When You Have the Goods, Exploit Them Fully; or, Why Les Miles Travels by Bus

Given the considerable brass in Les Miles' trousers, getting through airport security must be a monumental effort for the LSU coach and, consequently, anyone behind him. If you missed it, here's the final minutes of the LSU-Auburn game:

I don't know what amazes me more, Les going for six when three would've won it, or his straight-faced "on what?" reply to Holly Rowe's question about the last play. While nursing screeching hangovers, several thousand Cajuns are probably collectively asking themselves, "Is our coach the luckiest moron alive or is it just that his brain is composed entirely of testicular matter?"

It's a question for the ages. One certainty is that Les Miles must be a hell of a lot of fun to play for. This is a guy who goes for it on five consecutive fourth downs against the number 3 team in the country. Faced with the choice of with a game-ending play call where two of the three possible outcomes are disastrous (going for the TD) or a call where the odds are at least 50% and probably much greater (kicking a field goal), Les opted for the former, because, in his words, "we had the opportunity to kick their asses."

Contrast that with Miles' mouthy counterpart in Columbia, S.C.

Several weeks ago, Steve Spurrier, ebullient from a rare, 16-12 win at Georgia got his digs in by quipping, "It wasn't like they were some big, powerful team…Vandy beat them last year." Yeah, about that, Steve … suck it.

Dink NeSmith Has a Hammer and All He Sees are Red and Black Nails.

It apparently comes as a surprise to Dink NeSmith that the media is a two-way communication device. Which comes as a surprise to the rest of us, since, for nearly two decades, NeSmith has been running a chain of newspapers throughout Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

Although NeSmith claims that 74% of respondents to this piece "barked 'Amen,'" NeSmith still felt compelled to go after the other 26% with this piece, which clarified nothing about his original editorial, except that NeSmith believes it's his First Amendment right to not tolerate dissent, or something to that effect.

Fretting that "Erk is dead … and so is the storied Junkyard Dawg intensity," NeSmith last week proposed a pay-for-performance salary and bonus plan for Georgia coach Mark Richt that works like this:

"Your base salary will be $500,000. Your $800,000 radio/TV and $530,000 Nike deals go to the athletic association. You work for us, not them. You can earn it back and more. Each victory triggers a bonus. The bigger the game, the bigger the bonus. Win the SEC championship, get $1 million. Win the national championship, pocket another $2 million."

Worried, like the rest of us, that Georgia football has fallen off the plateau it reached between 2002 and 2005, NeSmith believes a fire needs to be lit under Richt, who, as a not-so-minor side note, is the winningest coach in Georgia history and one of the most coveted young coaches in college football. Never mind that Richt is only in his sixth season in Athens and perhaps it's a bit premature to draw trendlines.

What's important is that we all buy NeSmith's underlying assumption that business and athletics have the same dynamics and thus that the University of Georgia should take a business-minded approach to its athletics.

That three true freshman on the offensive line aren't pancaking people like Max Jean-Gilles did is just details. Details are for little people. And Dink NeSmith, in case you didn't know, is kind of a big deal. He's the president of Community Newspapers, Inc., which operates such media powerhouses as the Dahlonega (Ga.) Nugget and the Palatka (Fla.) Daily News.

NeSmith views himself as a major Bulldog shareholder trying to drive some upside. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

As always, Sen. Blutarsky at Get the Picture and Groo at DawgsOnline more than capably unwind NeSmith's tangled thread of illogic.

Groo boils it down to NeSmith wanting more hustle and being willing to pay for it. Richt, like any other coach, already has an incentive-based contract, although apparently it's not incentive-laden enough for NeSmith's tastes. Again, NeSmith assumes everyone thinks like him, except the other 26%, who hate free speech and want the terrorists to win. Blutarsky pokes a gaping hole in that assumption by asking, "Exactly why do you believe that Mark Richt is so crassly motivated by money?"

Indeed. I reckon $2M/year goes pretty far in Athens, and there are only so many yachts you can ski behind. We're talking about a guy who's adopted two kids from the Ukraine and goes on mission trips to Central America. A guy who, after presiding over the dominant FSU teams of the 1990s and bringing two SEC titles to a Georgia program that had gone through a two-decade drought, never heeded the siren call of a lucrative NFL contract. If Dink is unsure of Richt's desire to win, Dink can have a look at the FSU and Georgia trophy cases.

But since NeSmith insists on framing this in a business context in which Richt is motivated as much by dollars as by wins, Blutarsky asks why Richt would be willing to exchange his current package for one that carries the risk of a significant pay cut and, in the event that Richt politely declines, what coach would accept such a proposal? I'm left to wonder if NeSmith just assumes that Richt, perhaps like any of NeSmith's managers at CNI, will take any contract shoved in his face.

What amazes me about NeSmith is the following quote from his original piece:

"We expect victories. Our fans and the University have opened their checkbooks, within NCAA guidelines, to give you, the staff and the team fabulous resources to compete with the nation's best. Thanks to your leadership, we repeatedly recruit rosters of nationally ranked all-stars. It's past time for the investments to pay off."

Having reeled off his bona fides as a Bulldog supporter for nearly four decades, NeSmith claims an long memory of where Bulldog football has been. Trouble is, NeSmith still seems to be there, rather than in the present. College football's arms race – with its private jets for recruiting trips, $4 million annual coaching salaries, 100,000-seat stadia, indoor practice facilities and millionaires' club locker rooms – appears to have gone unnoticed by NeSmith. Florida and LSU, NeSmith must assume, stepped into a power vacuum created by Richt's not hustling hard enough.

Given all the glad-handing with alums, fans, media and administrators that Richt and other coaches have to do, I'm kind of sympathetic to current and former coaches like Jim Donnan and Nick Saban, who have been pretty surly in response to all duties not related to winning football games. When you add in megalomaniac über-boosters like Bobby Lowder, in whose footsteps NeSmith is dangerously close to treading, it's not much of a mystery why, for example, Steve Spurrier is currently coaching against his alma mater.

Of course Richt's boss, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans, could address NeSmith's issues far more knowledgeably than I or any other average newspaper reader. I suspect NeSmith knows this, which makes me, along with Groo and Blutarsky, wonder why NeSmith decided to air his grievances in newspapers rather than take it up with Evans directly. Aside from being a multi-millionaire donor, NeSmith is a former president of the Georgia Alumni Association and an emeritus member of the Board of Directors of the UGA Athletic Association.

Dink, if you want to get on Damon's calendar to tell him what you would do if you had his job, just call him. When he's not preoccupied with running the country's most financially and athletically successful ADs, I'm sure Damon's got all the time in the world to hear how a newspaper boss would run a Division I athletic department.

Game 7: Stepping away from the light

Not gonna spend a whole lot of time analyzing the Xs and Os on this one, as this was one of those games where the details, frankly, just weren't important. In the wake of the obliteration in Knoxville, the subsequent fallout, and the potential for the first losing streak against Vandy in half a century, any kind of win is fine with me.

And, yes, this was an ugly win. So ugly that we needed a last second field goal to win it. So ugly that our players needed to be reminded that wins over Vandy are supposed to be perfunctory, not something you celebrate with a classless midfield logo stomp (save it for when you get consecutive wins in Jacksonville – hell, do that, I'll go Auburn 1986 on that logo).

So ugly, that, at halftime, with Georgia down 17-7, I was strangely unperturbed, given the pervasive, funereal vibe that has blanketed the Dawg Nation since the bright orange devastation two Saturdays prior. Along with my preseason hopes and expectations, I had soberly laid to rest the hope of Georgia beating anyone else left on the schedule besides, maybe, Troy. Being blown out in Neyland is one thing – unpleasant, but not unprecedented. Consecutive losses to Vandy would settle any debate about whether the program is in decline. Bulldog Coaches have been fired for less and may it always be so.

As we cross the season's midpoint, the problems with this team are well-documented: youth, shoddy fundamentals and the kind of gunshy gameplanning designed to preserve a struggling team from total self-immolation, but not to snatch wins by the jugular.

In other words, Chapter 16 in Georgia's Melvillian epic, Limping into Jacksonville, is already being written. All the standard plot elements for the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Wake are there: injuries to key skill players, defense riddled with doubts after early season setback(s) and a consequently dyspeptic fan base whose martini of tears is already in the shaker.

Which is why I was simply glad to get the win this Saturday and be done with it, style points be damned. As Doug noted, "coming off a 35-14 annihilation by Tennessee and down 17-7 at halftime against [rhymes with 'shucking'] Vanderbilt, the Dawgs were walking toward the light." What we needed was a reprieve, something to head off a schneid similar to last year's bleak October.

And this could be a particularly auspicious time for a change in momentum, for several reasons.

For one, Florida (4-2, 2-2) isn't exactly rolling. With two back-to-back losses gnawing at them, on tap next week for the Gators is a trip to Lexington to face Kentucky, who is coming off a huge win against a team responsible for one of the Gators' losses. Sure, they're the best two-loss team in the country and their two losses are a hell of a lot more respectable than our two losses. Regardless, the Gators' losses so far are evidence that someone has figured out how to slow the Tebow/Harvin blitzkrieg. And our bye week means Willie Martinez has two whole weeks to figure out how to work a DVD player, watch those Gator losses and gameplan accordingly while Florida splits its attention between us and a sky-high Kentucky team.

For another, two weeks from now, 5-2 is 5-2 and how you got there matters far, far less than the fact that you're not 4-3 and Vandy's homecoming bitch. It's the difference between columns, radio shows and message boards discussing the top 10 candidates to replace Willie Martinez and instead discussing "Well, hell, if Stanford can beat USC …" 5-2 means the burden of being on the bubble for an early December trip to Atlanta is probably off your shoulders, so you can roll into Jacksonville with a what-the-hell attitude, ready to see someone else's cornflakes get pissed in for a change.

For yet another, have I mentioned the bye week? Remember how I said intangibles like bye weeks don't matter? Yeah, about that … turns out they do. At least that was one of my takeaways from the Tennessee thrashing. (Other takeaways include that I should never, ever try to predict a score – the football fates apparently hate it when you try to telegraph their moves and their consequent vengeance is swift, excruciating and replete with flea-flickers.)

Anyway, since many of our problems are of the fundamentals variety – overthrows, drops, poor tackling, missed blocking assignments, off-sides, false starts, lining up in the neutral zone (the litany is never-ending) – we can use the off-week to rest up, heal, re-learn tackle football and fully repress any memories of Knoxville. Actually, two weeks is probably enough time to merely scratch the surface of what ails us. But it's the most time we'll have all season to work on this stuff, so let's value it appropriately. And, for once, blessedly, the bye week comes midway through the season, as opposed to right before the last game of the season when it's too late for any off-week adjustments to have an impact on the season.

The bye week is especially salient given who our next opponent is. In the early 1990s, then-Florida coach Steve Spurrier recognized the importance of the Georgia game to the title-starved Gators' SEC title hopes. Noting that the Georgia game typically came a mere week after what was usually a draining slugfest with Auburn, Spurrier lobbied for and won a bye week before the Cocktail Party.

Of course, it was a lot more than bye weeks that got the Gators to the 15-2 streak they currently enjoy in Jacksonville, but the difference in energy levels between the two teams on game day and the annual late October unveilings of new trick plays in the Gators' arsenal point to Spurrier's bye week productivity.

In 2007, Georgia finds itself where Florida found itself in 1990: If anything great is going to happen for this program, it must retake Jacksonville. In 2001, Mark Richt spoke often of "lifting the lid" off of the Georgia football program. SEC championships in 2002 and 2005 – our first since 1982 – were thought to be signs that the lid had been lifted.

Not so. Until we can win consistently in Jacksonville, there will still be a big orange and blue lid on this program. During Georgia's 2001-2005 renaissance, the Bulldogs' 1-4 record against the Gators screamed "Yeah, but…" The careful wording of Mark Richt's 24-4 record in "true road games" has always rankled me, because it sounds like the commenter is going out of his way not to mention the overall record outside of Athens, which becomes a bit less noteworthy when you add in Richt's 1-5 mark on the banks of the St. John's.

So I'm indifferent about last Saturday's results and I'm neither pessimistic nor optimistic about what lies ahead in Jacksonville. Conventional wisdom says we'll get thrashed. Of course, conventional wisdom said the same about Appalachian State against Michigan, about Colorado against Oklahoma, about Stanford against USC, about us against Auburn last year and on and on and on.

How Long, Willie?

"We are gathered here today for celebrating this year of bicentenniality, in the hope of freedom and dignity.

We are celebrating 200 years … of white folks kicking ass. White folks have had the essence of disunderstanding on their side for quite a while.

However, we offer this prayer, and the prayer is – how long will this bullshit go on?

How long! How long? How long will this bullshit go on?

That is the eternal question man have always asked, 'How long?'

When man first got here, he asked, 'How long will these animals kick me in the ass? How long before I discover fire and stop freezing to death?'"

Richard Pryor, "Bicentennial Prayer"

At the end of the third quarter, I'd had enough. Watching a fully prepared Tennessee kick a fully unprepared Georgia's ass all over Neyland Stadium for three quarters had been sucking the life out of me, so I took what little was left and went for a run to shake off the malaise. While on the trail, Richard Pryor's "How long?" refrain was going through my head. This was the second consecutive ass-kicking Georgia had suffered at the hands of Tennessee, which has gone 12-5 against us since Vince Dooley retired in 1988. Tennessee is now 20-15-2 against us overall, so if you do a little math you can see that I've been watching Tennessee kick our ass for most of my life. Between 1975 and 1988, we were 3-0 against them, a tally that mostly occurred on Herschel Walker's watch.

So, indeed, how long?

First off, I'd like to take back most of what I wrote on Friday, particularly the part about Georgia having the coaching staff that "inspires more confidence in a big game setting." This is the second time in three years that Willie Martinez's defense has spotted an opponent a four-touchdown lead in the first half, getting gashed up the middle for over 100 rushing yards in the first 30 minutes of play. Given that Tennessee has struggled to run the ball all year and OC David Cutcliffe's bona fides as a passing game mastermind, it might have been fair to expect more of an aerial attack. But no matter: we didn't get a single soul into Tennessee's backfield all day, leaving QB Erik Ainge to do as he chose. And, seeing our confused LBs and DBs out of position for most of the game, Erik did what you'd expect a three-year starter to do: complete 77% of his passes.

Thing is, we saw this movie last year, when Tennessee torched Georgia in the fourth quarter en route to a 51-33 shelling. At the time, the blame fell on the turnover-prone offense, which gave Tennessee short field to work with for much of the second half. Still, when Fulmer crowed to his charges at halftime last year that "they can't stop our offense," that wasn't some idle boast: The Vols have scored 86 points on Georgia in two games, including 65 in the past five quarters.

So, Willie, how long? How long will this bullshit go on?

This isn't like trying to figure out how to stop the spread offense. This is Tennessee, good old meat-and-potatoes Tennessee. They've been running this offense since 1992. And this wasn't a particularly good version of it. Tennessee's running game was ranked 11^th in the conference going into this game. Gallingly, a ground game that averaged 130.2 yards a game raked us for 190 on Saturday.

Really, the first drive was all you needed to see to know what was going to happen: Georgia DLs getting blown off the ball as Tennessee RBs Arian Foster, Montario Hardesty and Lamarcus Coker churned through arm tackles to average, respectively, 5.8 and 4.9 yards a carry. That opened up a passing game that left burn marks all over Asher Allen and Bryan Evans.

On the other side of the ball, Georgia's ground game, which ran for over 300 yards last week and featured a returning Kregg Lumpkin, got swallowed whole in Knoxville, to the tune of 68 total yards at 2.8 yards/carry. Hell, the whole offense had less than 60 yards total at halftime.

There were a few high points: Tripp Chandler found his hands and led the team in receptions (4) and caught a touchdown that was almost reminiscent of P-44 Haynes in a rare moment of Tennessee's DBs being utterly being out of position. Demiko Goodman's touchdown catch was spectacular. Kregg Lumpkin played with a lot of fire, coming off injury, and had the team's longest run, for 10 yards.

In hindsight, it seems pretty clear that we ran into a buzzsaw. Tennessee's coaches, fighting for their jobs, had two weeks to watch film and prepare. Georgia's coaches, fat and happy from two straight conference wins, seemed pretty breezy just before boarding the bus to Knoxville.

But too much of what happened on Saturday was not an aberration:

Matthew Stafford's progression has been steady – but slow. The bad mistakes and five-interception games seem to be well behind him, but the timing and quick reads have far from fully arrived.

The inexperience of our OL really came to the fore today, but it's always been there. Against teams like Oklahoma State, Western Carolina and Ole Miss, you can cover up the shortcomings with screens, draws and misdirection, but the South Carolinas and Tennessees of the world will not be fooled. You can't make your OL bigger, faster, stronger and more experienced in a week.

But the defense, sheesh. At one point yesterday, the thought crossed my mind, "We can't stop the run, we can't stop the pass, we don't tackle – exactly what is it that we're good at?" I know we're young along the line, but there seems to be a good bit of experience among the LBs and DBs, which are whom you count on for heady play.

But on Saturday, you saw the full chain reaction that illustrates – for better or worse – the yin and yang of how a defense line and backfield works, or doesn't work, together: As the DL got pancaked, LBs and DBs had to adjust. Instead of stopping plays for no gain, their task was keeping five-yard plays from turning into home runs. And that's the nightmare scenario, because, if you're playing on your heels, eventually the dam will break, as it did on the trick play from Lucas Taylor to Lamarcus Coker.

Dawg fans will turn their lonely eyes to departed DC Brian Van Gorder, even though the last serious asskicking by an SEC team occurred on his watch. But that was in the SEC Championship game against an LSU team that went on to win the BCS Championship. Whereas Tennessee wasn't thought to be an SEC contender before yesterday and nothing would shock me more than to see Georgia re-enter the race anytime soon.

On balance, Martinez' defense usually does its job. But it is also given to moments of wild blunder, glaring lack of preparation, poor tackling and a lack of intensity that has been painfully obvious in opening drives, such as

• The 2005 and 2006 Florida games,
  
• the 2005 West Virginia debacle and
  
• Saturday's Tennessee wipeout
  

And at the end of regulation against

• Auburn in 2005,
  
• Tennessee, Vanderbilt and Kentucky in 2006 and
  
• Alabama this year
  

Van Gorder's defenses were staffed with players like David Pollack, Thomas Davis, Sean Jones and Odell Thurman – disciplined, mostly blue-collar guys who played like every play was the last play of the Super Bowl. Coach Van went 3-1 against Tennessee. With Martinez (1-2 against Tennessee), we're still waiting for plays like this:

and this:

Again, Willie, how long?

Anything happen while I was gone?

Well, good Lord. I go on a little business travel, walk away from this thing for a few weeks and this is the world I return to? Kentucky playing South Carolina to decide who's the Beast in the East? A morning after in which half the top ten takes a demotion? In which, via transitive football herpes, USF looks like the best team in the Sunshine State (USF>Auburn>Florida>Miami & FSU)? In which the bloom is suddenly and emphatically off the Urban Meyer rose?

Seriously, I feel like I've returned home to find the kid has turned into Teen Wolf, the wife has run off with a lesbian biker gang and Britney Spears' career is fully restored.

When we last heard from our humble correspondent, he was enjoying music in the park, Georgia was toodling around with a directional Carolina school in advance of a journey into the jaws of Saban and South Carolina/Kentucky were mostly an amusing aside in an SEC story principally concerned LSU and its chainsaw genitalia. "When the going gets weird," Raoul Duke famously observed, "the weird turn pro."

Today, we find ourselves in a world in which tickets to the Red River Shootout are as easy to find in Dallas as BMWs parked in front of mobile homes. Fortunately, there are familiar sights to sustain us in this brave new world.

Still, we find ourselves entering terrain in which nothing is what it seems, even when clad in red and black. In a stark role reversal from most of the Mark Richt era, it's the Georgia defense that seems plenty good on paper and yet still needs the offense to save its ass in critical moments.

And while other offenses pack the pews at the Church of the Spread Option, Georgia's contentedly lines up in the I-formation and runs toss sweeps for 300 yards like it's not a day past 1982. Remember all those concerns about the mostly underclassmen offensive line and its new position coach, Stacy Searels? Granted, they're not the '82 Redskins OL, but they have their moments, like this one:

That brings us to Knoxville, which in recent years has gone from house of horrors to home away from home for the Bulldogs. For Georgia and Tennessee fans alike, there are some tasty matchups to look forward to: Georgia's prolific running game vs. Tennessee's porous rushing defense, Tennessee's equally prolific passing game against Georgia's interception-allergic secondary, the inevitable Georgia punt return for a touchdown that has been a staple of every Georgia-Tennessee game since 2001, the Jekyll-and-Hyde Georgia passing game against Tennessee's flag-football secondary.

When I don't know what the hell's going to happen, I look at which team has the more experienced QB (Tennessee), the team that can run the ball (Georgia), the team with the nastier defense (Georgia, with a stack of "ifs" and "buts") and whose coaching staff inspires more confidence in a big game setting (Georgia – and I think there's no shortage of Tennessee fans who would readily 'fess up to that). South Carolina had the same advantages last night that Georgia brings to Knoxville on Saturday and that worked out all right for the Gamecocks.

When those answers are inconclusive, I start looking at intangibles. Tennessee has the home crowd, albeit one that can be quickly silenced for long periods after a big play (the quintessential example being Sean Jones, 2003). Tennessee has had the all-important immediately preceding bye week (I contend to this day that Ron Zook owes much, if not all, of his 2-1 mark against Richt to preceding bye weeks). Tennessee has also spent the last two weeks hearing about the supposed hot seat under its head coach's considerable can. Of course, that one can go either way: the result could be "Win one for the Pumpkin" or merely self-fulfilling prophecy. Sports psychology is a fascinating, but highly speculative science – or a voodoo designed to enrich bookies.

The intangibles favoring Georgia are Richt's 22-3 road record (some of which I attribute to the fact that our players can't hear our "fans" booing) and the fact that its defense ought to have one hell of a case of red-ass from last year's 51-33 meltdown in Athens. Then again, Florida expected vengeance against Auburn last week and look how well that worked out. Also, Georgia is an underdog, in spite of being ranked higher, so there's a disrespect factor.

With all that said, "intangibles" are mostly something for pundits to fill on-air minutes and column inches with. Repeatedly, I've read comments from coaches and players that intangibles impact the first five running minutes of a game and after that, "you're just playing football." When I've coached teams, my advice has typically been to clear all the voices out of your head and just play. Home crowds, off-weeks, pollsters, Vegas oddsmakers and Internet rumors won't make your QB go through his reads better or help your RBs find their holes quicker.

As Richt noted, the off-week is good for shoring up fundamentals that may have eroded during the season and for having a more thorough dress rehearsal for a game. But it's not enough time, say, to install a new offense or re-wire your defense. Tennessee is tweaking its depth chart on defense and I'm sure they're working on their OL blocking schemes.

But I don't think Phil Fulmer is the kind of tactician to pull of what Urban Meyer did with a week off before Jacksonville in 2005, in which he excised large portions of his playbook to accommodate the fact that QB Chris Leak would never have the mobility and hard-nosed attitude to run the spread option. Plus, they switched jerseys to the retina-searingly ugly single orange sleeve, utterly devastating the delicate sensibilities of Georgia fans who seize over fashion faux pas like jorts. Instead, Tennessee is going to try to do what they've been doing all season (and, really, for much of Fulmer's and David Cutcliffe's shared tenures), but with better execution.

It's important (and aggravating to absolutely no end) to note that Tennessee is 2-0 against us with Erik Ainge as its starting QB. Given time in the backfield, he will perform open-heart surgery on our secondary. With Marcus Howard and Jeff Owens dealing with various ailments, the first thing I'll be watching for is how much pressure we're putting on Ainge up front. I wouldn't be surprised to see Tennessee leverage off-week blocking drills into an impressive opening drive. The question is how well and how quickly can Willie Martinez adjust?

On the other side of the ball, Tennessee will doubtless look better on D than they've looked in weeks past. They've had two weeks to re-learn tackle football and to hear about how soft they are. When they don't look like what we expect them to look like (as they inevitably won't), will it be smarter to start flinging it around or stay hammerhead with the running game until we establish the damned thing?

Special teams are the real X-factor here. Punt returns, blocked punts, squibbed kick-offs and blocked field goals have defined this series since 2001. There is simply no excuse for either team to discount the importance special teams in this game. If it were Tommy Tuberville at UT's helm with two weeks to prepare, you could bet the mortgage on this being a trickeration fiesta in orange. But, like Lloyd Carr, Fulmer has made his bed on burying opponents on talent alone – to hell with fancy plays.

So, having laid out my qualifiers, I expect to win, but by no means comfortably and by no means is that a comfortable expectation. Something along the lines of 30-24 or 34-30 seems reasonable.

Game 2: “Frankly, I don't want to talk about it.”

Years ago, in response to a Georgia loss to Georgia Tech, Lewis Grizzard made syndicated newspaper history, publishing a column that was almost empty, save for declaration above.

When South Carolina intercepted a Matt Stafford pass in the final seconds of Saturday's game, I was tempted to honor Grizzard with a similar post. But doing so would be neither original nor genuine of me, just a cop out. So I'll press on.

Losing to South Carolina is a rarity, but it's also a very ugly catharsis for Georgia fans. The game is played early in the season, when the possibilities are still at their most expansive and expectations are at their highest. Twenty-three years ago, my father greeted a South Carolina win over Georgia by sending a loafer through the drywall in our kitchen. It landed right below the wall phone and his "Goddamnit, Georgia!" was met by Mom's rejoinder of "Goddamnit, Len!"

Bulldog historian Dan Magill once said of Georgia Tech words to the effect that, if you don't think Tech is a rival, try losing to them. I think the same can be said of South Carolina or any other foe that you're used to beating. Witness South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier's post-game taunting.

Georgia's record against South Carolina before Saturday night's contest was 44-13-2. That averages to about one Gamecock win every five years. Given that it had been since 2001 since their last win against the Bulldogs, the Chickens were due – overdue by a year, in fact. I take it as an indicator of the series one-sidedness that, following each of the other five Georgia wins, it never occurred to any Georgia coaches to bother taunting South Carolina.

One of the weird things about college football, from the perspective of fandom or gambling, is that a team is rarely as good or as bad as its last game. Last year, Georgia shut out Spurrier for only the second time in his career and then went on to give up game-winning drives to Vanderbilt and Kentucky. In 2004, we shelled the defending national champions, LSU, 45-16 and followed that up with a 19-14 loss to two-time Peach Bowl runner-up Tennessee.

This year, as in 2005, Georgia looked unstoppable against an upstart team widely picked to upset us in our opener. The following week in 2005 and this year, our offense wet the bed against South Carolina.

This time around, South Carolina eeked out a 16-12 win, the result of equal parts stifling defense on SC's part and dropped or poorly thrown passes and questionable play calls by Georgia. Really, the details are not important. Fans can tear themselves up on message boards, call-in shows and sports blogs about whom to blame, but it's best to step away if you feel that's the direction you're being taken.

Losses happen. We spend so much time focusing on champions that we lose sight of the infinitesimally small odds that even an outstanding team has of going undefeated, much less winning a national title. Think about it in terms of probabilities: If you had an 80% chance of winning every game on your schedule (and you couldn't even say that about Georgia's 1980 national championship season), you'd have less than a 7% chance of going undefeated in the regular season: 0.80^12 = 0.068719.

On the subject of fans needing perspective, as Kanu noted, those who booed at Saturday night's game should just stay home from here on out. It's deer season, right? I don't care if they are phoning it in; booing a bunch of 18-22-year-olds is never, ever acceptable. We're already doing a bang-up job scaring off recruits as it is.

Georgia fans love to lecture other rival fans about class. We'll wag our fingers about Florida fans and jean shorts. We'll chide Tennessee fans about their choice of a shade of orange. We'll snort at Auburn fans about their football factory masquerading as a sociology department. Having watched Nebraska fans applaud a rival that just got done beating their team, it occurs to me that we Georgia fans know about as much about class as Paris Hilton does.

So we lost at home to an opponent we perceived to be inferior. So did Auburn. So did Michigan, whom our fans were busy taunting last week (remember the students with "Ha Ha Michigan" painted on their bodies? Yeah, where are those guys right now?).

So let's hug it out, get well against Western Carolina and get ready for what looks to be the beginning stages of a monster being built by Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa.

Game 1: Troglodytes 35, Greatest Offense in the Universe 14

Our long march through the off-season desert is over and, rather than apologize for not having put together any previews of the college football season, I'll just acknowledge the exemplary work of the Dawg blogs on my blog roll: Doug at Hey Jenny Slater, Kyle and MaconDawg at Dawg Sports, David Ching at the Georgia Bulldog Blog, Sen. Blutarsky at Get the Picture and, of course, Paul Westerdawg at the Georgia Sports Blog. At my best, I might only have been rendered redundant. More likely, I would've been outclassed entirely. Frankly, since I'm not at practice everyday, it would have been impossible for me to write anything other than what had already been written: Youth on OL and DL, the impact of losing Paul Oliver on the secondary, depth at RB and WR, yada, yada, etc., etc.

So, with the season blessedly underway, let's get down to what actually happened and what it means for next week.

Georgia opened the season with one of its strongest non-conference season openers in years. I think you'd have to go back to 1983, when we opened with UCLA, to find us getting off the blocks against comparable competition. Freshly showered with T. Boone Pickens' millions, Oklahoma State is famously making its Big Move into the Big Boys' Club. These things take time, of course, and the early returns can be ugly. The year before its Fiesta Bowl stunner against Oklahoma, Boise State got its ears boxed in Athens, 48-13.

As others have noted, Oklahoma State is no Boise State. As a Big XII member, the Pokes regularly square off with Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M, Nebraska and others. They beat Alabama last year. They've played in big, loud stadiums – although they haven't fared particularly well as the road team – and their marketing department trumpeted the Cowboys as having "The Best Offense on Earth" or some such.

Anyway, by now, everyone knows how this thing wound up – 35-14, Georgia, in a game that, despite all of the parallels being drawn to the 2005 Boise State opener, was nothing like it. Yes, both BSU and OSU run spread offenses with mobile QBs who were supposed to run rings around our defense and make our offense look prehistoric by comparison. But Boise State was annihilated by halftime, with QB Jared Zabransky getting benched before halftime after throwing about a half-dozen picks. Whereas Oklahoma State was still very much in the game at halftime, down by what Georgia coach Mark Richt readily admitted was a "cheap" touchdown (Thomas Brown's 14-yarder from 1^st and 10 on the OSU 12) that was largely the result of an OSU special teams gaffe.

While many teams would have wilted after such a bad start, particularly with nearly 93,000 bourbon-fueled fans suddenly smelling a rout, Okie State clawed their way back into the game, piecing together a four-minute, 11 play, 70-yard (and that doesn't include a sack and a tackle for loss that totaled 11 yards) drive late in the second quarter to bring the game to 21-14. Georgia went three-and-out and, after OSU stalled on its next drive, we went into halftime, only head by that "cheap" touchdown.

This brings me to the real subtext of this game. Georgia, in 2007, is fielding a relatively young team that is more than a year removed from its last SEC title. We struggled badly with adversity in the middle of the 2006 season. With so many redshirt and true freshmen on the field this year, how would we respond to adversity early?

Troubling as OSU's last drive was, there was a pretty undeniable feeling that Georgia was controlling this thing. Concerned that my warm feeling might've come from the whiskey, I went back and watched the replay yesterday morning and checked the stats. Turns out my initial feeling was right. Georgia out-gained the Pokes in the first half 178 yards to 121, in spite of running five fewer plays. Georgia won the time of possession battle 16:25 to 13:35. It wasn't the gaudy domination of the Boise State tilt, but it was solid evidence of Georgia's upper hand.

The visual evidence was pretty compelling as well. Georgia's defense was swarming. Anyone in white with the ball was usually dealing, in very short order, with four or five red jerseys arriving promptly and with ill intentions. Efforts to spread the field east and west mostly left the Cowboys going sideways. Gang tackling abounded. Marcus Howard, Dannell Ellerbe, Rod Battle, Kelin Johnson, Geno Atkins, Jeff Owens and Brandon Miller seemed to be everywhere the ball was and the front four had a very regular presence in Oklahoma State's backfield. Of course, the second half confirmed the defense's dominance, as the self-proclaimed "Greatest Offense on Earth" mustered zero points in the remaining 30 minutes.

On the other side of the ball, Georgia's supposedly troglodyte offense looked crisp and brutally efficient, amassing 376 yards, no turnovers and a relative minimum of dumb penalties, save for a false start and an illegal formation. Every trip to the red zone (save for the last, when we were running out the clock) netted a touchdown. Aside from two bad passes right before half, when Matt Stafford wasn't planting his feet, the sophomore QB looked outstanding (18/24, 234 yards, two TDs, 0 INTs) – and so did his receivers. It was a genuine pleasure seeing the once drop-prone Sean Bailey return from ACL surgery to haul in five catches for 87 yards, including a spectacular reaching grab on the sideline and a stop-on-a-dime button-hook that he almost took to the house. Newcomers WR Mike Moore and TE Bruce Figgins caught one apiece – each for touchdowns. Mikey Henderson was his usual lethal self, receiving, returning and running for 103 yards.

An interesting stat popped up in Richt's Sunday presser: of Georgia's 234 passing yards, roughly 170 were yards after the catch. That may be a commentary on OSU's tackling, but, that was an important number to see, regardless. For years, I have tired of watching Georgia receivers collapse to the ground after catching a ball, either because Shockley or Greene wasn't placing the ball accurately enough or because, upon catching the ball, the typical Georgia WR thinks his job is done. During those same years, I have watched scores of Florida receivers put on track meets after catching a ball. If you watched Florida under Steve Spurrier in the 1990s, sure, they had accurate quarterbacks, but the real fireworks came after the ball was delivered. Why, I wondered, can't we have guys like that? Well, it appears we finally might.

But the real intrigue, strategically and tactically, lay in the running game. The best way to limit OSU's offense – or any offense, for that matter – is to not let them on the field. Grinding out the clock with screens and rushes for five and 10 yards a pop was the order of the day. But, from a tactical perspective, I think everyone was itching to see the covers come off Knowshon Moreno and whether reports were true of Thomas Brown's return-with-a-vengeance from ACL surgery.

The differences between the offense under the recently promoted Mike Bobo from when Richt called the plays were pretty subtle for the most part. I think Richt was inaccurately tagged a pass-first offensive coordinator, when, in fact, Georgia almost always rushed more than it passed. My criticism had to do with the timing of the running game, and how it would disappear once we crossed an opponent's 20, or any time it appeared to be having success.

Bobo seemed to recognize what happens to passing percentages as the field gets shorter and, accordingly, treated old-school Georgia fans to their version of mother's milk, the simple elegance of a toss sweep for a touchdown, one of two from Thomas Brown.

And while Brown got the touchdowns, Moreno got the yards. Spinning, sprinting, bouncing and battering his way forward, Moreno resembled a healthy Kenny Irons, rushing for 70 yards and receiving for 51. What jumped out at me was both his burst and balance. He was patient with his blocks and, as soon as the holes formed, KnoMo was gonzo. I can't recall him going down on first contact, nor do I remember it taking less than two people to get him on the ground. As long as he's healthy, I expect the kid to treat us to some spectacular runs.

Lastly, regarding the much fretted-over OL: I think they availed themselves well, but, as Richt noted at halftime, we weren't asking them for much. Mostly, we needed enough protection for Stafford to get a screen off or enough daylight for Brown, Moreno or Lumpkin (whom, sadly, we lost for a few games to a broken thumb) to get three yards. Oklahoma State's defense may be somewhat improved from their bottom-tier status in recent years, but it's safe to assume South Carolina and Jasper Brinkley will pose a much greater challenge up front.

So, where does that leave us? Well, notwithstanding Reshad Jones' personal foul, I think we've got a very disciplined team on both sides of the ball and one that happily plays smash-mouth. Given that Okie State brought in a new defensive coordinator, Bobo clearly logs his share of hours in the tape room. Rodney Garner, John Fabris and Willie Martinez have taken a young, talented defense and managed to pound some scheme into these Huns' heads.

I think we can expect more of a slugfest with the "bunch of average stiffs" Steve Spurrier will be bringing from Columbia. The Gamecocks' OL issues mirror ours and I don't expect QB Blake Mitchell to be poised any more than I expect Steve Spurrier to be forgiving when Mitchell makes mistakes under what ought to be pretty regular duress. Stafford will probably experience similar pressure from a reputedly solid South Carolina D, but will probably handle it a bit better than Mitchell, who was suspended in the Chickens' season opener, an uneven 28-14 win against Louisiana-Lafayette (SC was favored by 29). Spurrier is promising some lineup changes (a recurring theme this time of year at South Carolina), but I think we can expect to see many of that offense's mainstays: Mitchell under center, RBs Mike Davis and Cory Boyd and WR Kenny McKinley.

If we must jump the gun (we must! we must!), or What Braves & Birds said

In accordance with this country's due process tradition, the accused are innocent until proven guilty (except when residing in Guantanamo, but I digress …). Still it's hard to attach the "innocent until proven guilty" phrase to sentences involving O.J. Simpson and now Mike Vick without making those silly quote signs with your fingers or using some other annoying disclaimer like "theoretically," "technically," or "quote-unquote." Because there's Guilty in a Court of Law and then there's "C'mon, even his mother knows he did it." Given the specificity of the feds' 18-page indictment and the fact that one of Vick's alleged co-conspirators literally told the feds where the bodies were buried, Vick appears to have fallen so squarely in the latter category as to render the former almost a formality.

Among the many things that can be said about the feds is that, when they get around to indicting the rich, powerful and heavily lawyered, the feds usually come correct. A recurring statistic in this Vick story is the feds' 95% conviction rate. That 5% is an exclusive club that rejected the likes of Martha Stewart, Jeff Skilling, Lord Conrad Black and many others. For that and many other reasons, it ought to be shitting-bricks time for Michael Vick, Purnell Peace, Quanis L. Phillips and Tony Taylor.

That brings us to the mealy-mouthed attempts at excuses coming from various quarters – such as the fact that the victims weren't humans (neither were Jeffrey Dahmer's first victims), that Vick is from a historically disenfranchised socio-economic stratum that views dog fighting more sympathetically, and more equivocations that, at their most cogent, merely serve to insult even the slightest of intellects.

As an ex-pat Georgian forced to view my birthplace through a national lens, I was nervous about how Atlanta would come out looking in this. Like many major metro areas in the South, Atlanta is a rapidly growing, majority-minority city in a largely rural state and, accordingly, reflects all of the contradictions implied by such a setting. Yet Atlanta's Jim Crow legacy is considerably less burdensome than that of its neighbors, a point upon which Michael at Braves & Birds does a superb job expanding upon here and which ESPN utterly ignores here. As televisions exploded with images of church burnings, fire hoses, police dogs and race riots in places like Birmingham, Memphis and Little Rock, Atlanta was busy dubbing itself "The City Too Busy To Hate."

White Southerners are more than a little prickly when it comes to the topic of race in the South, principally because racism didn't begin in the South and, given recent events as recent as those in Idaho, it isn't likely to end there. And yet, to be in such a reputed hotbed of racial hostility, the South's economic nexus, Atlanta, has shown itself to be remarkably inclusive. As Michael notes: "Atlanta's mayors have been African-American since 1974. The district attorney in Atlanta is African-American, as is the chief of police. These seem like fairly relevant facts to me in describing the question of race in Atlanta."

When the Southern Christian Leadership Council initially jumped to the defense of Vick, saying that it would "honor" Vick at its national convention, it was a surreal moment. Had, as Jim Wooten wondered on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's editorial pages, Black America progressed so much since Jim Crow that the biggest problem facing African Americans in 2007 was that a federal dog fighting indictment had been served on a multi-millionaire athlete? Surely not, as State Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta) counseled SCLC President Charles Steele:

"What has he ever done except throw a football, run a football?" Brooks told the AJ-C. "I don't think he has done anything to deserve any special recognition."

There's a refreshing sobriety in Brooks' comment. Maybe, just this once, we can deviate from the standard reflex of foisting the standard storyline of the Plight of Blacks in the South on anything involving blacks and crime. This is, first and foremost (and, I'd argue, exclusively), a story about a multi-millionaire athlete possibly doing something that's a felony in 48 states and at the federal level. As Brooks observed, Vick never carried the flag for the SCLC, so why should the SCLC carry water for Vick? Michael at Braves & Birds is even more direct: "there is a subtle paternalistic prejudice in arguing that African-Americans shouldn't be expected to view the charges against Vick in an analytical manner."

When blacks celebrated O.J. Simpson's "not guilty" verdict, comedian Chris Rock asked with characteristic exasperation, "Why? What did we get?" Similarly, if Vick is exonerated, it won't be a victory for Black America, it'll be yet another victory for the rich, famous and well-lawyered.

What, exactly, is it that you, uh ... do here?

Gerald Poindexter. I’m naturally suspicious of people named “Poindexter.” Ditto people in bow ties, which, in Gerald’s case, would be an improvement as there can’t be many DAs outside of Hawaii who grace the cameras in Hawaiian shirts. Then again, there can’t be many DAs who can watch agents clear a property of five dozen scarred pit bulls, bloody carpets, modified doggie treadmills, performance-enhancing drugs, something call a “rape stand” and then, when reporters ask whether somebody should be held accountable, reply “For what?”

Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown. Sure, this is an oldie, but when your name shows up in the top Bushism of 2005, immortality is yours. Consider the runners-up:

· "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," Bush said in explaining his communications strategy in May 2005.

· "I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?" Bush asked in a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a U.N. Security Council meeting in September 2005.

· "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table," Bush said in Brussels last February 2005.

· "In terms of timetables, as quickly as possible - whatever that means," the president said of his timeframe for passing Social Security legislation in March 2005.

· "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law," Bush said in describing illegal immigrants in Tucson, Arizona, in November 2005

John Mackey. Like many people, John Mackey likes to post on message boards, blog and generally fart around on the Internet on company time. Unlike many people, John’s day job is chairman and CEO of a publicly traded company. Mackey confirmed last week that he spent eight years posting on Yahoo's financial message boards under the name Rahodeb, an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah. Many of his entries praised his company, Whole Foods, while blasting rivals such as Wild Oats Markets Inc., a company Whole Foods is trying to buy. So, after doing his damnedest screw Wild Oats investors and push down Wild Oats’ stock price in order to make them a more digestible acquisition target, Mackey wound up screwing his own investors by causing Whole Foods' shares to crater as a result.

Pit Bull Owners: Off the Chain, Out of the Closet

As a pit bull owner, I've been watching the Michael Vick pit bull story with great interest, in spite of the utter revulsion I feel towards the alleged activities (I refuse to use the term "sport" to describe dog fighting and defy anyone to justify doing otherwise). Regardless of whether Vick's direct participation is proven, as the owner of the literal killing fields upon which the gruesome felonies apparently were perpetrated, he ought to bear some responsibility. Indeed, according to the article linked above, even the surviving dogs taken from Vick's property on Moonlight Road will have to be euthanized, as animal control officers have determined that these dogs cannot be adopted. If it is proven that Vick actively participated in dog fighting (be it through betting, organizing, financing, training, etc.), I expect to see him in prison stripes before I ever see him in a Falcons jersey. Any other outcome would be a gross miscarriage of justice.

Of course, I realize that coming out against dog fighting is about as bold a stance as opposing child molestation. If the heinousness of such a pursuit isn't immediately obvious to you, your sociopathic tendencies require far more help than this blog can possibly offer. That said, it's probably worth calling out apologists such as ESPN's Scoop Jackson who, on Outside the Lines, attempted to excuse pit bull fighting as "a cultural thing" among blacks. I understand suicide bombing is a cultural thing as well, although I've never heard anyone attempt to justify it along those lines. "Cultural thing" or not, dog fighting is a felony in 48 states and a misdemeanor in the other two and, to my knowledge, it isn't any more legal if the perpetrators happen to be black.

Moving along though ... In part as a result of stories such as this one, the act of coming out in support of pit bulls requires an increasing amount of nerve. Try renting an apartment in any major metro area as a pit bull owner. Picture the change in a co-worker's face during the following exchange:

Co-worker: Hey, what’d you do this weekend?

You: Took the dog for a hike and swim along the Greenbelt.

Co-worker: Ah, cool. What kind of dog do you have?

You: A pit bull.

Granted, owning a pit bull is a lifestyle choice you make knowing the good and bad that comes with it. It's not like pit bull owners were born a disenfranchised minority with no say in the matter, like, say, blacks in the Jim Crow South. We could've saved ourselves some headaches by being golden retriever owners.

So why do we bother? In part, because of stories such as Vick's, not in spite of them. With every story of dog fighting or of a pit bull attack, a negative stereotype is further cemented in the public's mind about the breed. But to punish the breed would be to treat the symptom rather than address the cause, like banning the Internet because it's been a tool for identity theft. In this case, the cause is, invariably, cruel and/or neglectful owners. There is a place in this world for pit bulls: in the care of committed, loving pet owners. So being a responsible pit bull owner is a lifestyle choice, yes, but, with politicians clamoring for outright bans of the breed and the media using the acts of an irresponsible few to demonize the rest of us, it's increasingly a cause.

While I'm not starting any rallies for pit bulls, I am being more open about my dog's breed in hopes of broadening people's perspective on the subject. In the past, when a child at the park was playing with my dog, I was inclined to fib a little to the parents, not wanting to cause concern or spoil the goodwill that Goya was building with their child. I'd explain that my dog was a "terrier mix," a "Staffordshire terrier," or a "bull terrier – you know, like Spuds McKenzie, the Bud Light dog."

But I realized that I'm not doing anyone any favors – not to Goya, to pit bulls or to a potential voter. It's good for all three if I'm honest: Goya gets to be the ambassador that she ought to be (and that pit bulls and their owners need her to be), the breed gets some much-needed positive exposure and the parents get to see why pit bulls were once called "nurse maid dogs," due to their unusual tolerance around even the most rambunctious children. Over half a century ago, the pit bull was the RCA/Victor mascot, "Petey" from the Little Rascals, and the Buster Brown mascot. Today, sadly, the only thing you can sell with a pit bull is gangsta rap.

Anecdotally, the pit bull breed is rapidly increasing in popularity and, unfortunately, you can confirm this in part by visiting any animal shelter and noting the number of pit bull mixes hoping for adoption and likely facing euthanasia. For many pit bull owners, that tragic fact alone more than justifies any societal hassles. It's a breed that requires and rewards an extraordinary amount of care and training. Unfortunately, the market for pit bulls includes an inordinate percentage of would-be owners incapable of such attention, which is why so many pit bulls find themselves languishing in shelters. First-time dog owners would be well-advised to consider a less demanding breed. If you've got some feelings of inadequacy that you hope to rectify by acquiring an aggressive dog, do us all a favor and spend the money on a therapist instead.

It's true that, over the years, pit bulls were bred for aggressive activities such as boar-hunting and, yes, dog-fighting. But aggression is not their only trait. They are remarkably playful, loyal, intelligent and dedicated. If there's one thing they all can be counted on to be aggressive about, it's their affection towards humans. The greeting I get when I come home from work is a 15-minute onslaught of kisses. Contrary to the ticking time bomb reputation with which stories such as the Vick case have saddled them, they are renowned for their friendly temperament. The American Temperament Test Society provides temperament testing around the country for dog breeds, and gives a passing score for the entire breed based on the percentage of passed over failed within total number of the particular breed tested. As of December 2003, the American Pit Bull Terrier has a current passing rate of 83.9%, and the American Staffordshire Terrier passes at 83.2%. In comparison, the Golden Retriever passing rate is 83.2%.

The preceding statistics come courtesy of ATL King Pits, a breeder operated by senior University of Georgia wide receiver Sean Bailey, who appears to be bucking another ugly stereotype: the disturbing trend of athlete involvement in pit bull fighting. Bailey claims to have bred out of his blue pit bulls the "gameness" that dog fighters prize. ATL King Pits' articles section is full of useful tips, facts and suggestions about the breed and does much to dispel some unfortunate myths that burden so many pit bull owners.

EDIT: Hat tip to Nicki over in God's Country. We got a posse!

News and Notes

150 days until football season. Basically, we have the spring games and then things get really bleak. To tide us over in advance of some final football thoughts, here's a few random thoughts on the week's events so far:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran will release the 15 detained British sailors and marines "as a gift to the British people." In other news, I'm off to rob Goodwill, but rest assured I'll return the loot in a few weeks as a gift and, yes, I will be seeking a deduction next April 15. While the U.S. is not yet at war with Iran, apparently the race is on between our leaders to who can be the smuggest SOB alive not named Trump. Ahmadeinejad jumped out to a big lead this week, magnanimously asking British PM Tony Blair not to "punish" the crew for confessing they had been in Iranian waters when they were seized by Iranian coast guard. To make sure its stick landed squarely in Britain's eye, Iran broadcast videotaped confessions by crew members. (Image at right: Ahmadinejad, apparently in his hostage-taking salad days during the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.)

Keith Richards may or may not have snorted his dad's ashes. If it's true, the only thing surprising about this is that it wasn't Ozzy Osbourne. But Keef has gotta make anyone's short list of people who would do this kind of thing. That list would also include Lemmy Kilmister.

The NCAAs are over, but Billy Packer won't go quietly. Appearing on the Charlie Rose Show, CBS men's hoops color man/lightning rod for scorn, ridicule and hate! hate! hate!, Billy Packer, whose name is Packer, tells Rose, "you always fag out," in response to Rose's mock offer to help him out during the tournament. Consensus is that Packer was not using British slang for cigarettes, because a) Packer is not British and b) "you always cigarette out" makes absolutely no sense. Really, I thought the "Henderson was not looking for a cheap shot" call of the Tyler Hansbrough mugging was going to be Packer's nadir this season, although his insistence on mispronouncing Florida coach Billy Donovan's name ("Dunnavan") during the entire NCAA championship game has to make the season's top 10. Damn you, Packer, the whole point of this post was to see if I could make it through the day without mentioning the Gators.

EMI will be selling high-bitrate, DRM-free downloads through iTunes for $1.30 apiece. The chorus of DRM haters ought to include anyone with more than a two-digit IQ, which apparently excludes most major label executives. EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli, whom I took to task over a year ago, has finally acknowledged a least a small portion of the insanity that is Digital Rights Management. To recap, the lack of interoperability has inhibited digital music sales growth while CD sales continue to falter and placed content owners (the labels) squarely under the thumb of Apple's near-monopoly. Moreover, DRM means limiting consumer options, as in the number of devices on which a consumer can play a track and how many times he/she can copy it. Options have value, which is why we have the Black-Scholes Model. Apparently, EMI and Apple think options in the digital music realm are worth 30 cents a track, as the DRM-free tracks will be priced at $1.30. Lifting DRM restrictions eases some of the pains I mentioned, although these tracks, which are encoded at 256 kbps, will be initially available exclusively though … iTunes. EMI stressed that DRM would remain on music bought under monthly flat-fee-based services such as Rhapsody, Napster and Yahoo Music Unlimited. Oh, well. Baby steps.

The Morning After

It wasn't the end of the world and while I don't feel fine, God knows I've felt worse (see Auburn in Athens, 1999). Such is fandom that the arbitrary outcome of a ballgame can serve as empirical evidence that God is still very much the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament with a specific mad-on for your team and its followers. Sometimes, I swear that I peaked emotionally at age 12.

Obviously, last night has little to nothing to do with my team, so best to let the Gators have their day. In an era in which the NBA scoops up so many freshmen and high school seniors, it's a pretty special moment in college hoops when that the same starting five can repeat as champs. Pity that it was the Gators who delivered this piece of history, but a begrudging "congratulations" to them all the same.

Anyway, given the generous attention given to yesterday's post by Kyle at Dawgsports and Blutarsky at Get the Picture, and in the comments from Paul Westerdawg of the Georgia Sports Blog, I probably should clarify my stance on the Gators.

I don't think the Gators are the USC of the SEC or its "undisputed alpha." At least, not yet. Given the momentum and resources they've amassed and their investment going forward, I think they're a threat to take that mantle. That's why I used terms like "menace" and "danger," as in, the Germans were a "threat," "menace" and "danger" to placing Europe under their collective boot heel, although history records a different outcome. I hope that those who made it to the bottom of yesterday's admittedly long-winded fretting found evidence that Georgia (and several other SEC teams, for that matter) are eminently capable of blunting Florida's advance.

Also, I should probably clarify the comparison with USC. In terms of athletic tradition, USC towers over Florida like a skyscraper over an ant. I don't mean this as a dig at Florida, but as an only slightly hyperbolic statement of what even many Florida fans would concede. That said, I think tradition is grossly overrated. It helps up to a point, and then, as fan expectations become a program's albatross, it hurts. Tradition is why Alabama is paying $4M a year for a football coach and why Kentucky will probably pay something similar for a basketball coach.

Rather, my comparison has to do with the here and now. There is an undeniable aura of success around USC and Florida, although as Kyle notes, "the Big Lizards' multi-sport dominance over division rival Georgia generally has been by the slimmest of margins, coming in extra innings, by decimal places, and on fortuitous fumbles." Regarding football specifically, I share Blutarsky's belief that too much is being made of Florida's offensive scheme, which scored an average of 22.25 points a game against an SEC slate and which needed a defensive touchdown and a dubious facemask penalty to hold off the worst Georgia squad in perhaps a decade. Yet winning ugly is still winning.

Kyle also notes how the pendulum swings in any competitive rivalry and how, in sports, today's genius is tomorrow's knuckle-dragger and vice-versa. Prior to running roughshod over the SEC in 2004, Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville was an illicit plane ride away from being dumped for then-Louisville coach (and former Tuberville assistant) Bobby Petrino. When Ron Zook was the Gators' football coach, the second least popular person in Gainesville was the man who hired him, UF AD Jeremy Foley, whom ESPN's Pat Forde anointed on Sunday "the hottest athletic director in history." In Oklahoma, Bob Stoops regularly crossed the Red River to hang as much as 65 points on Texas in Dallas. In the past three Red River Shootouts, the Sooners' combined offensive output is slightly more than half 2003's grim total.

Personally, I don't think either Tuberville or Foley are idiots or savants. They're smart guys who survived some bad decisions. Foley's athletic department has won 16 of 19 SEC All-Sports trophies and has finished in the top 10 nationally every year since 1984. Lucky, he is not. If he ever leaves Gainesville, I will be shocked if it is on anything but his own accord. But as long as Bobby Lowder draws breath, I'll make no predictions for Tuberville.

Regardless, Foley's achievement did not occur overnight. He began as an intern in the UF AD in 1976 and took over as director exactly 15 years ago, when current Georgia AD Damon Evans, now 36, was still getting his bachelor's in finance. Foley had the incredibly good fortune of taking the reigns after Steve Spurrier lead the Gators to their first SEC championship, which revived a long-dormant program and presumably made Foley's job as a fund-raiser considerably easier. And, after losing Spurrier to the NFL in 2001, Foley nearly squandered all of that momentum with the near-disastrous hiring of Ron Zook and his failure to bring Spurrier back to Gainesville when The Visor came calling. Ok, so maybe he's a little lucky.

Evans, on the other hand, all he's done since taking over in 2004 is preside over a dozen SEC championships and seven national championships. He has also brought Georgia athletics into the modern age of sports business, setting fund-raising and logo licensing revenue records, doubling sponsorship revenue and breaking ground on a $30M gymnastics practice facility and a $30M basketball practice facility. And, yes, it helped that Mark Richt had revived Georgia football, whose profits fund half of Evans' budget. Still, if someone is going to take Foley's mantle, my money's on Evans.

The Gathering Gator Storm

Largely on the strength of his six-volume account of World War II, Winston Churchill won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. The first volume of his account, The Gathering Storm, is a day-to-day account of Hitler's unfolding menace and the failures of appeasement attempts by European leaders. In no way do I liken the University of Florida or athletic teams to the Nazis (but to the Taliban? Sure, why not.). Nevertheless, as a fan of a rival program, I am alarmed at the Gators' sudden dominance of the major revenue and non-revenue varsity sports and I consider their sweep of the SEC landscape analogous to Germany's steamrolling of Europe in the 1930s.

Some will argue that Florida's emergence will benefit the entire SEC, as the national exposure and television and bowl riches will trickle down to the rest of us. It's true that, over the past two decades of Gator dominance, the SEC has run circles around the rest of the country in the race for bowl and television revenue. Roughly half of the conference finished in the AP final top 25 football rankings. Competition breeds competition and the Gators' rising tide has lifted the rest of the SEC's boats. But, rest assured, that wealth will hardly be spread evenly.

I contend that the SEC is in danger of becoming the Pac-10, with Florida playing the role of USC as the conference's undisputed alpha. If you're an SEC fan (or, heaven forbid, an SEC athletics administrator) untroubled by Florida's rise, you're not paying attention. More troubling to me is that Georgia, which is well-equipped to turn back this tide, has instead allowed it to gather volume. For evidence, look no further than this season, when the Gators completed a sweep of Georgia in football, men's basketball, baseball and freaking gymnastics, which, during my time as a student during the Ray Goff era, was the only source of consolation for Bulldogs sports fans.

Today, the Florida men's basketball team stands on the cusp of repeating as NCAA champs. If they do so, they will become the first team to do so since Duke did it in 1991 and 1992. This marks a major change in the landscape. If we were talking about UCLA, Kentucky, Indiana, UNC or any other traditional basketball heavyweight, we could remain content that the status quo remains unchecked. But this Florida. Prior to losing in the second round of the 1987 NCAAs, Florida had never been to the Big Dance. Of Florida's 10 NCAA tournament appearances and two final four appearances, half occurred under current coach Bill Donovan, who is in his 10^th season in Gainesville. Florida's emergence as a basketball power is as sudden and out-of-nowhere as was Miami's arrival as a football power in 1983.

While we're on the subject of football, consider that prior to Steve Spurrier's arrival in 1990, Florida went some six decades without a football title of any kind – conference or national. Since then, they've amassed seven SEC titles and two national championships.

As Pat Forde notes, we have entered the mega-program era, in which the demarcation between "football school" and "basketball school" is being replaced by the simple distinction of "haves" and "have-nots." Per the Indianapolis Star's NCAA Financial Reports Database, the University of Florida's athletic department operates on a $77.7M budget and spends all but $3.8M of that. Ohio State's AD budget is $89.7M (Forde says it's $102M, but he doesn't cite a source), with but $120,674 unallocated. Georgia's AD budget is comparable, sporting $68.8M in revenues and, much to my consternation, leading the country with nearly $24 million in unallocated funds. So while Georgia's budget is comparable to Florida's, our spending is not.

"Advertising and sponsorships," which includes merchandise royalties, brings in $6.7M to UF's AD, which is a little over 60% of what a season's worth of ticket sales at 88,548-seat Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Given the glut of Gator gear that presumably would fly off the racks with another Gator championship, we can safely assume that Florida, which leads the SEC in royalties, will extend its lead significantly.

As Forde notes, "Six members of this year's Sweet 16 traditionally have been football-first schools: Florida, Ohio State, USC, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Oregon. Thirteen schools that advanced to the round of 32 in this tournament have played in at least one BCS bowl game this century."

Florida and Ohio State, as you will recall, just finished competing for a BCS championship in football. The cash flow that leads to this kind of preeminence is not hard to diagram. Football produced over $26M in profits for Ohio State and $27.1M for Florida. Men's basketball delivered $7.4M for Ohio State and nearly $1.9M for Florida. If football profits are driving the bus – and it appears abundantly clear that they do – then this is clearly a game Georgia can play. Football profits at Georgia totaled $38.4M, nearly $10M more than the SEC's second-most profitable team, Alabama.

Most Profitable Football Programs - SEC			Most Profitable Football Programs - National
1. University of Georgia	$38,363,343		1. University of Texas	$39,294,908
2. University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa	$28,803,845		2. University of Georgia	$38,363,343
3. Louisiana State University	$27,932,154		3. University of Michigan	$35,705,233
4. University of Florida	$27,172,983		4. University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa	$28,803,845
5. Auburn University	$24,184,850		5. Louisiana State University	$27,932,154
6. University of Arkansas	$16,088,700		6. University of Florida	$27,172,983
7. University of Tennessee	$15,739,864		7. Ohio State University	$26,099,129
8. University of Kentucky	$12,161,465		8. Texas A&M University	$24,975,623
9. University of Mississippi	$8,693,607		9. Auburn University	$24,184,850
10. University of South Carolina	$7,120,545		10. University of Arkansas	$16,088,700
11. Mississippi State University	$2,694,966		11. University of Tennessee	$15,739,864

As I have said before it is time for Georgia's athletic director Damon Evans to spend. Spend wisely, but spend. When it comes to total facilities and maintenance spending, Georgia ranks 48^th nationally and last in the SEC. Aside from the nation's loveliest football setting, an excellent baseball park and a new basketball practice facility, Georgia has very little to show in facilities spending. Nowhere is this negligence more glaring than at Georgia's basketball facility, Stegeman Coliseum, dubbed "the Stegasaurus," for its Jurassic-era design. (EDIT: Per Paul Westerdawg's comments below, the Georgia AD carries roughly $100M in debt related to facilities upgrades. It's an accounting issue, but apparently, the Indy Star's database doesn't count debt service towards facilities and maintenance spending.)

We've held our own in salaries, ranking 13^th nationally and 4^th in the SEC. And I'm on board with the recent decision to extend men's basketball coach Dennis Felton's contract. As Paul Westerdawg notes, there's been noticeable progress from the crater in which the Harricks left Georgia men's hoops and we need stability in the program for recruiting reasons and for a host of other reasons as well. The loss of Tubby Smith to Kentucky, coupled with the subsequent Harrick era, set Georgia men's hoops back well over a decade. A decade ago, Georgia men were in the Sweet 16. This year, we were routed in the second round of the NIT. I strongly encourage Evans to not allow the new practice facility to be the end of Georgia's hoops commitment.

If there's a positive in all of this, it's that Florida has proven conclusively that, with the right funding and management, a Johnny-come-lately can come in and dominate any sport in this new era of mega-programs. But soon, as the rich continue to get richer, that won't always be the case. Right now, Florida may resemble USC. Left unchecked for another couple of years, they'll resemble a better-managed version of the New York Yankees. Regardless of whether Florida wins or loses tonight – but particularly if they win – I hope someone in the Butts-Mehre building responds with a Churchillian sense of urgency.