Time to think and time to kill.

Noticed a whole bunch of kids traipsing around downtown and North Campus yesterday morning as I was heading to the Tent City tailgate, which I suppose tells you everything you need to know about what kind of game this was. Paradoxically, it was the kind of game you'd have to be a real die-hard to give a crap about, yet the real die-hards all dumped their tickets on casual-fan acquaintances who could say, "Hey, great, I can take my kids to a real Georgia gameday and then leave at halftime before they start getting antsy." And leave at halftime they did, for with Georgia carrying a 41-0 lead into the third quarter, the stands already looked as depleted as, well, as I remember Legion Field being for the first quarter of your typical UAB game.

Given that Idaho State is not only a I-AA team but a I-AA team of a significantly lower competitiveness level even than most I-AA teams we've scheduled for executions in recent years, there ain't a whole lot worthwhile to take from Saturday, but I'll entertain you with what snippets I can:

· I'm not excited that we gave up an easy opportunity for a shutout by losing focus and allowing Idaho State a garbage-time TD in the fourth quarter, but I'll excuse it because a) I don't blame any of our players for looking ahead to Auburn and b) the guy who caught the shutout-negating TD was wide receiver Rodrick Rumble. He may be a player on a bad DI-AA team, but he's definitely got a I-A caliber name.

· Nice to see Bruce Figgins out there for the first time in what felt like three years. (Actually, the TD he caught right before halftime was his first in three years, so.) Still, seeing all those names in the box score -- 10 different guys caught passes for us Saturday, including Figgy, Marlon Brown, and Israel Troupe -- kinda made me wonder: Where the hell have those guys been all season? Troupe, in particular, I was really high on in the preseason, yet he's basically disappeared this year. A.J. Green was out for the first month of the season and we didn't try any harder than this to work those guys into the game plan?

· I hate calling out individual players for random dumbassery, but for reals, Vance Cuff is making a strong push for the Bryan Evans Dude Seriously What The Fuck Lifetime Achievement Award. Here's a sequence spanning the third and fourth quarters that kind of sums up #25's Georgia career in a nutshell: Three and a half minutes left in the third quarter, Cuff picks off Idaho State's QB and turns it around for Georgia's final score of the day. Eight and a half minutes of game time later, ISU's first drive of the fourth quarter, Cuff gets aced on a 33-yard pass reception that moves the Bengals into Georgia territory for the first time all day, and then on the very next play gets tagged for a PI call that moves ISU down to the Bulldog 25. Couple plays later, Idaho State passes for a touchdown and ends Georgia's shutout.

Actually, that's a pretty apt metaphor for Georgia football in general the past two or three seasons -- anything good is followed in relatively short order by something embarrassing. Which means that even if we do somehow pull a miracle next week and hand Auburn their first loss of the season, we'll just go out two weeks later and get blown off our own field by Tech. So it goes.

· You could tell Idaho State's offensive coaches were doing everything in their power to make sure their QBs got rid of the ball as soon as possible. The bad news is that plan worked well enough to hold Georgia to only one sack all day long, by Christian Robinson; the good news is that ISU's passers weren't terribly accurate when they were sped up like that, which was reflected in their combined 42.8 QB rating on the afternoon. (Starter Russel Hill, who completed two passes to his team and two to ours, finished with a 1.68.)



· I can't remember who pointed this out at the tailgate on Saturday -- if it was you, e-mail me and I'll give you full credit -- but in their five wins this season, Georgia's average margin of victory is 35.8 points. Their total margin of defeat in their five losses is 35 points. Now, granted, that stat is skewed somewhat by the fact that our five wins came against some truly horrendous competition -- none of whom is currently blessed with a winning record -- but to be that dominant in wins, and to be close enough even in the losses to average being within a single score every time, just shows to go you how close this team might've been to being something special this year.

Elsewhere:

· Did it seem like this weekend a) was fairly bereft of truly interesting games and b) kind of felt like the CFB equivalent of Sweeps Week, where all the big contenders (and even quite a few non-contenders) were running up ricockulous scores as if they were trying to impress people? Duke over Virginia, 55-48. Florida and Georgia each hitting the double-nickel against crap opponents. Oklahoma State hitting the double-nickel against a good opponent (Baylor, and when was the last time you were surprised at the Bears getting beaten that badly?). Sixty-four points for Tulsa, 76 for Navy in an opponent's home stadium, forty-seven for TCU in an opponent's home stadium and against a team the pollsters considered top-five at the time. Forty-two points and 737 total yards for Boise State; 63 points and 844 total yards for Nevada.

· And that's even before we get to the bizarre Michigan-Illinois game, which qualified as a shootout long before it went to triple OT. Maize & Blue fans, did you ever think you'd be celebrating a return to bowl eligibility directly following a game in which you gave up 65 points to Ron Zook?



· One more dose of humility for Dawg fans in a season that didn't really need another one -- Colorado led a fairly hapless Kansas team 35-10 at halftime and 45-17 in the fourth quarter, only to give up five TDs in barely 10 minutes of game time in the fourth quarter and lose by a touchdown. But we couldn't muster a fourth-quarter comeback against the Buffs even with A.J. Green on the field. Seriously, God, after all the good works Mark Richt has done in Your name, you'd think You'd treat a brother a little better than that.

· UAB Blazers Watch: Speaking of teams that can't ever do something good without immediately following it with a fuckup, the Blazers lost to Marshall by two TDs at home and now need to run the table against ECU, Memphis and Rice to make it to a bowl. The last two games are eminently winnable, and East Carolina's even winnable if you saw how horrendous their defense was against Navy, but many years of experience tells me UAB's seventh loss is almost assuredly just around the corner. Actually, what'll probably happen is they upset ECU next week and then get punked by Memphis at home the very next Saturday.

· Wofford Terriers Watch: Tweren't pretty, but the Terriers knocked off Samford 10-3 last Saturday to run their winning streak to eight games, and -- with Appalachian State having lost to Georgia Southern in OT the same day -- take sole possession of first place in the Southern Conference. Should Wofford win at App State this weekend, they'll clinch the conference title outright, which may be the one positive thing I get to take out of college football this year.

· And as long as we're talking Terriers, I should mention one last thing about the Georgia game, or more accurately the tailgate, which is to say that Jenna drank like a champion on Saturday -- she was feeling it a little the next morning, but was back up and at 'em by mid-afternoon, and for that she remains an inspiration to us all.

Consider for a minute who you are, what you'd like to change . . .

Is it just me or are postgame victory celebrations even more satisfying in other people's stadiums?

My sister told me a joke one time about the difference between Gentile moms and Jewish moms (and she heard it from a Jewish friend of hers, so no charges of anti-Semitism, please): If a Gentile mom gives her son two neckties for Christmas and sees him wearing one of them, she says, "Oh, you're wearing one of the ties I got you, it looks so nice!" If a Jewish mother buys her son two ties for Hanukkah and sees him wearing one of them, she sighs and says, "What's the matter, you didn't like the other tie?"

That joke popped into my head as I was looking back over the stats for the Georgia-Kentucky game this past weekend -- if you looked at the box score and only the box score, you'd think a) the offense didn't accomplish much except for Washaun Ealey and b) the defense got shredded. Both of those statements are true, and yet not. The offense didn't accomplish much other than Ealey's 157 yards and five TDs, but mainly because it didn't have to; Kentucky's cavalcade of turnovers meant our average starting position in the first half was at the Wildcat 40. Which was only fair, given that a turnover-fueled second-half implosion was what basically handed Kentucky the win in Athens last November. Some statistically misleading wins you feel guilty about because you feel like you got lucky and stole something, but if Kentucky doesn't feel guilty about last year's win -- and they don't appear to, not that they should -- then I feel just fine about this one.


Sanders Commings intercepts a pass intended for Kentucky receiver and MSNBC political gadfly Chris Matthews.

Because this win didn't come down to luck -- somebody on the other side of the line of scrimmage had to make those turnovers happen, and that's where we get to statement b), the inference that the defense got shredded because they gave up 427 yards and 31 points. Yeah, our third-down defense was kind of atrocious, and I'll admit the thought of breaking a household appliance flashed through my mind as the 'Cats converted four straight third-and-longs on their second drive. While the defense did a lot of bending, though, it didn't do all that much breaking until the fourth quarter, when the game was pretty well in hand. Not that it was especially inspiring to hear players admit that they "relaxed" with a big lead in the second half, but when you're 19 years old and you're leading 41-17 in the fourth quarter of a conference game, I guess there's a tendency for those kinds of things to happen.

Here's the greater impression I got from Saturday's game: That increased aggressiveness that Todd Grantham promised us all through the off-season is finally starting to make itself apparent. Against Kentucky, we were better than +2 in turnover margin for the first time all season, and for only the third time in the last three years. We only forced 12 turnovers all of last season; just two-thirds of the way through 2010, we've already forced 15, and are sitting at +7 on the year, a blessed number after last year's wretched -16. And the front seven have been playing unbelievably well lately. Akeem Dent is flying to the ball like a guided missile, and Justin Houston . . . I've heard the voices of more than a few rival fans crack a little when they mention his name. (I wish I could describe to you the smile I get on my face when I hear this; you'll just have to watch this and let your imagination take it from there.)

The yang to the yin, of course, is that with greater aggressiveness comes greater risks, and we saw that Saturday night, as Georgia's relentless blitzing did sort of allow the defensive backfield to turn into a crapshoot. When the pressure worked, our guys paved Kentucky's O-line and made Mike Hartline do something stupid; when it didn't, unreasonably long third downs got converted, and occasionally points were scored. Still, if you'd told me before the game started that the payoff for such pain would be a 41-17 lead that turned the vast majority of the fourth quarter into what the average fan would probably call "garbage time," I'd have taken you up on that offer. If the greater aggressiveness Grantham has already preached to his unit is already paying off this handsomely in more turnovers and sacks, then I'm optimistic about what our D could look like once he's had a chance to refine their technique and minimize some of that risk.


Washaun, the evil brother of Knowshon, hits the mushroom boost and speeds into the end zone.

So now it's off to Jacksonville, where God only knows what's going to happen. Three weeks ago, though, who on earth would've thought that the Dawgs would march into this game matching, if not exceeding, the Gators' swagger (and impressing the oddsmakers enough to be favored by three points)? I was as miserable as any of y'all were when the clock ticked down to 00:00 in Boulder and we put the last bit of frosting on a 1-4 start, but if Tyler Durden really was right all along about how once you lose everything you're free to do anything, maybe this was what it took to get our swagger back and turn back into the kind of team we'd wanted to be all along . . . in which case it just might've been worth it.

But I guess we won't know until Saturday night.

Fleeting thoughts:

· I never thought I'd be thinking to myself that I'm far more terrified of a Gene Chizik team than an Urban Meyer team, but when you get right down to it, it's not 5-19 Gene I'm afraid of:



There aren't enough jocks in the entire LSU equipment locker to replace all the ones that their players got faked out of on that one run alone. Maybe Auburn gets caught looking ahead to the Iron Bowl in a few weeks and we manage to pull another 2006-style miracle out of our asses, but otherwise I'm thinking we really better beat Florida (and Idaho State, and Tech) if we want to avoid going 6-6 this year.

· Here's a couple questions for you, and feel free to answer honestly in the comments, because I have a feeling my answers are probably the same as yours: 1) Three weeks ago, how much money would you have paid to switch places with the Texas Longhorns, and 2) how badly would you want that money back right now?

· Here's another one: Over/under on a hypothetical Oregon-Auburn matchup in the national championship game -- how high would it have to be for you to take the under?


Since I was thisclose to going to Mizzou, I kinda have to feel happy for these guys.

· If the regular season ended today, the Big 12's final championship game would be Missouri vs. Baylor. I'll give you a few minutes to stop laughing.

· UAB Blazers Watch: For the second time in the past month, UAB erased a deficit on the road against an SEC opponent only to fall in the final seconds. It's looking highly unlikely that they'll make a bowl this year, but they're sure playing their asses off. (And yes, it pains me greatly that the Blazers gave State a tougher challenge than we did.)

· Wofford Terriers Watch: A 28-21 win over Elon keeps the mighty Terriers undefeated in Southern Conference play; they'll face the only other undefeated SoCon team, Appalachian State, on Nov. 13 in a game that will more than likely decide the league championship and an invite to the division playoffs.

We can't agree about anything, where to go or even where we've been.

Uga VIII (left) and Russ sniff one another, and a torch is passed.

Before we get to the actual bidness here, I want to take a moment to tip my cap to Russ, a DGD who just had the misfortune of coming along at the wrong time. Though Russ presided over that four-game losing streak that even now is a little tough to talk about, he bookended it with the wins over Georgia Tech and Texas A&M last year and this year's four-touchdown Racheblitzkrieg against the Vols, so never let it be said that nothing good happened under his brief interim reign. He passes the collar to Uga VIII with a 4-4 record and, as far as I'm concerned, his big jowly head held high, and he is no less deserving of a dotage of fine meats and cheeses and decadent ice bags than any of the "official" Ugas who came before him.

But a new day, and a new bulldog, have dawned, which means it's time to look forward. And looking forward entails making sense of this:



South Carolina, your clubhouse leader, remains in first place (though only with a .500 record) after taking the pipe from a Kentucky team that's still only a half-game out of last place even after the victory. Vanderbilt still controls its own destiny despite taking a 43-point jackhammering from a Georgia team that somehow does not control its own destiny, but that Georgia team, despite having just recently snapped their worst losing streak in 20 years, is still tied with the Florida team that was last year's runaway division champion. And then there's Tennessee at the bottom, still awaiting their first conference win -- but at the rate things are going, can anyone say with any degree of certainty that they won't be right back in the thick of it in just a couple weeks?

Just a few weeks ago, Georgia fans -- myself included -- were convinced that our team sucked and the universe was imploding. Now it turns out that it was just the SEC East imploding, and while our team may yet be no better than mediocre, that still might be enough to win the damn thing. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and in the land that's doing a bang-up impression of the ACC at the moment, the one-eyed man who's just pantsed two straight conference opponents by an aggregate score of 84-14 is no less worthy of wearing the crown than anyone else.


Why Carlton Thomas isn't celebrating his TDs with the "Carlton dance" from "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," I still can't figure out.

Mind you, this should not be read as gloating or overconfidence. Should the 2010 SEC season continue in this fashion, then even if Georgia comes out at the end with a not-humiliating record, a lot of people are going to be kicking themselves that we didn't grab winnable games against Arkansas and Colorado and take a lot more advantage of the chaos than we actually did. If the rest of the division is this bad, then it's entirely reasonable to look back and wonder why we didn't do a better job of bringing it under our heel. Whether we finish 8-4 or 5-7, those first five weeks of the season are going to seem like a real missed opportunity.

But OK, again, time to look forward, not back. What have we got right now? Well, we've got a young QB who's fifth in the SEC (and 18th nationally) in passing efficiency despite never having thrown a pass in a Georgia uniform prior to September 4. We've got an offensive line that is finally starting to come together and open up some holes for a running game that had been left for dead after Caleb King got suspended. We've got a defense that is -- get ready -- ranked 14th in the nation (and third in the conference) in total yards allowed, better than the Florida or South Carolina units that were supposed to be so stocked this year. A few weeks ago, we were at a point when we were starting to wish we could trade places with Mississippi State or Kentucky; Saturday night, I saw a couple Tweets from Florida fans looking longingly at us.


Welcome to the SEC East, where everybody looks like this.

I'm still trying to decide whether this season is more like a Kafka story or a "Twilight Zone" episode. Maybe it's both -- sort of an even weirder cross between The Metamorphosis and "The Eye of the Beholder": On October 3 we woke up to find that we'd turned into a cockroach -- and two weeks later we ventured outside to find that everyone else had turned into cockroaches, too.

Now, after all this we're still only 3-4 and flawed in a lot of areas, perhaps the biggest being our ability to get all our star players on the field at the same fucking time. (After Caleb King's arrest and suspension, I suggested -- only half-jokingly -- that Mark Richt rescind our players' driving privileges across the board, confiscating their licenses and only handing them back when they make big plays, kind of the way they receive dawg-bone stickers for their helmets.) But in the event we ever do get everyone on the field at once, it's starting to look like we may not actually be that bad a team. There's still a lot of football to be played. but at this point I think I'm actually looking forward to watching those games be played and tabling the Mark Richt Hot Seat debate until well into December.

Elsewhere in misery:

· How delicious is it that less than two weeks after Steve Spurrier called Les Miles out for succeeding in spite of himself, Spur Dog tries to channel the Lesticles himself in the closing minutes of South Carolina's game against Kentucky -- only turns out Spurrier isn't nearly as good at being Les Miles as Les Miles is. Dude, even I'm smart enough not to call a time-out when the clock's already stopped.


You can lie to your kids, Urb, but you can't lie to God. (From Bubbaprog at 30fps)

· As far as Florida is concerned, I know I have no right to bag on someone else for losing to Mississippi State, but at least we did it on the road, and at least we were playing well enough to make State have to work for it. In the Swamp, MSU threw only one pass in the second half, and afterward Dan Mullen was griping about how they should've won by more than they did.

· I can't imagine a more terrifying offense to play than Auburn right now. It's almost enough to make me hope for an Auburn-Oregon national title game. What do you think the over-under on that would be? Do you think it'd creep up into triple digits?

· Florida and Michigan are out of the top 25; Mississippi State is in. Michigan State is a top-10 team. Oklahoma is third behind Oregon and Boise State in both polls, but #1 in the first edition of the BCS standings. Somehow it's comforting to know that the SEC East's chaos syndrome is spreading nationwide.


Two more teams you'll never be able to figure out no matter how hard you try.

· UAB Blazers watch: Directly on the heels of a 42-7 pounding by UCF, the Blazers come home to host a 5-1 UTEP team, and keep that team out of the end zone for four quarters in a 21-6 victory. If people would just leave UAB for dead every week, they'd probably be 5-1 right now themselves.

· Wofford Terriers watch: No problem whatsoever for the mighty Terriers this week as they rolled over Western Carolina 45-14. If you follow Pat Forde on Twitter, you've probably noticed that he ends all his Boise State-related Tweets with "Bus.", in reference to him proudly getting on the Boise-State-for-national-title bus in the very beginning of the season. As I am now firmly on board whatever mode of public transport the Wofford-Terriers-for-FCS-national-championship movement is using, I'll now be ending my Wofford-related posts with "Train," "Tram," "Shinkansen" or something along those lines. If you have any suggestions as to what I can use, have at it.

It's about getting out of a rut, you need luck . . .

This was a good idea. Let's keep doing this.

Here's what a bizarre alternate-universe funhouse the SEC has turned into this year: Florida can't score, Alabama is powerless to stop a South Carolina QB, and if the regular season ended today, the SEC title game would be South Carolina vs. an LSU team whose fortunes really do seem to be determined by a Buffalo Wild Wings bartender fiddling with a remote control underneath the counter. And my first thoughts about this past weekend's game against the Vols, one of our bitterest conference rivals, are almost exactly what I was thinking in the immediate aftermath of the UL-Lafayette game that opened the year: "Well, we have to put an asterisk by this game because it was an obviously weak opponent, blah blah blah . . . "

I feel weird writing those words, partly because I'm close to someone who has a rather deep emotional investment in Tennessee's fortunes, partly because I myself miss the days when UGA-UT was too important to merit a 12:21 kickoff called by the surviving remnants of the late, great Jefferson Pilot empire. But there's no denying that Tennessee is a hobbled team this year, and at no point more so than the Saturday they played us. An offensive line peppered with underclassmen, with the injury situation almost severe enough to render a term like "two-deep" academic. A QB who actually makes Tennessee pine for the good ol' days of Jonathan Crompton. A depleted roster across the board, to the point where they probably could've fit all of their scholarship players on one of those chartered Delta CRJs that flew over the stadium toward the end of the fourth quarter. Beating this team signifies nothing in the long run for the 2010 season, other than I won't have to hear anyone yell "45-19" in my face for the rest of it. We're not going to face too many other teams (if any) whose QBs aren't even facing forward as the ball is snapped past them for 23-yard losses, nor any teams for whom fielding a fair catch is that problematic. (And how awesome does Logan Gray look right now, huh? Huh?)

All that said, though, a four-touchdown victory over any team, particularly a detested SEC East rival, is a big deal in the immediate term for this Georgia squad. For the previous four weeks, the Dawgs found increasingly infuriating ways to lose games; this time they actually found ways to win. They grabbed turnovers, they converted opportunities in the end zone, they caught even the passes that weren't thrown to A.J. Green. If all that was was a mediocre team beating up on a straight-up lousy one, then there's a definite ceiling to how excited we can afford to be about all this, but if it was a Georgia team rediscovering how to win, then it's something we can run with.


Remember where you were this day: Georgia defenders actually wrapping up a ball-carrier!

As impressive as the Aaron-Murray-to-A.J.-Green connection already looks after barely more than a game and a half -- I want people to be talking about these two guys like the Montana-to-Rice of college football by the end of the season, and I think I'm only partially joking about that -- the most impressive performance of the entire afternoon, to me, might have been that of the front seven. Tauren Poole might be the most talented and versatile running back we've faced all season (yes, even more than Marcus Lattimore), and it's not much of an exaggeration to say I was losing sleep over what he might do to our defense. But he was rendered a non-factor very early on in the game, and that was only partly due to the weakness of his offensive line. The other part was due to the fact that we actually wrapped up and tackled him, and I can't help but think that has something to do with the fact that we went full-contact #1s-on-#1s last Monday, something we practically never do on the first day of a practice week. If that's what it takes to get the team amped-up and purge the tendency to arm-tackle, then I know there's a greater chance of injury in that kind of situation, but by all means, please, let's keep doing it. Richt has indicated that we won't be going full-contact again this Monday, but I've heard that there will be more #1s-on-#1s later on in the week, so it's a sign of hope, if nothing else, that the toughness issue has been noticed and is being addressed. This team attacked and wrapped up with a fierceness that I haven't seen in quite a while.

Obviously there are still concerns. The offensive line, despite Stacy Searels' tinkering during the week, still can't run-block for shit; Caleb King reeled off some decent runs that managed to keep the chains moving at various points, but when your longest run of the game by an RB is only eight yards, you don't have the right to call anything "fixed" yet. And even though it didn't end up mattering in the long run, it hurt to see our secondary continue to get burned the way they did, particularly on Tennessee's long drives of the second half. The problems that they're having are similar enough to the problems they've been having for years now that I'm inclined to write it off to the lingering effects of Willie Martinez' coaching, but it's sad to think that it's taking this much time to get that stuff coached out of them, or that we may have to wait for a truly lock-down secondary until Scott Lakatos can get a chance to recruit some of his own players.


I will never begrudge an opportunity to be happy for these guys.

But a 27-point win is a 27-point win; I'm grateful for it, grateful to no longer be at the bottom of the SEC East, grateful that I can look at games like Vandy and Kentucky as winnable rather than being stuck mentally calculating the chances we end up going 2-10 this year. That's about as much as we can count on right now, as uninspiring as that sounds. But it's a start. We cross our fingers and say a prayer that the coaches and players alike take the good from this game and vow to keep doing it, and we move along.

In other news:

· So yes, I'd be striking a more flamboyantly celebratory tone right now if more of our success on Saturday had come from us being that good rather than from Tennessee screwing up, but it's not like Georgia wasn't overdue for a lucky bounce, and hey, we can't all be Les Miles. For the entirety of this season, the debate over LSU has been "Is Les Miles that good or is he just lucky," but I think after Saturday night we can officially deem that question academic. I mean, they needed practically every lucky bounce in the book just to make it to 9-4 last season, and that was with the end-of-game clock-management brain farts (hat farts?) against Ole Miss and Penn State; if the concept of "regression to the mean" meant anything to Miles, the Tigers would be 3-3 right now. Hate on them all you want -- and I have -- but you know you'd trade places with them right now in a heartbeat. (Best comment of the day: an assessment over at Senator Blutarsky's joint of Miles as "an escaped mental patient who played a lot of Tecmo Bowl.")



· As for their if-the-season-ended-today opponents in the SECCG, thank you, Sakerlina, for silencing (at least temporarily) the ADD section of the Georgia fan base who insists we should hire Kirby Smart yesterday to be our new head coach. Not that Smart/Saban's defense was the sole reason for Alabama's first loss since the '09 Sugar Bowl, but come on, even Georgia's busted-ass secondary didn't let Stephen Garcia hit 17 of 20. All of this is just a way of distracting from the fact that Saban is probably going to whip the shit out of his team this weekend to the point where they don't lose another game all season, but still, I think I'm actually going to look forward to the opportunity to tune into Finebaum on my drive home this afternoon.

· Don't look now, but Florida State looks like they're quietly making a bid to reclaim the title of Best Team in Florida. They rolled Miami way worse than Ohio State did -- on the road, no less -- and they've even been playing pretty decently on defense since getting carpet-bombed at Oklahoma a few weeks ago. When I was back in college, Florida-Florida State was a tentpole game on the college football calendar, perhaps even more so than the Iron Bowl or Michigan-OSU; I've been highly skeptical of Jimbo Fisher's chances in Tallahassee, but if he can make that game relevant again, more power to him.

· Speaking of Ohio State, what's the rationale for making them the #1 team in the country following Alabama's loss and not, say, Oregon or TCU? Oregon's going to be my top pick when I finish up my BlogPoll ballot later on today, given that a) tOSU's win over Miami just lost a lot of prestige and b) Oregon's marquee victory over a very good Stanford team can go toe-to-toe with anyone else's in the country. (On a related and possibly more hilarious note, I think the entire Rose Bowl committee simultaneously crapped their pantaloons Saturday night at the prospect of losing not one but both of their tie-in teams to the national championship game, which alone would make an Ohio State-Oregon rematch worth it.)



· Or, hey, how about Nebraska for the #1 spot? Second nationally in rushing yards, 106th in passing yards, just finished off a five-touchdown napalming of Kansas State -- if they haven't yet turned back into what they were during the Tom Osborne days, they're doing a damn good job of looking like they have. (And just as the Cornhuskers appear poised to lend a little stability and familiarity to the college football landscape as I know it, they're getting ready to jump to the Big Ten. I just can't win sometimes.)

· Haven't done the weekly UAB Blazers Watch in a while, partly because I've been too depressed about Georgia's woes to spend much time worrying about other rooting interests, partly because UAB's own woes have been too depressing to talk about. The latest injustice: a 42-7 loss at the hands of George fucking O'Leary and the UCF Golden Knights. With the Blazers at 1-4 and oh-fer in Conference USA play thus far, it looks like it might be time to pack up my prediction of a 2010 bowl for the Blazers and stash it in the attic for next season.

· So leave it to the Wofford Terriers Watch to save the day: Terrier U beat Georgia Southern at the Eagles' own game on Saturday, rolling up 302 rushing yards behind a triple-option attack on the way to a 33-31 win. That puts them at 2-0 in Southern Conference play and 4-1 overall; next to get wet up is Western Carolina, who just got hammered 38-7 by Samford. You don't want to mess with the realness, WCU.

Make a firm decision, it's time to go.

Since 2003, Georgia has alternated between opening its seasons with marquee matchups against legit contenders and opening with tune-ups against mid-major or I-AA scrubs. This being an even-numbered year, it was time to go the latter route -- which was good in the sense that we were coming into 2010 with enough major question marks that a tune-up game would be worthwhile, yet bad in that no matter how good we looked in this area or that area against Louisiana-Lafayette, there'd only be so many conclusions we could draw because it was, you know, Louisiana-Lafayette.

In spite of that, it seems like it's been a long time since I've seen Bulldog Nation leaving Sanford Stadium as collectively pumped as they appeared to be Saturday afternoon. I've become accustomed -- as, I'm sure, have many of you -- to seeing Georgia dispatch these early-season gimme games methodically but with little to no flair whatsoever, spending the first 10 minutes or so screwing around and missing out on big scoring opportunities by tripping over their own feet, then spending the final quarter (or two) standing by passively as the opponent makes the final score look closer than it actually was by launching some big scoring plays past a squad of less-than-focused third-stringers. Saturday, though, was a revelation, or as close to one as you can get when you're playing a Sun Belt team. Almost from the opening gun -- I say "almost" because, yeah, when ULL's kick returner brought the opening kickoff back to within spitting distance of midfield, I did briefly have paranoid visions of Jon Fabris lurking on the sideline -- we grabbed the Ragin' Cajuns by the throat and held on for the full 60 minutes, something I'm not accustomed to seeing us do even when we're supposed to be practically invincible. With numerous major question marks swirling around the team, we still managed to open a make-or-break season with the biggest margin of victory the Dawgs have enjoyed in the entire Mark Richt era. Sun Belt team or no Sun Belt team, I won't begrudge Bulldog Nation any excitement over that.



Question mark number one was Aaron Murray, who looked damned impressive out there, miles ahead of the kid who looked like he hadn't quite put it all together in the G-Day game back in April. If anything, Murray sometimes looked too confident -- that touchdown scramble to end the first half was the kind of luck you can reasonably expect to get against UL-Lafayette; pretty sure you can't expect to get it against, say, South Carolina -- but if you give me the choice between a kid who wants to make plays and a kid who just wants to take what the defense will give him and then get the hell off the field, you know I'll take the first guy every time. Murray may have relied on his legs a little too much, but I'll say this for him, he looked awfully good throwing on the run with that light-speed release of his. And while he may have made some questionable decisions with his legs, he didn't make many with his arm: There was only one pass all afternoon about which I found myself muttering, "Ooh, dude, you really shouldn't have thrown that," and it was the pass to the back of the end zone that the Lafayette DB should've intercepted but instead dropped. (Supposedly Murray was trying to throw the ball away by launching it past the end zone; I'm confident that either Richt or Mike Bobo was quick to inform him that that's what sidelines are for, son.) Murray's one pick, meanwhile, was a beautiful laser beam to an in-stride Kris Durham that took an extremely unlucky bounce off Durham's sternum and into the hands of his defender. If what we saw on Saturday was the kind of decision-making we can expect from Murray over the course of the season, then no disrespect to Matt Stafford, but it's looking like Murray's learning curve at the QB position might be a lot closer to David Greene's than Staff's.

And then there was the defense. I didn't think we'd be giving up 30-something points to the Cajuns, even in the very first outing of our shiny new 3-4 front, but I expected some initial sloppiness and mixed assignments by a bunch of guys still learning what their positions are meant to do. Clearly, that never happened, and if a mysterious Mephistopheles-like figure had approached me before the game and said, "How would you like for your defense to pitch an effective shutout, holding their opponent to just five first downs and 128 total yards," I would've asked him which body parts of mine he wanted in return. Granted, I'm a mere novice when it comes to Xs and Os and I certainly don't know the ins and outs of Todd Grantham's defensive playbook, but it sure looked like our guys knew where they were supposed to be and whom they were supposed to be tackling 99 percent of the time, and they attacked the Cajuns with an aggressiveness that, after years of tentativeness under Willie Martinez, was downright refreshing.



And then there was the play that put the "effective" condition before "shutout" in the above paragraph, the busted coverage that let ULL's Ladarius Green get behind Bacarri Rambo for a 60-yard touchdown reception. From what I've heard, that play was the product of some weird circumstances -- it was the Cajuns' first play after that fluky interception by Murray, and in the Georgia defense's frantic efforts to replace the offense on the field and get situated, some critical communication was lost and Bacarri got burned on the throw. The last person on the field to make any excuses about it, though, was Todd Grantham, who read his entire secondary the riot act on the sideline (and supposedly followed it up with a second mini-rant just for good measure). I'm not the kind of guy who's given to applauding tornadic sideline bluster for its own sake -- you know who else became famous for his red-faced tirades in his players' faces? Ron Zook -- but that said, I had to ask myself, when was the last time a Georgia defender made an egregiously bad decision and was openly held accountable for it by the defensive coordinator? Can't say exactly, but I'm pretty sure the last guy I recall doing that was Brian VanGorder. And if Grantham's intensity on the sideline is a necessary ingredient in the formula that takes us back to those days and away from the meek passivity of the Willie Martinez era, then all I can say is rant away, coach.

Now then, sooner or later we're going to have to return to the obvious question: How much of this can we really translate into something meaningful for the South Carolina game? At the end of the day, we all know the answer is "probably not a whole lot." Lafayette had a modest-at-best running game behind a fairly rickety offensive line, which the Gamecocks will not, if their Thursday-night rout of Southern Miss is any indication. And whatever else we know or don't know about South Carolina, we know their defense is going to make life a hell of a lot more difficult for Aaron Murray than ULL did (last year's bizarre shootout notwithstanding). This game was a confidence-builder; it was not an automatic indicator that the Dawgs have amassed the horses for an SEC title run, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

As confidence-builders go, though, it was pretty invigorating to watch. In the kind of game where we'd normally just be happy to not put in a half-assed performance and maybe come kinda, sorta close to covering the spread, we dropped a double-nickel on the opponent and, just for good measure, did it with nearly a starting lineup's worth of skill-position talent standing on the sideline. We've got 11/12 of a season remaining to figure out whether this game was a harbinger or a mirage, but for one afternoon, at least, the Dawgs were pointed squarely in the right direction.



And for one afternoon, I got to enjoy a heavenly day of tailgating with the Tent City crowd, surrounded by charcoal smoke, hot coeds, and sunshine. OK, maybe a little too much sunshine, as the rosy pink sunburn on the left side of my face will attest. (It's always awesome when the sunburn is only on one side of your face, isn't it? That's never embarrassing. It's just a shame this didn't happen six or seven weeks later, I could be going as Two-Face for Halloween.) But I got to enjoy football -- real, live actual football as a gainfully employed person surrounded by cherished friends -- and was reminded once again what it feels like to be truly blessed. I can only hope that all of you were afforded the same.

Elsewhere:



· Be honest -- Saturday morning, how many of you thought you'd be ending the day thinking, "Boy, I'm really glad we've got our offense and not Florida's"? Now, I know a lot of people are going to be tempted to chalk it up to possible first-game jitters on the part of John Brantley or "Well, we always knew they were going to miss Tim Tebow" or something like that. But the thing is, Brantley didn't have a terrible game (17-of-25, only 113 yards, but two TDs and no picks) -- when he wasn't having to chase bad snaps 10 or 20 yards down the field. I mean, they've had six months to fine-tune the center-QB exchange, which I think we can all agree is a pretty basic aspect of the game, and that's the best they could do? Give them back all the yardage they lost on bad snaps and fumbles and they still would've only amassed 305 total yards for the game, nearly a quarter of which came on Jeff Demps' 72-yard TD scamper late in the game -- one of only two Florida scoring drives that went longer than 30 yards. Which tells me that the guy they're really missing right now is not Tebow but rather Dan Mullen -- and that, if you ask me, is the worse position to be in.

· Of course, whatever glee I felt at watching the Gators' offensive Keystone Koppery was balanced out to some degree by seeing how good South Carolina looked Thursday night. Now, that performance probably deserves as many caveats as ours does, the two biggest being 1) Southern Miss' defense has turned into only a shadow of what it was under Jeff Bower and 2) the eye-opening plays by Carolina's skill-position players disguised what was mostly an average performance by their offensive line. Of course, "average" still handily beats what that unit has been managing for the past three or four seasons, so if Spurrier has finally unlocked the code for a halfway decent line, the Gamecocks could, in fact, be very, very good this year. But if that's the case, I hope we won't be able to make the definitive judgment until long after this Saturday.



· Well, getting the NCAA to reverse their decision on Jeremiah Masoli's eligibility sure did Ole Miss a heap of good, didn't it? Maybe Houston Nutt would've been better served scavenging some defensive players away from Oregon instead.

· Which reminds me: The NCAA had time this past week to rule and re-rule on Masoli, but they couldn't carve some time out of their busy schedule to tell A.J. Green he could play? Seriously, NCAA, fuck you guys.

· The three teams I've seemed to be more down on than the rest of the punditocracy as a whole are USC, Texas, and LSU, and after one weekend I can't say I'm inclined to take a rosier attitude toward any of them. For a team that usually unloads 50-something points on Conference USA opponents without breaking a sweat, Texas took a suspiciously long time putting Rice squarely in their rearview mirror, and while they may have rolled up nearly 200 rushing yards on the Owls, the fact that they needed 46 carries to do so tells me that their running game still isn't what they'd like it to be. As for USC, well, seven out of eight WAC opponents managed not to let Hawaii get to 36 points last season -- so congratulations, Kiffin & Kiffin, on fielding a defense that's better than Utah State's. That and two bucks will get you a grande coffee at Starbucks these days (and an invitation to face Nevada in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl -- whenever you're eligible again, of course).



· As for LSU, I know I said last week that the Chick-fil-A Kickoff might end up being a lifeboat for the winning coach, but after seeing the Tigers' performance in that game, I'm still not certain that LSU is gonna be good enough to save Les Miles's job this year. The game was a thriller, all right, but do not let it go unnoticed that LSU got shut out in the second half (and only managed 313 yards total) against a UNC team whose defense was straight-up decimated by suspensions, or that the Tiger defense got 412 yards hung on it by a quarterback, T.J. Yates, who directed Division I-A's 102nd-ranked passing attack last year. Honestly, I think the UNC fans may have more reason to come out of that game feeling happy: They came within a few yards of upsetting a ranked SEC team despite having the week from hell leading up to the game, and they might even have an offense this year, assuming even more of them aren't dragged down into NCAA purgatory. As for Les Miles, he might have to hope that seven wins and a meh bowl bid clear the bar for job retention, 'cause it may not get much better than that for his team.

· I don't even want to talk about UAB. Led nearly the whole game, had the winning score right in their hands thanks to an incredible 50-yard run in the final minute by QB David "Black Tebow II" Isabelle . . . and then the easily makeable FG gets blocked. OK, I know I said I wasn't going to talk about it. But anyway, it looks like my prediction of the Blazers going back to a bowl this year might require some revision. Still think it could happen, but I'm kinda glad I didn't put any money on it.

That's it, the end,but you'll get over it, my friend.

The Indy Bowl was the maiden voyage for the new #24 jersey I got for Christmas. All things considered, it went pretty well.

You'll recall that I sounded hopeful notes following our bowl wins to end the 2007 and 2008 seasons; I won't make the same mistake this time. I know this season, despite the bowl win, still qualifies as a "lost" season in many Dawg fans' eyes, and even as I was driving around Monday afternoon, taking advantage of a few post-Christmas sales before heading home to gear up for the bowl, I realized that the bowl game itself didn't matter much. A win would be nice, sure, but even if we lost -- even if we got blown out by a fairly embarrassing margin -- we could just chalk it up to the turmoil on the coaching staff, close the door on the season, and start preparing for 2010.

I don't know that an assessment as fatalistic as all that necessarily brought me any peace, though, so it was nice to see the team overcome a rather slow start, slough off all the potential disappointments and motivation-killers that had no doubt dogged them throughout the preparations for a less-than-fully-whelming bowl game, and rise up to pound the Aggies every bit as badly as they should have. It certainly wasn't a perfect effort -- no more perfect than 471 yards and 26 first downs would suggest -- but we all figured that this was going to be kind of a track meet anyhow. Give the defensive players (and particularly their thrown-together coaching staff) credit for allowing A&M to spin all that into only 20 points, rarely breaking even after bending that much.


Defense wins the Grace Under Ridiculous Pressure Award, if there is such a thing.

This morning on the AJC's Web site, Tony Barnhart said that Mark Richt "faces the biggest offseason of his time in Athens as he must hire a new defensive coordinator and develop a starting quarterback for 2010. This was a very good win to start that process." I don't know that I buy the second half of that statement -- this win didn't have any more to do with that "process" than, say, our even more significant (and less expected) regular-season-ending win over Georgia Tech -- after which, you'll recall, we still saw fit to unload three coaches. The Independence Bowl was a fun and inspiring end to a season from which, nevertheless, we will be carrying over very little in terms of attitude or mentality.

But that leads into the first part of Barnart's statement, which is absolutely correct: This is the biggest offseason (well, second-biggest after 2001) of Richt's head-coaching tenure. In 2001, Richt took over a program that seemed to have hit a ceiling on offense, largely stagnated on defense, and had consistently recruited loads of blue-chip talent only to fail to develop them into the kind of winners who believed they could compete, and defeat, the best the SEC had to offer; in short, he took over a program that seemed to have run out of ideas. The situation is not quite as dire in 2009-10 -- Richt obviously starts from a much stronger and more stable foundation now, one that he built himself -- but many of the conditions he's operating under are similar to what he faced in 2001. We're still recruiting great talent, but they're not being molded into players with the mentality of champions. I hate to toss out a phrase as vague and clichéd as "They need to get the fire back," but . . . well, that's what I'm gonna throw out there unless someone comes up with a better idea.

In 2001-02, all the talk was about how Richt had led the way in "knocking the lid off" a program loaded with unfulfilled potential. Somehow, in between our run of division titles and now, the lid has been screwed back on, and it needs to get knocked off again. Bringing in a fiery, hard-charging defensive coordinator is a piece of that process, but it's not the whole thing. I hope that over the course of this off-season, Richt and his coaches will take a look back at the transformation that took place in 2001 and 2002, reacquaint themselves with the changes they brought about both in how the players played and how they thought, and use that as a starting point for what needs to happen as we put the gears in motion again to prepare for 2010.


My memories of this are still pretty vivid.

Granted, the conditions in the SEC are not quite the same now as they were when Richt first arrived. The level of competition, I think we can all agree, is higher; Kentucky and Vanderbilt have gone from automatic Ws to teams we have to sweat over just like everyone else. Tennessee had hit the crest of a slope in 2001 and were starting to head downward; in 2009, they've gone through a trough and are once again headed upward, as much as we all might like to deny it. And the SEC West has gone from being the weak-sister division in the conference to being able to make a case that it's the stronger of the two.

But in the short term, the SEC East will be as wide-open as it's ever been. Florida will have lost its once-in-a-generation quarterback and elite coordinators on both sides of the ball -- precisely the kinds of losses that turned USC from a worldbeater into an also-ran this year -- and even their head-coaching situation has taken a turn for the bizarre. Tennessee will have to replace basically both lines in their entirety and their two most critical offensive skill players. Kentucky will likely be breaking in a first-time head coach; South Carolina, of all teams, might have the best shot at being the division's sleeper champion, but . . . well, we've heard that song and dance before. Georgia's not going to be competing for the national title next season, but if we want to make a statement that we've put our recent disappointments behind us and intend to be right back on top of the East in short order, 2010 would be a damn near perfect time to make it.

So let's pat ourselves on the back over an Independence Bowl well played, but let's not act like it really means that much in terms of momentum for 2010. Let's find ourselves some excellent new defensive coaches, but not expect them to be the ones to snap their fingers and solve all our problems. The task of turning us back into championship contenders is too big and complicated for any one player, coach, or game to solve, and it certainly isn't one that can be completed instantaneously; we really won't have any idea how much progress we've made toward completing it until we put toe to leather on September 4 of next year.

But whereas there were times this past season when I found myself dreading that game and the ones that would follow, I'm looking forward to it again, which is how it should be. Now go forth, Mark Richt, and do good.

And Go Dawgs.


Richt and senior DL Jeff "Huggy Killbear" Owens -- two Damn Good Dawgs.

Blue skies, heaven-sent.

You mess with our hedges, we mess with your turf . . . oh, no, I guess this is our turf now.

First, a confession: Other than Joe Cox's final kneeldown, I still have yet to see any of Georgia's win over Georgia Tech from Saturday night. When that game started, I was watching another game already in progress, and despite repeated offers by the other folks in the room to change the channel, I said no, partly out of a desire not to somehow "jinx" the team (hey, I never said there was any logic to any of this), partly because I wasn't sure I could bear the sight of the Dawgs getting trampled by Tech's running game. I just sat back on the couch, crossed my fingers, and did what they always tell you to do -- hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

The crawl at the bottom of the screen soon informed me that Georgia had gone up 7-0 on their very first drive; I didn't change the channel, thinking that the Dawgs appeared to have gotten off to a good start and didn't need my viewing eyes upsetting the delicate balance of . . . well, karma, or whatever cosmic force had spurred them to the early lead. (Again, didn't say there was any logic here.) When the Dawgs held Tech scoreless for the entire first half and held them to a field goal for their first score of the game, I didn't change the channel then, either, for the same reason. And then Georgia went into halftime up 17-3, and then I saw that Tech had scored on a 76-yard pass play on their first drive of the second half, only for Georgia to answer right back with a 75-yard run from Caleb King just seconds later, and then Georgia went into the final frame still ahead by double digits, and then kicked a field goal to go up 13, and then allowed a TD to the Jackets with seven and a half minutes left, and then had to give the ball back to Tech with three minutes left . . .

But then UGA-GT popped up on the crawl again with less than a minute and a half left in the game, and the little football icon was on Georgia's side, and I could finally breathe easily, knowing that the Dawgs were only a few kneeldowns away from getting revenge on the Jackets for last year's upset and closing out a trying regular season with their best win of the year. For the record, I don't regret not watching the game, as exciting as I'm sure it was; I'm going to pick it up on ESPN360 later on today anyway, and besides, I'm the kind of person who would rather the Dawgs go 14-0 and not be able to witness any of it than be present for every snap of a 10-3 year.


Didn't get to see Caleb King win the gold medal in the 75-yard dash, but I'm still confident it actually happened.

But here's what I do regret: not believing enough in our players. It's one thing to point out Georgia's weakness on this unit or that unit, express worry over a specific matchup, or even predict a loss; it's another thing to doubt whether your team has the heart to win a tough game, and I can't deny having done some of that in the week leading up to Clean Old-Fashioned Hate. In my "defense," I wasn't writing off our players as a bunch of spineless layabouts, but rather wondering whether they'd have the willpower or mental strength to get up off the mat after such a crushing loss to Kentucky and outlast a heavily favored opponent (after already having clinched Mark Richt's worse season, statistically speaking, to boot). But still, as someone who's gone ballistic over poor treatment of our players by our own fans, I shouldn't have done that, and I apologize to the team. I apologize to the coaches, too, whom I'd similarly written off.

Now, I'm not a Pollyanna about this one win, no matter how satisfying it might have been. After last season's solid bowl win over Michigan State, I think I made the mistake of being too quick to ass-out-of-you-and-me-assume that the problems that had made 2008 such a disappointment were automatically on the way to being solved, which clearly they weren't; I'm not going to make that same mistake this time around, because I know there's a lot of work to do over the next couple months. Souls will have to be searched, hard questions will have to be asked, and yes, people will have to get fired.

And no, beating Georgia Tech doesn't change that. Looked at a certain way, the GT win really shines an even more glaring light on some of our larger failings this season -- if we really had this much talent in the backfield, why didn't it start producing anything until halfway through the season? If we could screw our heads on straight enough to maintain a positive turnover margin against the #7 team in the country (and, it should be said, a team that came into the game 28th in the country in that category, at +6), why couldn't we do it against teams like South Carolina or Arizona State? If we could corral an offense as dangerous as Georgia Tech's as solidly as we did for four quarters Saturday, why did we only do it for two quarters when we faced them last year -- and why did we do it only intermittently (or in some cases not at all) against much lesser teams this time around?

Like I said, hard questions will have to be asked and very hard decisions will have to be made; I'll be digging into these topics over the next couple weeks. If Mark Richt makes the same mistake I made last year (and, evidently, that he made last year too) and assumes that one win has turned everything back in the right direction on its own, then we're more than likely going to be having this same conversation in a year's time, only in more desperate tones, and with yet more (like Richt's own job) on the line. But if Richt takes full stock of the season as a whole and full responsibility for his staff's failings, and makes changes in both personnel (no matter how hard they might be for him personally) and the overall attitude and mentality of the program, then there's reason to think that with the talent we have on hand, we'll be more than capable of fulfilling the promise this program seemed to display two years ago when we were marching out of the Superdome with 11 wins, a Sugar Bowl trophy, and a top-five ranking in our pocket.


Reshad, after all the crap you've had to take from me, the refs, and everyone else, you deserve some credit for being a DGD.

A lot of ifs, I know. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it; for right now, I'm certainly not going to let those difficult considerations cloud my enjoyment of a win over GT. I'll never be disappointed about beating the nerds, particularly at a juncture where they were angling to seize the mantle of the state's premier college football program. That may happen eventually, Techies -- law of averages, infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, and all that -- but for right now, we're still Georgia and you're still Tech, and that still sucks for you.

GO DAWGS!

"I said, no more 45-42. Maybe you didn't hear about it, you've been away a long time."

You've got a home here.

"Georgia Wins" on the Jumbotron, and Athens itself -- both sights for sore eyes.

I felt my eyes welling up not once but twice Saturday night -- the first time was when the lone trumpeter started playing in the southwest corner of the upper deck at Sanford Stadium and the highlight video started up on the Jumbotron. Hearing Larry Munson narrate the video, the crowd shout at the top of their lungs as "Baba O'Riley" started, seeing the team rush out onto the field, I realized it'd been more than a year since I got to see all that in person, and I realized how much I'd missed it; and I also realized that after months of variously expressing hope, despair, barely contained frustration, and a million other conflicting emotions over the state of our football program, there is still no better place to be on a beautiful evening in the middle of November than Athens, Georgia, surrounded by friends.


Bacarri Rambo: big-hitter, game-saver, hero. Get well soon, baller.

The second time came with less than a minute to go in the actual game, when Bacarri Rambo made his bid for folk-hero status by flinging himself at Mario Fannin at the goal line, knocking what would've been the tying touchdown pass away from him, and landing flat on his back and motionless. Whether he knew it as he was flying through the air or not, Bacarri was sacrificing himself to make the game-saving play in what might've been our biggest and most desperately needed win of the season. I hope everyone who was out there saying silent prayers for him and then chanting "RAM-BO, RAM-BO" as he was carted off the field remembers that guys like him are the ones down there on the field doing our dirty work; guys like him are the ones we're pinning our hopes on each week; guys like him are the ones who take the hit when we give into our temptation to lay into our own players and divine sinister motives for what they're doing or not doing on the field each Saturday. There will be time enough after this season is over to determine what worked in 2009 and what didn't, who's likely to be a major contributor to our success going forward and who isn't, but for right now I hope Bulldog Nation keeps that image of Bacarri in their minds and remembers just how much each and every one of our guys are risking out there just so that we might have something to be proud of the next morning.


Israel Troupe, hopefully the forgotten man in our receiving corps no more after making this catch.

In between those two emotional moments, of course, there was the usual roller-coaster ride of momentum being given away, snatched back, and changing hands many more times over before the final gun sounded; in a way, it did follow the early-season script I alluded to in my preview of the game -- go in a hole early, claw our way out of it, dangle the momentum in front of our opponents' faces and risk handing it back to them at least one more time before the whole show finally ends -- but with a couple of differences.

First of all, we didn't dig ourselves into the early hole with turnovers. Quite frankly, we dug ourselves into the early hole with abysmal play-calling on both sides of the ball -- seriously, you've got A.J. Green, the best receiver in the nation, and you're going to waste his once-in-a-generation talent on swing passes? You're gonna let Auburn convert three straight third-and-longs on the way to a second easy touchdown? And when we ended the first quarter down 14-0 in points and 145-5 in yards (needing a seven-yard run from Caleb King on the last play of the quarter just to sneak into positive territory), I'll be honest, I was giving serious thought to the prospect that I might not be there to see the second half start. But as the game unfolded and Georgia hunkered down, got their heads on straight, and clawed their way back from the early deficit, a funny thing happened: For the first time all season, we didn't commit any turnovers. Nor did we kill ourselves with penalties -- after a dumb offsides/false-start flag on each team's opening drive, we only committed two penalties the rest of the way.


Washaun Ealey, Knowshon's evil twin, says "So long, losers."

For all the nail-biting I'm sure we all did and all the opportunities we let whiz by our heads, it was a surprisingly clean game in that regard, and it gives me hope that someone or something is starting to sink in with our players. There's going to be a lot of soul-searching amongst our coaching staff once the season's over about why it took 10 games for all that stuff to sink in -- actually, 23 games, when you consider that last year's team wasn't exactly a paragon of excellence in those categories either -- but for right now, it's nice to be able to sit back and revel in something other than our program's uncertain future for a change. We needed this win in the worst way, and we got it thanks to a tremendous team effort from a bunch of guys who refused to give up.

All in all, except for the whole going-into-a-two-touchdown-hole-in-the-first-quarter thing, it was a weekend that couldn't have gone any better if I'd scripted it myself beforehand. I got to give Orson Swindle and Holly a taste of the Full Athens on a beautiful autumn day in which Athens the Georgia fan base put their very best respective feet forward. The tailgating scene was everything Holly had been told about and then some, and even Orson, a Florida grad rarely inclined to say anything nice about Georgia unless compelled to by crushing gridiron defeat and/or gunpoint, evidently had a blast:



So thanks to the city of Athens; the Georgia fanbase; the Tent City crew, especially Scott Hartman for being my ticket hookup; Holly and Orson; and, of course, the Georgia team and coaching staff for collectively giving me the best Saturday of the football season thus far. As Holly and I were sitting there in section 134, row 12, watching the Dawgs do a little post-victory dancin' in front of the student section, it occurred to me just how many of my most cherished Georgia football memories are from the UGA-Auburn rivalry; this was the 13th straight Georgia-Auburn game I've been to (and it was the day after Friday the 13th, no less), but it was anything but unlucky.

Elsewhere:

· I don't know how much comfort this will be to the more beleaguered segments of our fan base (and I certainly don't like that it's coming at the expense of Paragon SC, a guy I've met in person and love like a brother), but for what it's worth, Bulldog Nation, the whole "Has Our Coach Lost His Mojo?" meme is hardly exclusive to Georgia at this point. Pete Carroll arguably had a good bit further to fall, too, and it'll be an interesting (if perhaps not especially enjoyable) exercise to compare him and Mark Richt as they try to steer their teams through lower-than-expected bowl bids -- and, potentially, through thorny off-season dilemmas concerning the respective states of their defenses. As much as you might want Willie Martinez gone, folks, we at least haven't given up 55 points this season, to Stanford or anyone else.


That's Commitment with the stop; Integrity gets credited with an assist.

· While taking in as much of Florida-South Carolina as we could before heading down to the stadium, I noticed a Gamecock player with "Courage" on the back of his jersey, followed by one with "Service," and I remember thinking, "My, those South Carolina guys do have some cool, if unusual, last names" -- but then I saw the guy with "Commitment" and I was reminded that both South Carolina and Maryland were gearing up in special military-themed unis to mark Veterans' Day. Here's my question, though: If I'm the Wounded Warrior Project marketing guy tasked with pushing this idea, how thrilled am I that the two teams agreeing to wear the special jerseys are South Carolina, for whom November 11 is right around the point where their annual late-season slump is hitting terminal velocity, and Maryland, who at this point isn't making a run at anything other than the title of worst team in the ACC? Don't get me wrong, I have no beef with the idea in principle; I just hope that for the sake of our troops they manage to land two more inspiring teams next time around.

· Speaking of the ACC, big ups to Clemson and some other team for locking down their divisions' respective berths in the ACC title game -- but given how weak a draw that game has been even in favorable circumstances, how thrilled are the ACC bigwigs, really, that this is just gonna be a rematch of a game we've already seen? Will the Tech and Clemson fanbases be rejuvenated enough by their teams' apparent rise from mediocrity that they'll make the long drive down to Tampa, or will half the purchased tickets end up getting tossed like last time?

· UAB Blazers Watch: Don't look now, but dear old UAB is 5-5 after dispensing with Memphis and only needs one more win to earn the second bowl bid in the program's history. I kind of doubt that they'll get that sixth win against East Carolina this weekend, but I'm seriously considering heading back up to the Salty 'Ham on the Saturday after Thanksgiving to see if Black Tebow can nail down that sixth win at the expense of George "Master's Degree" O'Leary and the UCF Knights. Oh, how delicious that would be.

· Wofford Terriers Watch: A difficult season continued in its difficult-ness with a close loss to Samford. The switch to an option-based offense, clearly, has been a rough one for the Terriers, but they can end the season on a high note with a win at Furman this weekend.



· Cheerleader Curse Watch: The winsome Chelsie (above) did not manage to doom her team to a loss on Saturday, but the fact that her Minnesota Golden Gophers had to come from behind to beat DI-AA South Dakota State on a late field goal should prove that the Curse's powers have not disappeared.

· And finally, never let it be said that I don't keep my promises. Flag run, engage.