long time on sheer talent. 

Since Urban Meyer is another admitted, outfront, unapologetic a-hole who could easily dominate college football for a long time on sheer talent, by logic I should probably hope the Okies beat the Evil Gators in the MNC game.  But I won't, since we're talking about the MNC, which needs to stay down South. 

So my attitude is: win every game, a-hole SEC coaches, or accept the opprobrium you have earned from your regional landsmen. 

Like a lot of you who were at Sanford Stadium yesterday, I'm taking precautions against the onset of pneumonia, and looking forward to a year of well-earned taunting from Dirt Dauber fans. 

And like a lot of you, I wasn't really surprised at yesterday's outcome.  After the first Tech TD in the second half, I turned to my fiancee (or to my fiancee's shivering, cloaked form, to be more exact) and said: "This feels a lot like the Tennessee game two years ago."  It wasn't quite that bad, but it was close. 

In any event, to use this year's reigning cliche, it was what it was, and for that matter, the future lies ahead.  But I do have a question for the better-informed-than-me readers out there:

I gather the Rookie Salary Cap speculation guarantees that Stafford and Moreno are gone.  But on the Kevin Butler post-game radio show, someone (my teeth were chattering too loudly to be sure who it was) said that any player who could go in the first three rounds of the draft will probably bolt.  So who else could we lose in an untimely manner?  And will the entire SEC have a season next year bereft of very talented seniors and/or redshirt juniors? 

With the Delaney and Bonnie classic playing on the IPOD in my brain, I'm "Comin' Home" to Georgia for Thanksgiving, and to Athens on Saturday for the Dirt Dauber game.   

I've now watched the Dawgs from four different times zones this year.  For the Kentucky game, I had to rely on radio via GeorgiaDogs while impatiently waiting for the local sports bar to open.  The Raycom feed of the Auburn game was available at Yahoo, which was nice, since much of what I had to say during the game was best said in the privacy of my living room. 

Like most Dawg fans, I have no idea what to expect Saturday. I suggest the PA announcer at Sanford Stadium distract the Bees by frequently announcing scores from the UVA-VaTech game, which will determine their fate in the wretched ACC.

My fiancee and I have already decided not to order bowl tickets--not because we are disappointed with the team or the season, but simply because we don't want to spend a weekend in Orlando, our least favorite city in our least favorite state.  My line about Orlando is that it's what you'd get if the Mormons had built Las Vegas (no disrespect intended to LDS folk; I just can't personally stand a big cup of tackiness without a dollop of decadance). 

While I'll bark and yell with the best of them Saturday, I'm already looking forward to 2009, which I had always figured, even during the pre-season Number One hype, would be Our Year.  Let's hope Stafford and Moreno feel the same way in January. 

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all, and Go Dawgs!

As a self-proclaimed Diaspora Dawg, it seemed appropriate that I watched the Georgia-Florida game in the strangest place yet: the small but beautiful Caribbean island of St. Kitts, where I was attending a wedding on Friday.

Since both bride and groom were from Georgia, a big chunk of the hungover wedding party was interested in a different Cocktail Party.  We were going to watch the game in the hotel bar, but extremely loud steel drum music made audio impossible.  So we piled into one hotel room, fortified with food, local rum and beer, and Tennessee sipping whiskey. 

Our actual game experience probably wasn't that different from yours, aside from the slight dissociation involved in looking away from the disaster on the screen and seeing blue waves and green mountains.  About half our group were knowledgeable enough to understand the early, familiar portends of a bad Dawg Day: the red zone ineptitude, the key dropped passes, the missed field goals, the beatdown of Stafford, the stupid penalties, the once-too-often predictable playcalling.  The other half drank, looked at wedding photos, and gradually drifted off to the beach. 

All in all, it was environment that encouraged philosophical shoulder-shrugging rather than angry teeth-grinding.  But personally, I found myself watching the Texas Tech-Texas game, in an effort to reinstitute some sort of experience of good college football.  It was probably a better choice than my first impulse, which was to wander down to the casino and engage in a few hours of masochistic losses at the blackjack table. 

From a philosophical shoulder-shrugging point of view, I told a few of my fellow Dawg fans that maybe next year was intended to be Our Year after all, given the exceptional youth of the team, the folks who will be back from injury, and the increasing probability that Stafford and Moreno won't have the sort of season that guarantee immediate NFL riches.  But we all got seduced by the preseason number one ranking, and even down in the hazy and illusory atmosphere of a small Caribbean paradise, the illusions died quickly. 

Like a lot of Diaspora Dawgs, I made it to homecoming on Saturday, and enjoyed the atmosphere, the tailgating, and of course, the win. 

But inside Sanford Stadium, it felt like one of the quieter home crowds I've ever seen, in a victory at least.  The loudest the Dawg fans got was in booing the refs during and after the two pass interference calls that fed Vandy's second-quarter TD (or maybe booing the zebra en masse when they trotted off the field at half-time). 

Part of the issue may have been the unusually large number of children who seemed to be in the stands; it's hard to cheer when you have your mouth full of Dipping Dots or peanuts, or both. 

(The chirrens were amusing, though.  Three rows behind me, two kids, probably eight or nine years old, were arguing early in the game.  "I want to be Knowshon," said Kid #1.  "No, I want to be Knowshon," said Kid #2.  "No, you can be A.J. Green," said Kid#1.  "Aw, OK," said Kid #2.  Thirty seconds later, Green made a brilliant downfield catch.  "I caught it!  I caught it" said Kid #2). 

But I suspect the bigger problem is that ol' debbil Expectations.  It's becoming obvious that Dawg fans were really affected by the pre-season Number One ranking.  Prior to the Arizona State game, and after the Alabama game, every win has been unsatisfying.  And it may be a while before the Faithful completely forgive their team and coaching staff for ruining, perhaps forever, the Blackout phenomenon on September 27--not to mention Behaving Poorly in Front of Company in a rare GameDay-featured appearance. 

And now, we're facing the sobering reality that the Dawgs could conceivably lose every single remaining game.  Ironically, the Auburn game looks closest to a gimme, and just as a blind pig will find an acorn now and then, the Plainsmen could find an offense by mid-November.  More sobering still is the thought of what could happen to Georgia if yet another offensive lineman were to go down. 

On the other hand, of course, Florida's the only opponent that looks terrifying at present, and it's basically the same team Georgia smoked last year, and very much the same team that lost to Ole Miss a few weeks ago.  I sure like our odds in Baton Rouge right now a lot better than I did in August. 

In any event, I'm planning to go cross-country again for the Dirt Dauber game, and hope the crowd has reason to be fully into that one. 

Go Dawgs!

Hello, dawgs. 

I begin this fan post series as someone who has been a Georgia fan since the Ed Thilenius era; who obtained a law degree from UGA back in the day; and who has followed the Dawgs from a wide and wild variety of venues across the country during a couple decades of exile from my home state. 

This very year, I watched the Georgia Southern game from a sports bar in Denver; listened to the CMU game via GeorgiaDogs.com, was able to struggle through the South Cackalacki game amidst fellow Dawgs during a brief trip home to Georgia, and experienced the 'Bama disaster, dressed in black, at my current residence in central California.  

I spend much of my time as a political writer (and blogger), and my loyalties are betrayed by my handle, but I had to give up even occasional college football discussions on my current site, so here I am, shorn of any politics other than BCS lobbying. 

In posting here, I'll try to speak for the vast Bulldog Diaspora, people scattered around the globe who spend each autumn Saturday finding some way to follow the Dawgs, and wishing we were stuck in traffic going into Athens for a tailgate, and/or a lunch at Weaver D's.   I'm also a big fan of the Tall Dawgs, male and female, and understand it's especially hard to follow SEC basketball outside God's Country.  Last year I scouted out a bar in Monterey that was showing the SEC tournament, split a big order of food and drink with a Kentucky fan, and then watched the sky fall on the Georgia Dome.