Poll dancing, week 10: Family matters.

The ballots are going up a little late this week because, among other reasons, I was visiting family in West Virginia all weekend and I'm still trying to catch up on all the Intertubes action I missed while I was up on top of a mountain. Full disclosure: While I did get to see plenty of football on Saturday (hooray satellite!), I didn't get to see more than a few minutes of the Alabama-LSU game; I have a cousin who went to Ohio State and a cousin who went to Georgia Tech, so that's what we watched, because I'm selfless like that. Actually it's because they're both bigger and taller than me, but I'm still selfless.

Games watched: Flipped back and forth between Miami-Virginia and Arkansas-South Carolina; also flipped back and forth between Georgia Tech-Wake Forest and Ohio State-Penn State; caught a little bit of Clemson-Florida State.



The next five: Utah, South Florida, West Virginia, California, Oklahoma.

Dropped out: Oklahoma (18), California (19), Notre Dame (24).

· Another flip-flop between Alabama and Florida in the top three, for reasons explained below. I suppose I could've dropped Texas lower than Florida for starting so slowly against UCF, but it's not like they haven't been doing that all year, and were probably due for such a sleepwalk after having dismantled Oklahoma State last week.



· The top 10 looks quite a bit different with Iowa gone, Oregon down, and TCU having leapfrogged Cincinnati after the Bearcats had to survive UConn on Saturday. I could've dropped Oregon more for having laid down and let Stanford's offense run all over them, but there was no way they were going below USC. (On that note, what's the sportswriters' and coaches' excuse?)

· Oklahoma, California, and Notre Dame are all gone thanks to fairly embarrassing (or, in ND's case, reeeeally embarrassing) losses; in their places are BYU, who destroyed Wyoming on the road and are probably headed to their 5,436th straight Las Vegas Bowl; Stanford, who dished out the aforementioned ass-beating to the Oregon Ducks; and Tennessee, who's probably a shaky Top 25 candidate at only 5-4 but has looked as hot as anyone over the past few weeks. Based on the performance of my previous predictions, they will probably repay me for this kindness by going down in flames at Ole Miss this weekend.

And the SEC Power Poll ballot:

1. Alabama -- I feel like I've flip-flopped Bama and Florida in the 1-2 spots on nearly a weekly basis, but the Tide took a big step toward righting their offensive ship against LSU on Saturday . . .



2. Florida -- . . . while Florida's offensive struggles all came thudding back against Vandy despite the beatdown UF laid on Georgia the previous week. If the SEC title game were played this week, I have a feeling Bama would be favored, and they'd deserve to be. But the Gators did manage not to blind anybody this week, so there's that, at least.

3. LSU -- And poof go the Tigers' shot at an SEC West title, which doubly sucks for them because the loser of the conference championship game is almost certain to certain to claim an at-large BCS bid (as far as I know, each conference is still limited to two such berths).

4. Auburn -- Furman scored 28 points on AU in the second half . . . is that an indictment of the Tigers' defensive depth, or am I really reaching for reasons to have hope for Georgia this weekend?

5. Tennessee -- Crompton has been damn near unstoppable for the last month. Yep, I actually typed that sentence, and you really just read it.



6. Georgia -- Even without any fruity uniform changes, they handled Tennessee Tech even more easily than I anticipated, enough that a bowl-eligibility-clinching sixth win against Kentucky goes from "toss-up" to "likely" in my book. Anything more than that this season, though, will be a gift from God.

7. Ole Miss -- Since Saturday's win was their second this season over a DI-AA opponent, the Rebs still need another W to go bowling . . . and with Tennessee, LSU, and Missy State remaining, it's conceivable that they might not get it.

8. Arkansas -- Probably clinch bowl eligibility this week against Troy, with a shot at a seventh win against MSU the following week, which would be a big step forward for the program under Petrino.



9. South Carolina -- Didn't think the Gamecocks could go into another tailspin as bad as their late-2007 collapse; I may be in the process of being proven wrong.

10. Mississippi State -- If the Bizarro Bulldogs take two out of their last three and make a bowl, Dan Mullen walks away with SEC Coach of the Year. Heck, he may even deserve it already.

11. Kentucky -- Struggled with Eastern Kentucky well into the third quarter, but Morgan Newton looks like a solid choice to be the Wildcats' QB of the future.

12. Vanderbilt -- Beat the spread against the Gators, which is exactly the kind of moral victory that represented the Commodores' ceiling during the Widenhofer years.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system: The Tennessee Tech preview.

Hometown: Cookeville, Tennessee.

Last season: Started 3-2 with wins over Gardner-Webb, Southeast Missouri State, and Central Methodist (the last of which is an NAIA school), then lost their last seven to finish 3-9, 1-7 (last place) in the Ohio Valley Conference. Their seven conference losses came by an average of 21.5 points.

This season so far: Major improvement -- the Golden Eagles started 1-2 with losses at Eastern Kentucky and Kansas State but have won four of the five games they've played since. Currently 5-3, 4-2 in the OVC, good for fourth place out of nine teams.

Hate index, 1 being "Glengarry Glen Ross," 10 being Glenn Beck: One. Seriously, I've had to go back like a dozen times this week to remind myself whether we're playing Tennessee Tech or Tennessee State. You think this is a game I've managed to gin up much hate over?

Associated hottie: Other than a former New Jersey state assemblywoman and, weirdly enough, not one but two members of the Rockford Thunder women's softball team, TTU's list of notable alumni on Wikipedia is kind of a sausage fest, so I checked out the home page for the school's cheerleading squads. Here's Jessica Downs, a member of the co-ed cheer unit who made the 2008 Athletic Director's Honor Roll. I research because I care.



What excites me: TTU may have shown major improvement over last season, but it comes with a bit of an asterisk -- none of the four DI-AA teams they've beaten have a winning record either in OVC play or overall. The Golden Eagles have a pretty good pass defense, allowing only 171 yards per game through the air, but other than that they're really no better than so-so in most of the statistical categories. Their offense is particularly mediocre, averaging only 92 yards per game on the ground (that's even worse than our running game!) and 282.8 yards total, 92d out of 118 teams in Division I-A. Even Willie Martinez should be able to hold them down pretty easily.

What worries me: I'm worried about the same stuff I always worry about when Georgia plays a get-blown-out-for-dollars opponent like this one -- a Bulldog team that knows it doesn't have to try all that hard and plays like it, making dumb mental errors and allowing big plays we should never be allowing to a DI-AA also-ran. Only this week those worries get ratcheted up a notch, for two reasons: One, we're just not all that good at much of anything this year, and two, our season has more or less had the garbage-can lid slammed on it by the Gators. We're at a point now where our absolute best-case scenario is an Outback Bowl berth. Now, I'm no Marc McAfee, so my standards for this sort of thing are surely lax, but I can totally see how it would be hard for a Georgia player to get motivated for this game. I'd be lying if I said I was getting up for it myself.


You guys go ahead on to the stadium. Save us a seat, we'll catch up.

We'll also be playing this game without the services of one A.J. Green, who sustained what has been referred to as a "pulmonary contusion" against Florida and may be out for the Auburn game as well. (Gulp.) Joe Cox and Logan Gray, neither of whom have particularly distinguished themselves at any point in the last month, will have their work cut out for them without the nation's most reliable safety valve available to catch their throws. We're also likely to be without our best pass rusher, Justin Houston, who hyperextended his elbow in Jacksonville.

Player who needs to have a big game: WR Tavarres King. Since "playing-for-next-season" time may be looming over us already, I would hope we'll get to see a good dose of Rantavious Wooten and Marlon Brown in the passing game on Saturday. But with A.J. Green out, King is our next biggest contributor in the WR corps and will have to shoulder a much bigger load helping to prop up our sagging passing game. TTU has managed to pick off 13 passes in eight games, so they may not be a complete pushover against the pass, and our wideouts can't afford to take any plays off just because the opponent is DI-AA.

What does it all mean? As much as I hate games between I-A and I-AA teams, particularly when it's our team scheduling them, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't grateful for this one. If ever there was a team that could use a breather right now, it's us. And I won't feel bad if we blow the Golden Eagles out of the stadium, either; we've paid them $475,000 to come to Athens, they know they're likely going to get blown out, so we might as well get our money's worth. That's how the system works, and for this one weekend, I'm OK with it.

For the record, no, I don't think we're going to blow TTU out, at least not as badly as a lot of our fans would surely like us to. But neither do I think Georgia is quite bad enough to lose this game at home, as tempting a prediction as that might be for some of the less confident, more hysterical portions of our fan base. Barring a complete collapse far worse than anything we've seen so far this season, we'll inch closer to bowl eligibility on Homecoming Saturday, it just won't be particularly engaging to watch.


Presented for comparison's sake: paint drying.

If you've seen Georgia play a gimme game at any point in the last decade, you probably know what's coming. On offense, we score early but follow that up with some dumb-ass penalties and plays botched due to lack of full attention; on defense, that same inattentiveness leads to a couple more big plays than there ought to be, making the game look closer than it actually was in the Sunday box score (we've allowed an average of 19 points to our last four DI-A opponents). In this case, our propensity for turnovers (I think we can expect at least one pick, either from Cox or from Gray) will probably be responsible for at least one score by the Golden Eagles, even if (hopefully) it arrives too late in the game to make any difference.

What I'd really be watching this game for (if I could watch it -- I'm going to be in West Virginia this weekend, far away from cable or wireless Internet access, and where people are too busy questioning Bill Stewart's competence to be concerned with Mark Richt's in the first place) is to see if there are any changes, either personnel-wise or strategy-wise, that would indicate there's any kind of larger change in mentality going on in the program. Unfortunately, I don't expect there will be any. When I say "unfortunately," I'm not even talking about the near-zero probability that Aaron Murray or Zach Mettenberger will see the field; while I think there's some wisdom from a long-term standpoint of giving them some playing time, there's an equal chance Richt might be kicking himself three years from now for blowing one of their redshirts in the last month of a season that was already lost. What I'm more discouraged by is Willie Martinez's apparent inability to diagnose, much less fix, what's ailing our defense, particularly against the pass. What Martinez's comments tell me is that we're going to be playing the same old soft zone and using the same old personnel (i.e. not Bacarri Rambo, for reasons that continue to mystify me) to run it; obviously the consequences of that are a lot less dire when you're talking about Tennessee Tech than when you're talking about Florida, but still. If you're headed to Athens to get both some barbecue at one of the Homecoming tailgates and a glimmer of hope that a turnaround is on the way for the Georgia program, be prepared to head home with only half of those wishes fulfilled.


You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need (assuming that what you need is a pulled-pork barbecue sandwich).

So I'd expect to see 16 or 17 points put on the TTU side of the scoreboard, and as for Georgia -- well, we should at least be able to match our production against Vanderbilt, maybe tack on an extra TD for funsies. But running it up just isn't Mark Richt's style and still won't be even at a time when we could probably use an opportunity for a real cathartic jackhammering, so any bigger blowout than, say, 42-17 is probably asking for too much.

Will I take it? Oh, definitely. A win is a win, particularly when you're still trying to scrape together six, and like I said, it's not like we haven't paid enough for this one. Come get your whuppin' and pick up your check, Tennessee Tech, and make sure you indulge in the many joys of Athens while you're here. You'll find that most of us are too fatigued to mess with you at this point anyway.

If you're trash-talking: Then you're just being mean. Still, as a grown man with the maturity and mentality of an 11-year-old, I cannot deny some inner chortling at the thought of referring to our pending opponents as "Titty U."

Incidentally, TTU's coach is one Watson Brown, whom I have some familiarity with from his tenure as the head coach at UAB from 1995 to 2006. After going 3-9 with the Blazers in his final year, he left Birmingham voluntarily to take over at Tennessee Tech; his younger brother is Mack Brown, whose career has followed a somewhat different trajectory. Maybe there's something in there you can mine for trash-talk, but please, don't be a dick about it. I would hope we haven't sunk so low that we're getting our jollies from shitting on DI-A fans. Save that stuff for the nerds.

I will run up and down the street in front of my house wearing nothing but a Georgia flag wrapped about my nether regions if: Georgia scores more than 50 against the Golden Eagles. I don't think that's that far outside our abilities -- I mean, Kansas State hung 49 on them earlier this year, and they managed to lose to UL-Lafayette, for crap's sake. Just move that ball, Dawgs, and don't give it to the other team any more than you absolutely have to, and we'll be fine.

To the victors go the spoils . . . and the losers get grounded.

Not ever having played football may preclude me from being able to criticize the decisions made by coaches or players on the field, but I was an editor-in-chief of The Red & Black when I was at UGA, so I think I'm more than qualified to say: This column by online editor Marc McAfee is one of the most presumptuous, self-satisfied, and just plain poorly argued columns I've ever read.

First, a little background: I take a lot of ribbing from my friends because I have a policy of refusing to go downtown after a Georgia loss.

I'm sorry, I just don't see any reason to celebrate when we get rolled by the Tide or chomped by the Gators. (Obviously I haven't been going out too much this season.) But then recently, I realized I looked pretty stupid for staying home and moping after a loss. Why?

Because I heard from several people that half the football team was in Flanagan's or Farenheit on Saturday night. And while I was angrily going to sleep, those players were apparently out spitting game as if they'd stomped the Gators instead of getting romped by them. Yeah, I know it probably wasn't the whole team, but there were some big names in those bars.

So because Mark is too ashamed to go out after a Georgia loss, the players should be too? Is that what I'm supposed to get from all this?

I know they're college students too. I know they deserve to have fun like I do. But I haven't been endowed with the responsibility that comes with signing those papers that make me a part of this storied program in need of an update. Those players chose not to live the life of an average student, and they need to start acting like it.

Georgia's football players (and DI-A football players in general) may have chosen "not to live the life of an average student," but I don't think they ever signed a piece of paper saying that their right to eat out or have girlfriends was contingent upon them winning football games. I'll be the first person to admit that SEC football players are not exactly like you or me, but isn't this kind of an arbitrarily applied standard? If I told Marc McAfee that he wouldn't be allowed to date or have a meal at a restaurant if he got a C on a term paper or missed a typo in a headline in the R&B's online edition, do you think he'd go for that?

The worst part of the whole thing is the way McAfee makes dramatic, sweeping assumptions about the character (or lack of same) of our entire roster -- based on having seen half the football team in Flanagan's on a certain Saturday night. No, scratch that: Having "heard from several people" that they were in Flanagan's on a certain Saturday night. Yeah, that's a terrific basis for writing off our entire team as a bunch of irresponsible slackers.

Toward the end of the column, McAfee says that Richt needs to "re-evaluate his recruiting." Guess what, Marc: If your attitude takes hold, he won't need to. No decent high-school player in his right mind would come to a school where he'd have his after-hours activities restricted based on the uninformed judgments of holier-than-thou newspaper columnists. We can wave bye-bye to all the good players as they head off to Florida and Tennessee, and then we can take the leftovers who don't mind being forced to live like the Amish when they have the temerity to lose to someone.

At that point we can probably knock the program down to Division III, and then maybe we can start new rivalries with Sewanee and Birmingham-Southern. Football Saturdays will be quite a bit less exciting then, I grant you. But dammit, at least those football players will know their place.

Poll dancing, week 9: I believe some apologies are in order.

I apologize to you, the reader, for incompetently composed BlogPoll and SEC Power Poll ballots based on what little information I can remember through the haze of nearly a half a bottle of George Dickel No. 12 during the Cocktail Party game on Saturday. But y'all are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to people to whom I owe apologies, a group that includes, though is not exclusive to, my mom and dad; all three of our dogs; Holly; the Georgia coaching staff; any of the little kids who came to our house for Halloween candy; Mrs. Wilkes from down the street; that cop in the Tahoe on Macon Road; all of the employees working the third shift at Denny's; and the entire Northside High School girls' volleyball team. I, uh, didn't know it was hanging out like that.

And I apologize.

Games watched: East Carolina-Memphis, a little bit of South Florida-West Virginia, flipped back and forth between Iowa-Indiana and Auburn-Ole Miss, Florida-Georgia, Tennessee-South Carolina.



The next five: Brigham Young, Tennessee, South Florida, Wisconsin, Utah.

Dropped out: Utah (21), West Virginia (24).

· The top three get reshuffled once again, with Florida (who finally rediscovered their offense, at Georgia's expense, of course) and Alabama (who had a bye but only looked so-so in their previous game, against Tennessee) swapping places. Texas, who decimated Oklahoma State in Stillwater, holds on to #2.

· I have a feeling Boise State and Oregon are going to be tied to each other for the rest of the season in consecutive slots, as Oregon's rapid ascent continues to make Boise's dominating win over them on opening Thursday look that much more impressive. No matter how high the Ducks rise, I can't in good conscience put the Broncos below them.



· Southern Cal probably deserved to drop more than three spots for getting the dog beaten out of them by that Oregon team, but let's face it, there's a huge dropoff once you're outside the top 10. Bad as the Trojans looked in Eugene, would you put them below LSU or Houston at this point? I obviously wouldn't. (Still, I have to laugh at the above picture, which apparently depicts Death coming for USC's Rose Bowl hopes.)

· Only two of the two teams who drop out of my ballot actually lost, but Utah took forever to put away a lousy Wyoming team at home; West Virginia, meanwhile, did the courtesy of losing to a South Florida team that's usually spending this part of the season tanking their way right out of the top 25 themselves.

· In their places go Texas Tech, who stomped what was supposedly a good Kansas team (but may not be anymore), and Auburn, who got back on the side of the angels by pounding an Ole Miss squad that was supposedly bouncing back.

And the SEC Power Poll ballot:



1. Florida -- Yeah, they're a great team, and Brandon Spikes can go die in a train derailment. Sorry, was that me being a sore loser? Please let me show you where to shove -- er, send your complaints.

2. Alabama -- Got jumped while they were on their bye week, which is probably unfair, but their passing game needs to show some major improvement against LSU this week.

3. LSU -- If they were looking ahead to Alabama while playing Tulane on Saturday, I must've missed it. They're going to give the Tide everything they can handle.

4. Auburn -- Got a big game by the offense when they most desperately needed one. Looks like the Chizik/Malzahn doubters who all of a sudden burst forth from the woodwork may have to keep quiet for another couple weeks.



5. Tennessee -- The defense remains top-notch despite a barrage of injuries, even Crompton is looking good . . . has Kiffykins righted this ship a whole lot more quickly than any of us realized?

6. Ole Miss -- I'm done trying to figure them out. Can we just send them their Music City Bowl invite already and be done with it?

7. Georgia -- The offense can't stop turning the ball over, the defense can't stop anybody, and the coaching staff's idea of a bye-week adjustment is black helmets. Good Lord, I'm actually looking forward to the start of basketball season.

8. Arkansas -- Blowing out Eastern Michigan isn't enough to make up for the turd you laid on the field against Ole Miss, Hogs.

9. South Carolina -- Thanks, 'Cocks. It's nice to know Mark Richt isn't the only SEC coach against whom Lane Kiffin is undefeated.



10. Mississippi State -- They've got exactly two more SEC wins than I predicted they'd get this season, and they're only two wins from bowl eligibility. Can anyone say with absolute confidence that the Bizarro Bulldogs aren't going to beat Arkansas and Ole Miss to close out the season?

11. Kentucky -- They've got Eastern Kentucky and Vandy the next two weeks, so there are your six wins, but I wouldn't count on any more than that.

12. Vanderbilt -- Finally discovered an offense. Too bad the coupon was only good for the first half against Georgia Tech.

In denial.

When I was a kid, and my mom would order me to clean up a bedroom that I'd managed to really trash with toys and all kinds of other junk, frequently I'd spend the first hour or so doing stuff that looked sort of like cleaning but wasn't. Like, I'd line up my Transformers in battle formation or "pick up" my Legos by building things out of them -- I'd be engaged in some kind of activity that looked cleaning-esque but was really more playing than anything else. An hour or so later, my Transformers might be more organized and I might have a half-assed Lego creation to show for my efforts, but nothing about my room would be appreciably cleaner; given the amount of time and effort expended, I wasn't anywhere near as close to fulfilling my mom's orders as I should've been.

I flashed back to those preadolescent attempts to snow ol' Mom on Saturday when the Dawgs charged out of the tunnel at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium wearing black helmets and pants, which apparently constituted the sum total of our preparations and alterations over the bye week preceding the latest edition of the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. OK, that might be overly harsh: Stacy Searels seems to have found an O-line combination that works in the sense that our run-blocking was dramatically improved, to the point where Georgia finished with more than 120 rushing yards and both Washaun Ealey and Richard Samuel finished with per-carry averages better than 4.0 yards. Other than that, though, we were the same old team we've been all season, in all the same old stupid ways -- dumb, momentum-killing penalties; the head-slapping interceptions that increasingly appear to be a feature, not a bug, of Joe Cox's game; an inability to consistently keep any of our defensive backfield within seven yards of a receiver. I distinctly remember that on Florida's second touchdown pass, the one where Brandon Boykin actually did cover Riley Cooper beautifully and Cooper caught it anyway, we had a defender -- either Reshad Jones or Bryan Evans, he had a single-digit number -- running around in the middle of the field with nobody from either team within 20 yards of him. That was what we were doing for two weeks?

I'm not saying we should've been expecting a win over Florida. But Tennessee managed not to lose to Florida by 24 points. Arkansas, a team we unloaded on back in September, managed not to lose to Florida by 24 points. Mississippi State managed not to lose to Florida by 24 points. A common refrain in many of the picks columns I read predicting a big Florida win was the idea that the Gators were "due" for a big offensive performance, but there's no such thing as being "due" for something like that; more often than not that's code for "playing a defense that can't stop you even when you're not very good," and we've now been that for two of the last three teams we've faced.

The black pants and helmets were lipstick on a pig, a neon sign hanging over the heads of our coaches indicating they're officially out of ideas. Starting Bacarri Rambo, the only member of our secondary who's demonstrated a consistent ability to cover, much less intercept, anything this season? Actually trying to return punts rather than putting Logan Gray back deep to declare to the world we have no intention whatsoever of returning it? Letting Blair Walsh boot kickoffs deep on a regular basis? (Yes, he put most of his KOs in the end zone, but there were a couple of instances where the old directional kicking reared its ugly, arbitrary head once again, for reasons I cannot even begin to speculate on.) Our play is sloppy and inconsistent because the decisions being made at the top are sloppy and inconsistent. It's bad enough that we're eight games into the season and still throwing things at the wall to see if they'll stick; sadly, we appear to have torn through our Bag Of Things To Throw so completely that we're down to uniform switcheroos, which is even worse.

I've spent so much time railing away at our coaching staff this season that some people might stumble onto this site and get the impression that I've started to enjoy it. For the record, I don't. I've lived and died with these guys for eight-plus seasons now, through such triumphs as the '02 SEC championship and the '07 winning streak, and I absolutely feel a twinge of disloyalty whenever I talk about the prospect of dismissing anyone who played a part in those accomplishments. But with each passing week I get more and more of a feeling that our coaches have begun to stagnate, that "This is how we've always done it so we're going to keep doing it this way" has been allowed to supersede logic, statistics, or changing conditions on the actual field of play in our decision-making process. And it would be one thing if that stubbornness were merely resulting in sloppy play, squeaking out four- or five-point victories over opponents we should be hammering, but we're way past that now. Last year Richt suffered the worst blowout loss he'd experienced as Georgia's coach (the 49-10 loss to Florida); in the past month alone, he's now suffered the second and third worst (the 45-19 loss to Tennessee and this past Saturday's, respectively). Is that not enough proof of a program in decline, of problems that go beyond the simple hands-off "stay the course" fix?

Liberal though I may be in my politics, I'm conservative when it comes to football; as I've confessed before, I almost always err on the side of not firing people, and I rarely embrace change just for change's sake. We're getting awfully close, though, to the point where change for change's sake might be a worthwhile course of action, and that includes dumping coordinators, moving freshmen to the top of the depth chart, a switch at quarterback, everything on the table, at least as a sign that "that's the way we've always done things" is no longer our team-wide M.O. Because the game of risk vs. reward we're playing is no longer confined in scope to this season; we're now at a crossroads where we have to start asking whether it's time to focus on next season. And as much as I hate it for the upperclassmen for whom this November may be their final memories of putting on the Georgia uniform, I don't know that it's right to place whatever meager goals we still have in our sights in '09 ahead of the need to lay groundwork for loftier goals in the future -- that'd mean we're selling a hungry, motivated group of youngsters short just to throw a bone to a group of upperclassmen who've failed to produce for a while now. I hate referring to them in those terms, especially when the blame for their underperformance rests back with the coaches. But that's starting to look like the choice we're stuck with.

I apologize for this post being so scattershot and rambling; I also apologize for the fact that it sounds like I've been writing the same post over and over again for the past month or so. I sincerely hope Mark Richt gives me something else to write about after the Tennessee Tech game. But it's got to be something real, not uniform tweaks or backup QBs being put on special teams or more deck chairs being rearranged. The sad thing is, once upon a time I could place near-absolute faith in Richt being able to tell the difference; hopefully I will be able to do so again.

Monday Morning Cage Match XXI:The Battle of Georgia commences.

So the big move went off more or less without a hitch, and here I am, back in Columbus, Georgia, occupying space at my parents' house and charging full speed ahead into the process of trying to figure out what to do next. I suppose I can fool somebody into offering me a job eventually, but for right now I guess I'm kind of like the unemployed, living-with-my-parents version of Don Draper from "Mad Men."

Living at home and desperately searching for work is, with all due respect to my fine parents, not quite where I'd hoped to end up at age 31. But there is something comforting about being back in the familiar, warm embrace of Columbus, Georgia, where most of the front license plates bear the UGA logo as opposed to Alabama or Auburn and the civic corruption has a lean, efficient air of professionalism that Birmingham just hasn't mastered yet. To some extent that warm embrace is kind of like the illusory feeling of warmth you get right before you fall asleep and die of hypothermia, but I'm going to try not to think about anything quite that morbid for the time being. Instead, it's time to take stock of my new (or at least certified pre-owned) surroundings and compare my home state to the other entity claiming its name: State of Georgia vs. Former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Lets git 'er done, or as they might say in Tbilisi, სამაგიეროს მისი გადახდა:

	(State of) Georgia	(Republic of) Georgia
Founded	January 2, 1788	April 9, 1991
WINNER: State
Land area	59,425 sq. mi.	26,916 sq. mi.
WINNER: State
Population	9,685,744	4,260,000
WINNER: State
Ever been invaded by Russia?	No	Yes
WINNER: State
Ever been dominated by Florida?	(sigh) Yes	No
WINNER: Republic
Folk hero	Herschel Walker, Heisman Trophy winner	Kakutsa Cholokashvili, leader of the guerrilla resistance against the Bolshevik regime in the 1920s
WINNER: Tie
Representative cuisine	Barbecue, chicken fingers, beer	Muzhuzhi, khinkali dumplings, homemade vodka
WINNER: State

FINAL SCORE: State of Georgia 6, Republic of Georgia 2. Nothing against our namesake neighbors to the east, but this one wasn't really close.

Takin' it back.

We Are Douchebags - watch more funny videos

All the time, Mr. Blight. All. The. Time.

I don't think I've ever identified with a blog post on a more personal level than I did with this one over at Corn Nation, a Nebraska blog.

Boy, does this guy get me.

Comfortably numb: The Florida preview.

Hello, is there anybody in there? . . .

Hometown: Gainesville, Florida.

Last season: Won a bunch of games, lost to Ole Miss, Tebow's pledge, won a bunch more games (including Georgia), won the SEC title, won the national title, blah blah we're done here.

The season so far: Haven't lost yet, but haven't looked great either; failed to cover in three of their five SEC games to date, including back-to-back nailbiters against Arkansas (at home) and Mississippi State. After reclaiming the top spot in the AP poll this week, they sit at #1 in both major polls and the BCS standings.

Hate index, 1 being fried pork chops, 10 being fried swine flu: Nine, which is high, but not even as high as, say, other rivals of ours such as Tennessee or Georgia Tech. I mean, I'm tired of them beating us all the time, and I can't stand Urban Meyer (at least Spurrier did us the courtesy of having a personality, assface), but it's possible that the Gators (and Tebow in particular) have become such a constant fixture in the media that I don't even bother thinking about them that much on my own anymore. It's almost as if they're this semi-pro team that we've somehow bad-lucked our way into having to play every year, so I'll grit my teeth and grimace through this one week a year I have to worry about them on a personal level but just not spend a lot of energy on them otherwise. (God, reading back over that now, it's even more depressing on the page than it was when I was typing it.)

Associated hottie: UF alumna Jenn Brown, a former correspondent for "Inside the NFL" who now hosts "The Superstars" on ABC and "ESPN Road Trip" on ESPNU, is being touted as "the next Erin Andrews." But Florida is also the alma mater of the current Erin Andrews. Does this mean the Gators are building a monopoly on ridiculously hot, blond, sports-oriented TV personalities? OK, that's enough to get me actively pissed off. How much can one rival fan base be expected to endure, anyway?



What excites me: The Gators may hold the most recent national title and be headed at top speed toward the next one, but something about them has looked . . . off lately. They didn't score any more points against LSU than we did, for example, and whereas we quickly shrugged off a first-quarter barrage from Arkansas to hang 52 points on them, Florida needed a furious (and ref-assisted) fourth-quarter comeback just to squeak by the Hogs 23-20. Last week, the ordinarily reliable Tim Tebow, who'd only thrown two picks all season, managed to toss up two pick-sixes to a Mississippi State pass defense that came into the game ranked 76th in the country. Maybe we all underestimated how much the Gators would be affected by the departure of Percy Harvin to the NFL, maybe we underestimated how much they'd be affected by their switch in offensive coordinators, but either way, there's something wrong with the passing game -- it's ranked 80th in the country in terms of yardage, a good 31 spots behind Georgia -- and it hasn't shown any signs of getting solved over the past few weeks.

This may or may not mean anything at all to a Georgia team that looked unremittingly godawful in nearly every phase of the game against Tennessee, but there were some signs of life against Vanderbilt -- and even if it was only Vanderbilt, we beat them considerably worse than anyone else has managed to this season. Not only that, but we spent last weekend on a bye, which we also enjoyed before our win in Jacksonville two years ago. Finally, the Bulldogs are 7-1 since 1965 against defending national champions, which includes the Gators in both 1997 and '07. We may be 16-point underdogs to the Gators this week, but as I mentioned in my post for Dr. Saturday on this year's Cocktail Party, the 1997 was a twenty-point underdog to UF. So nothing's impossible, as big a mismatch as this game might look like on paper.


I prefer this paper, anyway.

What worries me: Other than punting, protecting the QB, and (occasionally) passing, Georgia just isn't very good at much of anything at the moment. We're second from the bottom in the SEC in both total offense and total defense, next-to-worst in pass defense (in terms of both efficiency and total yardage), and dead last in rushing offense. Florida's passing game may be struggling, but nobody whose secondary recently got lit up by Jonathan Crompton should be feeling too smug about that. And the one phase in which our defense has generally been competent (against the run) is poised to get severely tested by the Gators, who are averaging nearly 260 yards per game on the ground.

Even if we do succeed in corralling the Gator offense into a fourth straight mediocre performance, we're going to have to put some points on the board somehow. The common thread running through all three of our wins over Florida in the last 19 years is that our offense managed to crack the 30-point barrier each time; in the sixteen losses, our highest scoring output was 26 points, and we've averaged only 14. But points are incredibly hard to come by against this Florida defense. They're second in the nation with only 10 points allowed per game, and only one team they've faced (Arkansas) has even managed to make it to 20 against them. If Georgia even manages to make it to double digits in offensive points on Saturday -- which only one opponent, Tennessee of all teams, has managed to do all season -- that's almost a moral victory right there.

Player who needs to have a big game: QB Joe Cox. Our struggles with the running game are a secret to precisely no one at this point, so the game is going to be on the Ginger Ninja's shoulders, at least in the beginning -- and he's going to be up against the nation's best pass defense. So good luck with that, Joe. I know you've taken your lumps this season, but you want to go down in history as a Georgia legend, here's your chance. Hey, you were the one who threw the pass that scored our lone touchdown against the Gators last year! Just do that four or five more times on Saturday and we'll be golden.

What does it all mean?: Given that the last time I actually got to see Georgia in action was three weeks ago, when they got their asses handed to them in Knoxville, I've been strangely at peace about our impending march into the Valley of Death otherwise known as Jacksonville Municipal Stadium. Precisely nobody is picking us to win this game, so unlike, say, last year, it will be very difficult for us to substantially disappoint anyone with our performance. As bad as we've looked for a good part of this season, Florida is the team that's been the subject of the "What's the Matter With . . . ?" editorials of late, and there's a case to be made that they don't even look as good right now as they did in the first part of last season, when they half-assed it against so-so opposition right up to the point where they needed Tebow's now-infamous "pledge" to turn things around. They're no more invincible now than they were then, and there's a part of me that thinks Georgia might just be capable of playing the Ole Miss spoiler role this time around. No, we're not a particularly good team right now, but neither was Ole Miss at the time -- their win in Gainesville was sandwiched between home losses to mediocre Vanderbilt and South Carolina teams -- so between the bye week and our excellent record against defending champs, it's almost enough to make a guy think we've got a shot.

But that's all intangible, hunchy, gut-feeling stuff, of course. The reality is that there are certain things a Georgia team has to do to beat Florida, if the last two decades are any indication, and there's not much reason to think this year's Dawgs are capable of doing them. For one thing, it's anyone's guess as to how we make it to the critical 30-point line. If you throw out the running game -- which I think you can pretty much do, given that the Gators have allowed only two teams to go over 100 yards on the ground against them this year, never mind individual rushers -- the burden shifts to Joe Cox, and more specifically offensive coordinator Mike Bobo, who's going to have to throw some new wrinkles into the passing game. Three weeks ago, Tennessee almost completely neutralized A.J. Green as a deep threat without even double-covering him all that much, yet in spite of that, we barely even looked in the direction of Orson Charles or Aron White in the short passing game. Bobo's going to have to get them more involved, as well as continuing the involvement of guys like Caleb King out of the backfield like we did in the Vandy game, to present a worthwhile threat to the Florida defense. And then maybe, maybe, we can establish some kind of running game underneath that.

If we can accomplish that, then we can probably keep the game somewhat close, at least, in light of the struggles that the Gators have been experiencing on offense. Part of the reason for those struggles, obviously, is Florida's lack of a deep threat in the passing game, but looking at their stats over their last three games, it seems that another part of that is a lack of imagination on offensive coordinator Steve Addazio's part. Obviously Tebow can be counted on to dominate the stat sheets in most of the games in which he plays, but lately he's been dominating in terms of the plays that are called to begin with:

Opp.	Total yards	Tebow yards	Total plays	Tebow plays
LSU	327	172 (52.6%)	64	33 (51.6%)
Ark.	391	324 (82.9%)	72	53 (73.6%)
MSU	376	215 (57.2%)	69	44 (63.8%)
Avg.	365	237 (64.9%)	68	43 (63.4%)

Even on designed running plays, there's a nearly 50-percent chance that Tebow's number is going to be called. Why the play-calling would be so single-minded when the Gators have a wealth of lightning-fast quarkbacks such as Jeff Demps, Brandon James, and Chris Rainey in the backfield, I have no idea, but Addazio's reluctance to rely on any of them does simplify things somewhat for our defense. Of course, as frustrated as Florida fans might be with Addazio's playcalling, I still have to assume he was smart enough to have watched some tape from the Tennessee-Georgia game, in which case he's discovered that Willie Martinez has no idea how to defend a well-executed play-action strategy. If the Gators decide to do that to us, then the game will be over in a hurry no matter how much of it ends up resting on Tebow's shoulders. But I'm going to try not to think about that right now.

The thing I can't just summarily block out of my mind is turnovers. Last year, in spite of the final score, we actually managed to stay pretty close to Florida on the stat sheet (and finished with more total yards than the Gators); what killed us was a -4 turnover margin, including three picks from Matt Stafford. I don't need to remind anyone just how much we've struggled with turnovers this year. We've had at least three turnovers, and finished behind in the final margin, against everyone except LSU and Vandy this year; Joe Cox has thrown at least one interception in every game. Even if we manage to keep things close in the early going, turnovers are going to be our undoing eventually. Florida actually hasn't been great in that category either -- they're -1 on the year after coughing up four fumbles to Arkansas -- but they've picked off 10 passes this year and are a virtual lock to snatch one or two from Cox on Saturday.

I can see the first half of this game unfolding in a fashion similar to the LSU game: Minimal production from the Georgia offense, yet we manage to stay in the game due to the Gators playing conservatively and settling for field goals where they should be scoring touchdowns. But I think they'll pull away in the second half due to a turnover on our part or a big Tebow play, and that's all she wrote. If I had to put money on it one way or the other, I'd bet on us covering the 16-point spread, but the Gators will still conclude the second decade of their awful, miserable, and inexplicable hex over us with a 17-3 record.

Is it bad that I'm barely even worked up over it at this point? That I'll settle for a close, valiantly played loss so that we can get on to other, winnable games? It is? Oh, well. Play me off, Pink Floyd.



If you're trash-talking: Then you're either very brave, very dumb, very drunk, or some combination of the three. Either way, there is no useful help I can offer you, other than to say go with God, son.

I will run up and down the street in front of my house wearing nothing but a Georgia flag wrapped about my nether regions if: Georgia wins, period. Ask me nicely and I might even do it without the flag. I think a victory on Saturday might merit something like that.