You know where you went wrong.

Stand tall, soldier.

You all know me as someone who never likes to appear too confident about the Dawgs before any given game; I get jacked, sometimes bare-assed flag-wavingly so, about wins, but during the course of an average week I'm probably a lot closer to Depressive Doug from the Manic-Depressive Previews than his counterpart. So when I looked Holly square in the eye Saturday morning before we packed up for Auburn and said "We're gonna win," that was a big step for me. Between Georgia historically playing well on Auburn's home field even when the Tigers are astronomically ranked, Auburn's shittastic defense, the Dawgs having shrugged off their early-season losing streak, the potential for distraction on Auburn's side and, fuck it, Auburn just being due for a loss, I really thought we had a chance.

And I was right -- for a quarter, at least. No, check that: I was right for a lot longer than that. The commentator on ESPN Radio the next morning said Auburn "dominated" as he was rattling off the weekend's scores, but I didn't see anyone get dominated in Jordan-Hare. "Dominating" teams don't fall behind 21-7 or lead by only four going into the final quarter. The Dawgs hung in there better than you or I or probably most of the people in the stadium thought they would, and I tip my cap to 'em.

But as confident as I was (or tried to appear) before the game, I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said that confidence remained consistent for the full 60 minutes. It started waning around the end of the second quarter, at which point Auburn had erased their two-touchdown deficit and appeared to have wrestled momentum back from the Dawgs -- and Georgia, despite about a minute on the clock, one time-out and a clicking passing game, declined any attempt at answering back. (Which reminds me, we did the same thing against Kentucky and ended up going into the locker room with all three time-outs still languishing on the board.) Even as the bands played at halftime, I found myself thinking, "You know, these are just the kinds of circumstances under which we're prone to just completely fucking things up."


"Yup, this is where things start going pear-shaped. Got it."

And then Auburn hit a beaut of an on-side kick to start the second half, they charged down the field for a TD on the ensuing drive, and my prediction started coming true. Well, not really: We didn't "fuck things up" in a visibly disastrous way, but it became clear that Auburn had found another gear and shrugged off earlier frustrations to hit a level of intensity that just weren't quite able to match.

I guess you can't get too mad about that, given that Auburn is the #2 team in the country and armed with the nation's best player, who, for obvious reasons, had to have been playing the second half pissed. But it does get back to a complaint of mine that's been lingering around this team for three years now: We deal with success worse than anyone in the SEC, perhaps the country. For the most part, we deal with adversity just fine -- look at how we bounced back in the second half of the Cocktail Party -- but God forbid we ever build up a big lead against a good team, we'll immediately start hunting for ways to piss it away. Hit a big play for a score, give up a huge return on the ensuing kickoff. Mount a nice drive down the field, drop a crucial third-down pass or just fumble the ball away entirely. So it goes. I'm sure it says something unpleasant about the state of our program that we're this unaccustomed to good things happening, but that's where we're at.


You will be shocked, shocked, to learn that Murray doesn't have the ball in this picture.

Don't know how much more there is to say about it, other than congrats, Nick Fairley, you did what many thought was impossible and wrested the title of Dirtiest Player in the Country away from your teammate Ryan Pugh. I wonder if I'm the only one who noticed that Auburn's defense only started getting consistent stops when Fairley dropped any pretense of not trying to put Aaron Murray in the hospital? Good luck trying that in Sanford next year, kiddo. And whether it's because of the NCAA or the NFL, I doubt you'll have Cam Newton on hand to cover up for the rest of your defense sucking.

Sorry, how unsportsmanlike of me. I shall do the honorable thing and eject myself from this blog.

But not before a few passing thoughts:

· Both Oregon and Auburn were tested Saturday, and while Auburn shrugged off that test more easily than the Ducks did, I'm inclined to keep Oregon as the #1 on my initial BlogPoll ballot tomorrow, for one simple reason: If Oregon and Auburn end up in the national title game, I've got a lot more confidence in the Ducks' defense being able to come up with a critical stop against the Tigers than in the Tigers' ability to do so against the Ducks.

· Of all the coaches in Division I-A, I never dreamed Bret Bielema would be the one I'd be criticizing for being too big a pussy to go for 90.


Leaving aside for a moment any jokes about the best team in the ACC being sorta like the prettiest girl in the insane asylum . . .

· I don't know if y'all have been following Virginia Tech at all or if you gave them up for dead after they lost to James Madison, but they've now broken off eight wins in a row and appear destined for another ACC title. So is it too early to write off the JMU loss as the product of an embarrassing hangover following a heartbreaker of a loss to Boise State -- the undefeated team that all the TV pundits seem to want in the national-title game?

· UAB Blazers Watch: Wow, you talk about not being able to handle success. UAB scored a TD with 9:41 left in the game to go up 42-34 on East Carolina, and here's how the rest of the quarter went: ECU drives down the field to score a TD and come within two; UAB three-and-out; ECU returns the punt to the UAB 11, scores three plays later to go up 48-42; UAB fumbles the ensuing kickoff, ECU scores four plays later to go up by 12. And, of course, UAB throws an interception at the Pirates' 6 on their last-gasp drive. Thus are the Blazers eliminated from bowl consideration. Fun while it lasted, I guess.

· Wofford Terriers Watch: As if this weekend wasn't soul-crushing enough, the Terriers got shut out in the first half on the way to a 43-13 demolition by Appalachian State. So even if WU beats Chattanooga in their season finale this weekend, they'll lose the tiebreaker to ASU for the Southern Conference championship.

On the other hand, I just realized that Wofford University's initials are WU, as in "-Tang Clan," which is yet more evidence in support of their awesomeness. So they've got that going for them. Which is nice.

I've seen too much for a little while, I want to forget.

Well, what can I say about this past weekend except I shouldn't have watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" Friday night -- everything I needed to know about what was going to go down the following afternoon was right in there.

Except when you get right down to it, the above scene, iconic though it may be, is insufficient -- and entirely too simplistic -- to accurately portray Georgia's misery in this rivalry, particularly when there's a far more apt metaphor in the very same TV special. I mean, yeah, Charlie Brown gets the ball whipped away from him at the last second every single time, which is embarrassing enough, but you'll notice nobody is ever around to watch it; the humiliation is at least a dark secret shared only between him and Lucy. To declare that "Lucy = Florida" also doesn't work -- while Lucy and the Gators are both bitches who wear blue and aren't nearly as hot as they fancy themselves, that statement implies that Georgia's chances for success are entirely in Florida's hands, which, no matter what Bulldog Nation may be thinking in its most desperate moments, isn't true either.

No, the better metaphor is "Great Pumpkin = equal footing in the Georgia-Florida rivalry." More obscure, I know, and definitely more abstract, but sometimes to make sense of cosmic absurdity like this you gotta be willing to try and wrap your brain around something challenging. Every year, we think it's coming; every year we think that if we just believe enough, it will reveal itself to us and, out of moral obligation, reward us for our seemingly unending persecution in its name. OK, I just totally fucking freaked myself out by sussing out that the Great Pumpkin is a metaphor for the Second Coming -- seriously, Charles Schultz, way to blow a brother's mind on what is otherwise a day of perfectly festive debauchery -- but all that being said, we believe, it doesn't show, and we get publicly humiliated for our faith all over again.

I believed. Oh, boy howdy, did I believe. I believed even after Aaron Murray got picked off on the game's very first play from scrimmage, believed even when Florida's previously moribund offense started gathering steam, believed even when we went into halftime down 21-7. Because look! We roared back after halftime and went on a 17-3 run to tie things up, and then, when Florida scored a relatively rapid-fire TD that put them back on top, we went right back down the field to tie it up again and, just for good measure, held on Florida's final drive of regulation and successfully forced overtime. All the trappings of that rare amazing Georgia victory were there: More than 30 points against a very good Gator defense? Check. Great QB play? After a miserable first half, Aaron Murray settled down in the second, going 13-of-21 for 198 yards, two TDs and no turnovers, looking once again like the stunningly poised player we'd seen over the first eight games. Confident squad? By the time Georgia tied it up with four and a half minutes left in regulation, our guys were jumping all over the place. The defense couldn't wait to get out on the field and make a stop; the offense looked hungry to get out there and take a stab at getting the winning score.

But obviously we didn't. Yeah, some of it comes down to inferior play -- the turnoverpalooza in the first half, f'rinstance, without which we might have been up by two scores and simply handing the ball off to Caleb King and Washaun Ealey to see how much clock, and how much of Urban Meyer's soul, they could grind down. Some of it also comes down to inexplicable coaching -- we were lucky enough that the Mikey Henderson "One and Done" play worked the first time three years ago, so did we really think we were gonna outsmart Florida's secondary with it a second time, particularly with a QB who I'm not sure has hit a fade to the end zone all season?

Some of it, though, I'm struggling to justify with any word other than "luck." Take these four situations:

1. Trey Burton fumbles at the Florida 14 and Georgia picks it up.
2. Aaron Murray fires a pass over the middle to 6'4" TE Aron White, and it's a little high but White gets a hand on it.
3. John Brantley gets sacked by Darryl Gamble at the Georgia 35 and fumbles, and a Georgia player gets a hand on it.
4. Aaron Murray throws another one over the middle to A.J. Green, the best receiver in college football, and A.J. gets a hand on it.

Two times the ball began the play in Florida's hands, two times it started off in Georgia's; all four times Georgia gets a hand on it at some point; but all four times it belongs to Florida by the time the whistle is blown. Yeah, yeah, I know: Inferior play had a hand in some of this, too, even the blown opportunities with the fumbles -- if we just fucking fall on that first one rather than trying to pick it up and run with it, for example, we start inside the Florida red zone with three near-automatic points and a pretty good chance at seven, and we deny Florida the long TD drive that swing momentum in their favor for pretty much the rest of the first half.

Still: Four times we get a hand on the ball and we don't get any of them? Not one? If we can have a game like that less than a year removed from going -16 in turnover margin, fuck a regression to the mean. It wasn't just the turnovers, either. Late fourth quarter, game tied at 31, Florida's gotten another good KO return from Chris Rainey -- and oh, God, don't get me started on his sociopathic ass being suited up and in the game to begin with -- and they've got 2nd-and-9 just a couple yards shy of midfield. Darryl Gamble crushes Brantley eight yards behind the line, resulting in 3rd-and-17 from the 40 (on a day when we're actually covering third downs pretty well, wonder of wonders), which gives us a chance to force a punt and set ourselves up with not-horrible field position and a couple minutes and two time-outs with which to get Blair Walsh in place for the game-winning field goal. Awesome, right? Right?

Nope -- a false start by Florida, their fifth false start of the day, negates the sack. They get the first down, drive into Georgia territory, pin the Dawgs at their own 6 and it's off to overtime we go. Even when they fuck up, it turns out better for them.

I realize I'm leaving myself getting open to getting flayed here -- by fans both Florida-identified and non -- with charges of whining. Hey, you're taunting a dude who's lost the ability to feel, so you're the one who's arguably wasting more energy here. And yes, again, I realize that no small amount of what I've described above goes back to Georgia's players not having the focus or fortitude to make the optimal play in a given situation, whatever that happens to be. And not long after I got home from Atlanta this evening, as I gathered my thoughts and tried to figure out what exactly I wanted to say in this space, I'll admit I briefly entertained the thought that the loud, heavily publicized, tension-fraught atmosphere of Jacksonville might have something to do with that lack of focus, which of course led to me wondering if maybe we should move the Cocktail Party out of there after all. (I mean, we've already officially ripped the words "Cocktail" and "Party" out of it to begin with; after that, any talk of tradition, on the parts of the respective university presidents at least, is pretty ridiculous.)

But no, I'm not gonna go there. Even if you think the series would be more fun for the students as a home-and-home; even if you can make a case, in spite of Georgia's still-pretty-good road record under Mark Richt, that the Dawgs' greater travel distance is a tangible hindrance to their chances of winning in this rivalry; even if you think that the Dawgs face a "hostile environment" in a stadium that is divided directly down the middle between Dawgs and Gators, it would be wrong to move this game. Why? BECAUSE IT WOULD BE A BITCH MOVE. If we were to go to a home-and-home, then no matter how dominant a run Georgia went on immediately afterward, no matter how supposedly solid our reasoning was for moving the game, we'd be the the school that whined the Cocktail Party out of Jacksonville and one of the sport's last remaining neutral-site rivalries out of existence. I'll be damned if I'm going to have that on my conscience, or the University of Georgia's.

Unfortunately, that doesn't get us a millimeter closer to solving the critical question: What do we do? I'm sorry if you came here for answers, because I don't know. What I do know is that I won't be watching the game next year. If I'm in front of a TV, it'll be tuned to something else (maybe I'll put a "Mad Men" DVD on); if I'm in the Jacksonville area, I'll be relaxing on a sunlit beach, stuffing a lime into the neck of a Corona and thanking the good Lord that, independent of any fortune or misfortune being visited upon my football team, I'm gainfully employed, living in what remains the freest country on earth, and blessed with an inordinate number of family and friends who care about me dearly. But I can't put myself through the misery of another one of these -- not for another year or so, anyway. Believe me, I've got nothing but admiration for Linus for going out there year after year in the face of overwhelming odds and public humiliation and laying bare his trusting soul for all the world to see. But I'm not Linus; I don't have a blanket to turn to anymore; and when I dated a girl named Sally in high school, she dumped me for a dude in the band. I've had an inkling for a while now, in other words, that the Great Pumpkin ain't coming for me. So I think I've earned a year off.

The husband or the hedonist,the businessman or the communist.

The other day I remarked to Holly that I wasn't sure which outcome of the Georgia-Colorado game would be more frustrating -- to go down in flames, even with A.J. Green back in the lineup, and realize we're just a lousy team, or to win and realize that A.J. Green was the sole difference between competence and utter misery all along. Well, Saturday night we got the worst of both worlds: We realized we're absolutely nothing without A.J. on the field, and lost anyway.

I don't think I've ever seen a single team have such a dramatic contrast based on a single player's presence. With A.J. on the field and a factor in our game plan, we ran 40 plays for 363 yards of total offense. Without him, we ran 19 plays for 46 yards. The absence of one player, one player, dropped our offense's effectiveness by nearly 75 percent. Hell, even our defense played better when he was in the lineup: They averaged three yards a play when they knew A.J. would soon be back on the field, nearly eight and a half when he was gone.

And still we lost. We lost because we whiffed on one too many golden opportunities that were dropped directly into our laps; we lost because we couldn't maintain focus at a time when a win was ours for the taking. But most of all, we lost because somehow, we let ourselves get into a position where the burden of the team -- not just its yardage, not just its hands or its feet, but its heart and its soul -- were placed on one guy. We shouldn't be asking how could we have A.J. in the game and still lose; we should be asking ourselves how we ever let it get to that point in the first place.

And even now, there's a part of me that remains thrilled enough by what we were able to do at times during that game that I've still got hope for the rest of the season. But the larger part of me wonders how in the world the team is supposed to pick itself up off the mat after this. It's bad enough to be losing this much to begin with, a position that none of these guys have really ever had to face while they've been wearing Georgia uniforms. But to have that kind of opportunity to turn the corner, to have redemption sitting right there, only to have it snatched away -- and to have an entire flight from Colorado back to Georgia to stew over it, to dwell on being 1-4 after having so many opportunities for something at least a little better -- I don't know how you come back from that. I'd like to think there's someone on the coaching staff who can lift them up and inspire them to spin the positives from this game into something amazing down the road, but . . . well, I've gone on at length about the doubts creeping in that there's anyone capable of doing that. So I'm not going to belabor the point.

Nor will I drag out any further discussion of Richt's job security -- not at the moment, anyway. I'm sure y'all know any number of places where you can do that. For right now I'm just going to tune into the Pac-10 games, maybe have another drink, and try to let my mind wander off to a fantasy world where this season never happened.

Ahh, yes, it's happening already. Incidentally, in this fantasy world, I've gotten a bestselling novel published and I'm working on my second one; I drive an Audi Q5; and I'm just about to close on a condo in the Gulf. I may pack everything up and head down there for the rest of the fall so that I can work on my second book. I'm not sure if I'll be watching a lot of Georgia football while I'm down there; actually, in this world Georgia football may or may not exist to begin with. I'm still mulling that one over.

Has it gone on too long? Do you mind that it hurts?

You all saw what happened just as clearly as I did, I'm sure, so I'm going to keep this (relatively) short and sweet, except to say this: I kind of feel like Chazz Palminteri at the end of "The Usual Suspects."

I'm sitting there, thinking I've got the case wrapped up -- not entirely to my satisfaction -- but I think I've at least got a handle on it, know what's going to happen next. Then I sit back in my chair, coffee in hand, and I look up at my bulletin board. The collapse of the run defense in 2008, followed by the collapse of the pass defense in 2009. The inexplicable implosions against teams who are supposedly at a marked talent disadvantage -- Tennessee 2007, Tennessee again two years later, Kentucky last November. Joe Cox, a fifth-year senior, making the kinds of mistakes a freshman wouldn't make. And the off-the-field stuff -- the DUIs (which we racked up another one of last night), A.J. Green punting his jersey, Washaun Ealey driving after being specifically instructed not to. The never-ending stream of injuries that seem to ensure we never quite have a full, healthy complement of players to put on the field. All these things which, taken just one at a time, could be shrugged off as isolated incidents, mere frustrations, but all together they make you drop your coffee cup on the floor and stare slack-jawed at the inescapable conclusion: Mark Richt is Keyser Söze. Only in this case, Keyser Söze is Ray Goff.

What I see when I look at Georgia football now is a program that is losing control. You can blame that on the players, and sure, the ultimate responsibility for their actions lies with them, but when you view the people above you as weak and indecisive, what's your natural inclination? And could our coaches possibly be doing a better job of looking weak and indecisive right now? We've just put the last dab of whipped cream on top of our first three-game SEC skid in nearly two decades, and in the midst of a bunch of meaningless word salad about "looking within" and "[making] sure that everything we do is the right thing to do," Mark Richt gives us this bit of insight into the coaching staff:

“We just, at times, called a couple running plays just blindly and just said, ‘Hey we’re going to run this no matter what,’ ” he said. “There times when we had success and some times we got hit in the mouth because of the pressures they brought. And again, until you look at the film, it’s going to be hard to say exactly. They did a nice job defensively.”

Let's say you're an 18- or 19-year-old kid who's actually witnessing this thought process play out on the field, hours before Richt makes specific mentions of it. What do you think after something like that? If you've just watched your coaches heave a 160-pound tailback up the middle right into the teeth of a hulking MSU defensive line for an entire half with exactly zero success, what conclusions do you then draw about your coaches' true determination to see you and all your teammates leave that stadium with a desperately needed win? If, at my current position at MegaConglomCo p.l.c., my editor tells me that my top "action item" for this week is to beat my head repeatedly against a wall, and I say "I don't see how that's going to help me complete my projects on deadline" and she says "No, trust me, this is how I want you to do it," how hard am I going to work for that editor, or anyone else in my department, going forward?

And yet I may not be in any kind of position to cast stones here, because if you accused me of phoning it in with this post, you wouldn't be completely incorrect. I've written it several times already -- banged out the first iteration after Vanderbilt '06, wrote another one after Tennessee in '07, composed the revised and expanded! Georgia Tech '08 edition while sitting in a boarding lounge at LAX. Each time I wrote it with some degree confidence that things would turn around, that Richt and Co. would learn their lessons from it and improve going forward, confidence for which I was chided more and more as the years wore on. So in some ways I'm just as guilty of the whole "Do the same thing over and over expecting a different result" strategy as anyone else associated with the program.

No longer, though. I still hope things will get better, but I no longer have confidence that they will. Let's be real here: The team in white that played and was coached last night in Starkville might be a 4-8 team if they get some lucky breaks. The "miracle ending" to 2010, at this point, is if we manage a Marine crawl back to 7-5, the same record that got last year universally described as "the worst season under Mark Richt's tenure" but with nothing tangible to point to as an indication that things will get any better in 2011.

Is that enough to earn Richt a pink slip? After this season? I honestly can't say. If we end up 4-8 or 5-7 this season and Greg McGarity determines that Richt has earned one more year to try and end the slide, then I'll be OK with that. I mean, really, at this point, what difference does one more year make in the cosmic scheme of things? On the other hand, though, if McGarity decides it's time to pull the plug on the Richt Era and make his mark on the program by bringing in a new guy, I'll be . . . relieved. I will be sad, and tremendously disappointed that a man as fundamentally good and upstanding as Mark Richt never got to achieve the legendary status that so many of us have wanted for him ever since he pulled off P-44-Haynes almost exactly nine years ago, but I'll be relieved that someone finally decided to throw the switch on an embarrassing slide and do something different. There was a time, as recently as a few days ago, when I couldn't even conceive of saying something like that, but there you have it. Think of it as me being willing to make a major change in my worldview; I can only hope that it's not way too late for Georgia's coaches to do the same.

Just a little wind, and the trees are falling down.

If there's one thing I've learned in close to 20 years of living and dying with the Bulldogs -- and the Manic-Depressive Previews should provide an inkling of this -- it's that with the Dawgs, things are never quite as good or as bad as they seem at the time. Any win can be a false positive; any loss can be a setup for a redemption story. So when my first reaction to the heartbreaker of a loss to Arkansas was that Georgia football had turned into "The Wizard of Oz" -- to wit, our offense needs a heart, our defense needs a brain, our coaches have no courage, and the fans just want to go home -- it tripped a fail-safe switch that told me things couldn't possibly be that dire. And I went about seeing how I could walk things back to something a little less bleak.

Here's what I came up with: Through injury, spectacularly ill-advised jersey sales, and just plain old bad luck, our coaches have been dealt a hand none of us thought they'd have to deal with. Dump on Mike Bobo all you want -- and trust me, I'll get around to it in a sec -- but put yourself in his shoes: Coming into this season, he thought he'd have one of the best, if not the best, offensive lines in the country; a one-two punch of talented (if still raw) rushers in the backfield; and a game-breaking receiver who could make the rookie QB look like a hero on any given play. Instead, the O-line has stunk for reasons you can only partially blame on the injuries and illnesses they suffered over the summer, we've only been able to get one of those running backs on the field at a time, and thanks to an NCAA suspension, that once-in-a-generation receiver has yet to make his first catch of 2010. That'll fuck with anyone's game plan, and there's not much you can do about it. Except.

Except adapt, and that's just not something we're good at, nor is it something we've been good at for a while now. Here's the thing, Mike Bobo -- it sucks that our offensive line is acting like they're still learning their positions, and it sucks that you don't have A.J. Green, but you don't charge headlong into a game with the same game plan you had before you found out all those things and just hope everything works itself out. You don't ever tell anyone you "really don't know" how you're going to open up the offense for your young but hugely talented QB. You're the offensive coordinator, you figure that shit out. Your game plan counted on having A.J. Green deep and Caleb King in the backfield? Sorry, life sucks, but since you don't have the conditions you thought you'd have, you go out and adapt to the conditions you do have.



I hate to harp on that last play before Arkansas' winning touchdown drive, because it's not like that hasn't been hashed over on every blog and call-in show from here to Toccoa, but . . . to not have any checkdown options for your QB, even though you don't have A.J. Green as a money bet with the deep ball and even though your QB has been running for his life all afternoon long, that is, as Charles Barkley would say, just turrble. Turrble. I don't like to make a habit of psychoanalyzing people, particularly when I've never met them, but it almost seem like the Jon Fabris directional-kicking philosophy on a larger scale: "This hasn't worked before, nor is there any profound reason why it should work this time, but I'm going to do it anyway because that's what I decided I'd do when I was planning all this out the other day."

Or if not that, then it seems like the lingering effects of something I remember hearing a lot of folks remark on last year -- this pervasive idea, from Mark Richt on down, that we could just rely on our talent to get the job done without getting in their faces and teaching and motivating them. If anything, it's worse this year, because it seems like we're relying on talent we don't even have on the field sometimes. (Shaun Chapas is hurt? Well, hell, throw Washaun Ealey in there to block, he's probably just as good. Except he wasn't.) The easy fix for this, of course, is that we should get Caleb King back next week, A.J. the week after that. But what then? What if King and/or Chapas come back a little rusty, or Murray can't get the ball to A.J. because his protection is breaking down too much? We still gonna rely on our talent to pull us through, or are we gonna adapt?

It occurs to me that for a post that started out "I'm gonna try to not feel as bad about this as I did the other day," it still sounds, well, pretty bad. It doesn't have to: We know Murray's good, and will only get better, particularly once his pass protection gets settled. The defense hasn't been great, but unless you were one of those knobs who just assumed we'd magically start holding people to single digits just because we'd managed to usher Willie Martinez to the service exit, you can't be too down on how they've performed so far -- we've now faced two SEC teams, both of whom we played last year, and performed markedly better against them this time around than we did a year ago, despite introducing a brand-new scheme. So that stuff's just going to take time. I'll freely admit I don't know enough about the Xs and Os of 3-4s and 4-3s to gauge progress in that regard, but I do know one thing for pretty damn certain: I'm not going to call for a guy to be fired after only three games of a brand-new system.



As for the rest of you, adapt, gentlemen, adapt. Use the guys you've got and account for the ones you don't. And as I mentioned in my SEC Power Poll ballot, please, please find a setting for Aaron Murray other than "Do Absolutely Nothing" and "Carry Entire Team On Back"; there's got to be a nice compromise in between there somewhere.

As bad as 0-2 in the SEC looks right now, it's only hopeless if you had your heart set on an SEC East title this year, which I didn't. Now, as someone who was pretty confident about some modicum of improvement over last year's record, 0-2 still comes as a disappointment, even coming, as it did, against two very good teams (and two of the better squads we'll face all year). I was thinking we might face kind of a wild season that, thanks to our state of flux on defense, might be peppered with quite a few shootouts; that may yet be the case. Now, I was also thinking 9-3, two games better than last season, which may not be realistic at this point. I still think there's a 9-3 team buried somewhere beneath the grime and uncertainty of this year's players, I'm just not sure how long we're going to have to chip away before we find it. And it's starting to look like the chip-away process might not be as much fun to watch as I'd hoped.

Onward:



· As for that game up in Knoxville, it was weird seeing such a flawed Florida team roll up into Neyland Stadium -- even in the Zook years, you had a reasonable expectation that the flaws would get papered over, and they certainly had the center-QB exchange down pretty solid -- and even more weird looking upon the Vols as such a broken program, fighting for some kind of direction. I have to say I was impressed by how well the Vols played, though. It was a moral victory, and that's the kind of thing they're going to have to settle for more than once this season, but you never got the impression that that's all they were playing for. Derek Dooley has done some weird shit in his brief tenure in Knoxville, but after the all-sizzle-no-steak reign of alternating terror and error under Kiffin, a weirdly, defiantly businesslike guy may be just what they need. You know how they say poor people are "weird," rich people are just "eccentric"? Well, maybe the only real difference between weird, insular, businesslike Derek Dooley and weird, insular, businesslike Nick Saban is a whole shitload of wins. I guess we'll see if Precious manages to get his.

· So, Houston Nutt . . . you put us through all those oversigning controversies and the Summer of Masoli, and all just to lose two Vanderbilt by two TDs at home? Nutt seems like a pretty confident guy, which if it works for him then great, but keep in mind this is a place that traded David Cutcliffe in for Ed Orgeron without even being blackmailed into it. You think they wouldn't catapult Nutt into the sun if they thought for one hot second that Mike Leach might come to Oxford?

· How weird is it that the Pac-10, thought to be one of the weaker BCS leagues coming into 2010, now has what could be a very exciting three- or even four-team race for the Rose Bowl -- and the Trojans are not one of those teams (and wouldn't be even if they were eligible for a bowl this year)? Here's another question: How many punters bet on those Trojans to cover eleven and a half on Minnesota last weekend, and ended up getting an unsolicited, unlubricated foreign object in the ass because of Lane Kiffin's continued fetish for fucking around with two-point conversion tries?



· Early prediction: South Carolina horsewhips Auburn on the Plains this weekend. While the Gamecocks were toying with Furman for an afternoon, Auburn spent four quarters and an overtime period locked in one of the hardest-hitting football games I've ever seen, against a BCS-conference team, no less. Just watching it took a considerable level of emotional investment. Even after a win, I'm not sure Auburn bounces back from a war like that in the span of just one week, particularly with South Carolina showing signs of actually being really freaking good this year.

· Finally, I would be remiss if I did not give props to the UAB Blazers, who were staring down a 23-0 deficit to in-state rival Troy on Saturday but stormed back -- behind their backup QB, no less -- to claim a 34-33 win on a 44-yard Hail Mary on the very last play of the game. There's some fight left in this team yet; it's just a damn shame they don't have Ole Miss on the schedule again this year.

An empty box, an open space . . .

Losing to South Carolina is never an enjoyable experience, and I've already read a ton of comments from fellow Dawg fans professing high levels of anxiety about what this latest loss to the 'Cocks says about our team. At the risk of sounding apathetic or committing "treason by omission," I'm honestly not nearly as worked up about this loss as I thought I'd be, and that might be because -- at the risk of committing treason, period -- in plotting out how I thought this season would go for Georgia, I kind of figured we'd lose this game from the beginning. Newly revamped defense, freshman QB making his first-ever start in an SEC game on the road -- not a formula for victory, much less an easy one. Particularly if the wealth of experience on Carolina's side finally translated into actual execution on the field, which it looks like it might actually do this year.

So we lost, and it was ugly at times -- you don't ever get to be happy about only scoring six points on someone, unless you're North Dakota State, I guess. But if all you're paying attention to is the number 6 on the scoreboard, you don't seem to have paid a lot of attention to Aaron Murray's performance in his first-ever SEC start, which I'd call one of the most impressive ever by a frosh quarterback under Richt's tutelage. No, actually the most impressive -- feast eyes:

	Comp-att	Yards	TDs	Int	QB rating
David Greene (vs. SC, 2001)	21-33	169	0	1	100.59
Matt Stafford (@ SC, 2006*)	8-19	171	0	3	86.13
Aaron Murray (@ SC, 2010)	14-21	192	0	0	143.47

* did not start, but played all except one series

Hell, even D.J. Shockley didn't have that good a day against the Gamecocks, and he was a fifth-year senior who'd just suckerpunched a nationally ranked Boise State team. So let's not spend too much time grousing about how rickety the offense looked, considering that A.J. Green was out and Murray still managed not to do anything monstrously stupid, even in a stadium that's as loud as anyplace he'll have to go all season. If anything, the offense would've looked better had the coaches taken the restrictor plate off Murray much earlier in the game -- in the first half he only threw eight passes, completing four of them for 32 yards, but in the second he was 10-of-13 for 160, against a Gamecock secondary that was back at full strength with the return of Chris Culliver. And it wasn't just the passes Murray threw but the way he carried himself under center -- staying calm, not making dumb decisions, and directing the offense like he'd been doing that shit for years. I fully realize that I'll likely get laughed out of the blogosphere for calling him "Manningesque," but I'd be lying if I said that wasn't the first word that popped into my head. I'm just as hesitant to make a sweeping statement along the lines of "I'm officially not worried about our freshman quarterback anymore," but . . . I'd be lying if I said I wasn't awful close.

Now then, let's talk about the defense. Yes, it was . . . aggravating, to put it mildly. Here's what I don't get: How could we be so good at wrapping up Stephen Garcia -- whom we sacked five times -- and so bad at wrapping up Marcus Lattimore, who went off for 182 yards on 37 carries? This will puzzle me for quite a while, and if y'all have any enlightening explanations to suggest, by all means, the comment thread is open. I will say this: In both QB pressure and run-blocking, our defenders were at least in the spots they were supposed to be, so the transition to the 3-4 front -- maybe the biggest and most indigestion-inducing worry of Bulldog Nation coming into this season -- appears to be going well enough. It's the fundamentals, weirdly, which seem to still be lacking. Is a team that's picked up the 3-4 just fine but tackles like a middling C-USA squad more worrisome than a team that tackles beautifully but always seems to be doing so after an 8- or 9-yard gain because they didn't know what the hell their assignment was? And of the two problems, which is the easier fix?



Maybe this is a case of Todd Grantham, lord love his red-faced screaming little self, realizing that this team was far more lacking in the fundamentals than he thought. Maybe it's also a case of South Carolina finally having a more dynamic talent at running back than they've had in three decades. Neither one will help me sleep particularly well tonight, I have to say.

But I'm not prepared to write off this season yet, either. If I'd done that the last time we lost to South Carolina, I'd have missed us playing in the Sugar Bowl. Which is not meant as a declaration that I think we're headed there again this year (news flash: we're not), but consider that maybe some of us got our expectations too inflated after the dominating win over Louisiana-Lafayette, and now they're being reeled back in. Aaron Murray appears to be as good as advertised by that first game, the defense probably isn't, but at least there's time to work on it. As pissed as I was to see our tacklers bouncing off the ball-carriers almost as badly as they did against Georgia Tech in '08, we're at least seeing that stuff at the beginning of the season rather than the very end, which means there's time to fix it before our hopes get irrevocably dashed.

Whatever else you can say about Todd Grantham, he seems like the kind of guy who's a lot more committed to fixing glaring problems like that than just sitting there and hoping things clean themselves up on their own. And you can't deny that he's already effected some improvement: Last year we gave up 29 offensive points and 427 yards to the 'Cocks (at home). This year we gave up 17 points and 75 fewer yards (on the road) to a Carolina team that's arguably quite a bit better than last year's, for reasons that don't begin and end with Marcus Lattimore.



So yeah, I'm frustrated, but I'm not hanging my head in shame. Are we an SEC-championship-caliber team now? No, but I didn't come into this season thinking we were, either. Instead of arbitrarily overloading this team with our own expectations, maybe it's time to treat them as a blank slate or empty vessel that will get filled as the season progresses. Either way, it's far too early to presume that the team has no hope of improving; we've got 10 games left and the pieces to win most of them, so it's time to settle down and figure out how to do that.

Look at it this way: We came into the season with two big worries -- that the QB would be a deer in the headlights, and that the defense would stink -- and we're awful close to being able to put one of those to rest. So now we'll work on the other one, power through the growing pains, and see what happens. Maybe I'm being naive, but I am not terrified about watching this process unfold. There have been times over the last few seasons when I would've been happy for the season to just be freaking over already, but at this point I'm kind of jonesing for the next opportunity to get out there and watch this team get better.

Miscellaneous stuff:

· If you want to feel better, you need look no further than our in-state rivals, whose own transition to the 3-4 has gone . . . well, perhaps not swimmingly, at least so far. In case you wanted it spelled out in black and white -- and if you're a Dawg fan, here's guessing you did -- the Techies allowed 319 yards and 28 points to a team that had managed only 293 and 3, respectively, against D-IAA North Dakota State the week before. Count your blessings, folks.



· Hell, just feel glad you're not an ACC team, period: The presumptive conference champion, Virginia Tech, became the latest victim of the rapidly spreading lose-to-an-FCS-team virus; Florida State got destroyed by an Oklahoma team that was sweating Utah State until the very end the previous week; Miami scored 10 offensive points against Ohio State in the 'Shoe; N.C. State had to squeak past UCF. If you think about it, the most impressive performance put up by any team this past week was poor maligned Virginia pushing USC to the brink in the Trojans' own house. Four ACC teams in the top 25 coming into this past weekend, and all lost in fairly soul-crushing fashion. Particularly with UNC poised to receive a crushing blow from the NCAA's Thor-hammer in the near future, it looks like the date for the ACC's ascension to superconference status remains "TBA."

· The other fallout from this weekend's ACC-wide failgasm, of course, is that we no longer have to worry about Boise State being taken seriously as a contender for the BCS title. All due respect to the Broncos, but seriously, guys, a team from the Colonial Athletic Association just beat VT worse than you did. And therein lies the tragedy of only having one or two respectable opponents on your schedule: Just like it's dangerous to put your entire retirement fund in one stock, you pin your entire championship résumé on one opponent and that opponent can sink you.

· I'm more worried about Florida than I was last week, but if you're still tied 7-7 with South Florida at halftime, let's just say you clearly haven't solved all your problems. Same goes for if Eastern Michigan rolled up more yards on Miami-Ohio on the road than you did at home.



· It's still too early to call Michigan resurrected, but it sure does look like they're finally on their way to executing the kind of offense Rich Rodriguez wanted from the very beginning. Denard Robinson is going to make some coaches fear for their job security over the next few seasons.

· Little Brother update: I think UAB's season is close to being a writeoff already -- good thing I didn't, you know, predict they'd go to a bowl this season or anything, heh -- but I'm sure you will be thrilled to know that Wofford opened Southern Conference play with a win over Charleston Southern. Thus begins the Terrier resurgence, folks. Get on board or get out of the way.

Too soon, hippies. Too soon.

In light of everything that Bulldog Nation has had to endure in the past week, this is kind of like watching an old lady get carjacked, thrown into the street, and run over by another car, and then, as she lies there broken and dying on the pavement, bending over and saying, "Ma'am, have you ever considered public transit as an option?"

(Hat tip: the esteemed Senator.)

If I was you, if I was you I wouldn't treat me the way you do . . .

The game was an embarrassment. The turnover on the very first play of the second half was an embarrassment. Both of Joe Cox's interceptions were embarrassments. The play-calling, particularly on offense, was an embarrassment. Getting outscored 28-7 after halftime was an embarrassment. Losing to Kentucky at home for the first time in more than 30 years was an embarrassment. Potentially getting knocked down to a bowl in Shreveport is an embarrassment.

But nothing, and I mean nothing, on that list matches the embarrassment of our fans booing our own players on Senior Day (followed by most of them leaving with two minutes left in the game, with the rest staying only to boo some more). You can doubt our players' ability, hope certain players get playing time instead of others, be disappointed in decisions they make on the field, even dislike them as people if you must -- but you never, ever boo them. And you damn sure don't boo them on a night when we're supposed to be honoring them for having offered their bodies up to get knocked all over a football field for four years. If that's what you want to do, go sit in the visitors' section, put on the other team's colors, and boo them from there. But if you can't display the modicum of self-control it takes to keep from throwing a temper tantrum at their expense, or the equally minor modicum of brain power it takes to realize that said tantrum translates into exactly zero improvement on the field, I don't want you in Sanford Stadium, wearing my colors and disgracing my diploma. You're not a Dawg. You never were a Dawg. Go home and see if Tech has any tickets available.



It was an absolutely disgraceful display from a fan base that, sadly, is not new to this sort of thing, and the only reason it doesn't seem worse in retrospect is because our program's prospects for the future already seem more depressing than anything that's actually happened already. There needs to be a total overhaul of this program in the offseason, everything from our schemes on both sides of the ball to the way we motivate our players to the mentality of the team itself -- but paradoxically, the more we lose, the less confident I am that anything will actually be changed. When we do something that doesn't work -- no matter how many times it doesn't work, or how disastrously it blows up in our faces -- the attitude is never, "This isn't working, we need to do something different"; it's, "We need to keep plugging away at it and eventually we'll do it right."

But that strategy hasn't worked this season, and it's failed dramatically enough that there's no reason to expect it will. Our coaching staff refuses to adapt on either a micro or a macro level. With respect to the former, we saw last night how our offensive playcalling followed predictable patterns (long pass on 1st down, which may or may not get completed; dive play on 2d down, which may or may not gain any meaningful yardage; leaving us with long yardage to convert on 3d down) that Kentucky was defending easily by the fourth quarter; for the last 20 minutes of the game, we were held to 82 total yards and zero points. As far as the macro level, it's been four years since Urban Meyer brought the spread offense to the SEC and we've shown no appreciable progress in our ability to defend it, whether it's being coached by Meyer or anyone else. If anything, we've gotten worse with each passing season, and are now at the point where even Jonathan Crompton can be handed a play-action game plan and run it with ruthless efficiency. Just like Tommy Tuberville and Phil Fulmer and all those other dinosaurs to whom Richt is now being compared, we've failed (and in many cases stubbornly refused) to adapt to new realities on the field of play in the SEC, and we're paying for it.



That's the first major problem with our coaching staff right now. The second is that we squander momentum as badly as any team in Division I-A. Some teams don't respond well to adversity; we don't respond well to the opposite, and haven't for the last two seasons. And it's not just our kickoff coverage, either, though that has been about as monumentally bad as it could've possibly been over the past couple years (and reared its ugly head again on Saturday: Kentucky's average field position following a Georgia TD was the UK44). It's in the way we managed to hand over every last bit of momentum immediately after coming out of the locker room at halftime with a supposedly secure 20-6 lead. It's in the way we managed to fall so flat on our faces just a week after what could've been the most inspiring win of the season. It's in the way we managed to give up two field goals, a safety, and a pick-six right after going up on South Carolina 38-23 back in September. Hell, it's in the way we responded to being the preseason #1 last season, and the way we came out against Florida that year despite supposedly having put so much swagger back in our game with the end-zone celebration in 2007.

I don't know whether it's because we've got a group of young, easily excitable guys who get amped up over a big play or big lead and start to lose control of themselves, or because positive developments like those cause us to get overconfident and complacent, but either way, it goes back to coaching. As much as we like to believe our players are supermen -- apparently to the point where we'll boo them for not meeting those expectations -- you simply cannot expect an 18- or 19-year-old kid to come to Athens already knowing how to respond physically and mentally to elite SEC football players trying to crush their bones in front of 93,000 screaming people. That is something that has to be taught, and for the first time I've begun doubting that Mark Richt and his staff are teaching it properly.



And that gets back to another reason why I'm so upset at the "fans" for booing our guys on Senior Day. Yes, they played poorly in the second half, but I've read their quotes and their Twitters and blog posts and the rest of it; they know they played poorly without you all reminding them of it. The people you might be better off reminding are our coaches, who have seen this happen repeatedly over the past 24 games and have whiffed on their responsibility -- let me stress again: their responsibility -- to make changes. "A fish rots from the head" is an ancient cliché, but like a lot of clichés that have lasted that long, it's usually true. And in this case, those players you're booing are only doing what they've been told, how they've been told to do it.

No, of all the things I'm ashamed of about the performance Bulldog Nation collectively put on Saturday night, the players are way, way down the list. Not that much of this matters now; we've only got two games left in the season, one of which we're almost certain to lose, the other of which will be in either Birmingham or Shreveport and thus will be of no consequence to begin with. It's an awful way to end any season, particularly for a team that entered the 2009 campaign with such promise. And yet I can't help but wonder now whether our coaches and fans alike haven't ended up with precisely the team we deserve.

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.

If you didn't really understand the rules,if you didn't even know the score . . .

So after the laughter, I guess comes the tears.

Even ninjas get the blues.

Well, between my absolutely horrendous EDSBS picks for this week and the preview/breakdown of the LSU game, y'all are hereby absolved of whatever dwindling obligation you had to pay attention to anything I say. Nearly everything I'd been harping on Georgia to do for the past month, we did: Kept the turnovers in check (and, but for the one game-ending interception on a pass we shouldn't have even needed to throw in the first place, wouldn't have had any at all); pressured the living shit out of the quarterback (for six sacks' worth, thereby more than doubling our season total), and against a mobile quarterback, no less; even found a bit of a running threat in Washaun Ealey, albeit a little late in the game. Did all that, and we still lost. If that's the best return that I can expect from my exhaustive research and borderline-obsessive emotional investment, then I'm not gonna lie to you, I might as well just say fuck football and turn this back into a primarily political blog, which I know would please most of you immensely. (Except politics only breaks my heart almost as bad! Where, oh where are we to find the men and women courageous enough to pass the public option?)

Let me get this out of the way now before I go flying off the tracks here: The excessive-celebration penalties in the fourth quarter, while completely and utterly bogus, didn't singlehandedly lose the game for Georgia, unless you think the penalty was so emotionally demoralizing that it kept us from tackling Charles Scott on LSU's winning touchdown run. But with that said, somebody in the NCAA needs to sit down with the rule book and figure out exactly what qualifies as what's "excessive" and what isn't, and then make sure those rules are uniformly applied, because I'm getting damn sick and tired of a bunch of excited teenagers being expected to do nothing more than nod politely and hand the ball back to the refs after scoring a touchdown on national fuckin' television. And if those refs honestly can't discern between taunting and mere pump-up-the-rest-of-the-team jubilation, then perhaps the competitions they're assigned to moderate need to be a little less intense in nature, like something along the lines of high-school debate team matches.

Now then, here's another thing I said earlier this week that ended up not having any relevance: I said we'd at least have a better idea of what kind of team we had coming out of the LSU game, and I'm still not sure we do. Which is the real Georgia offense, the one that spent the entire first half tripping over its own shadow or the one that showed flashes of brilliance in the second half? How much optimism can we express about the potential revival of our running game based on only eight carries by Ealey? Should I be happy about the defense's performance for the first 59 minutes or pull my hair out dwelling on the one last minute we couldn't get it done (and justify it by pointing out that LSU's offense was absolutely nothing special to begin with)? If anyone has any trenchant, concrete insights into these issues, by all means, share; clearly I have no more relevant insights into this team's fortunes than Jenna does.


Jenna (at right, bejerseyed) and Earl do an uncanny impression of Georgia's offense in the first half.

As agonizing as the first half was, the way that we came back in the second half and refused to give up almost makes me want to put up one of those "Despite the loss, I feel better about the team than ever" posts. I'm not gonna do that, since I did it a couple of times during the 2006 season and got nothing but additional tears for the trouble. (And I was kind of hoping our program would be at a point where we could avoid indulging in that kind of moral-victory shit anyway.) I will say this: The second-half effort against LSU demonstrates improvement in a number of areas over where we were coming out of the Oklahoma State game, particularly in the area of turnovers and QB pressure, somewhat less so in terms of consistency in the run game. And a Georgia team playing at exactly the level it did in the second half Saturday will be good enough to beat Tennessee Tech and Vanderbilt, perhaps also Tennessee and Kentucky. But to beat any of the remaining teams on our schedule, that improvement is going to have to continue at a more than incremental rate, and the lingering issues standing in the way of that improvement (confused run-blocking, indifferent punt coverage) are going to have to be solved.

Once upon a time, as recently as our blistering second-half run in 2007, I would've had near-complete faith in our coaching staff to solve those problems. Now, I'm not so sure. Last year we managed to tangibly regress over the course of a season for what was, as far as I could ascertain, the first time in the Mark Richt era; this season, we've been so inconsistent in nearly every area that you could practically use a coin flip to make your predictions on just about anything from whether we win or lose to whether it's a defensive struggle or a blazing shootout. Perhaps it's a product of all the really young talent we've put out on the field this year, far more so than in any previous year I can remember, particularly at the offensive skill positions. But we're at a point now -- past that point, really -- where we should be making some concrete decisions about what to do with those guys, and our continuing inability to do that is preventing us from acquiring any kind of identity on offense. Hell, we're having some of those same issues even with our established playmakers (can anyone, anyone at all, explain what A.J. Green and Rennie Curran were doing on the sideline for even a minute of yesterday's action?). We're too talented a team, and too far into the season, to still be resorting to the "throw-stuff-against-the-wall-and-see-if-anything-sticks" strategy, but it still seems like that's what we're doing a lot of the time.

That's about all the insight I can offer at this point; beyond that I'm just as blind as everyone else. But while my prognosticating eye may be blind, my faith isn't. Help me out here, Mark. I want to have hope, but I gotta know what we're doing first. Depending on what type of skid you're in, people will tell you to either steer into it our steer out of it; right now it kind of just seems like we're sawing the steering wheel back and forth and pounding the brakes at random. Let's please figure out which way we're supposed to be steering before we end up hitting a tree.



· Didn't get to see much of the later action since I spent most of the evening driving back to C-Town, but from what I've seen in looking over the recaps this morning, I think I'm actually starting to agree with something Lou Holtz said earlier this week: Only three teams look like they deserve to be in the top 10 at this point. After Texas, Alabama, and Florida, I think they should just put "N/A" in slots 4 through 9 and pick up again with Cincinnati or somebody at #10. Ohio State (ranked ninth as I type this) dominated Indiana fairly impressively given that Indiana has looked better than anyone expected, and USC crushed a Cal team that's started its second-half skid even earlier than usual this year, but other than that there weren't a lot of top-10-caliber performances. And it's not like most of them were even playing good opponents, either.

· Here's a meme that should be building more steam at this point: the "Just How Bad Was Georgia's Loss To Oklahoma State?" game, otherwise known as Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon If Kevin Bacon Was A Homeless Alcoholic. Georgia loses to Oklahoma State, who goes right out and loses to Houston at home; Houston survives a couple weeks as a potential BCS-busting Cinderella, then gets unloaded on for nearly 60 points by a UTEP squad that has accomplished precisely jack and squat in the past three seasons. You know what this means, don't you? However many points Memphis is getting next Saturday, jump on 'em.


Nineteen of 34 for three TDs and three picks gets you a "good job," but it sure as hell doesn't get you any "giggety"s.

· As up and down as Joe Cox has looked this season, is there anyone who'd take Jevan Snead over him at this point? His QB rating this season against I-A competition is 118.7, which is five points lower than Joe Cox's against LSU in spite of the fact that our offense basically wrote off the entire first half. I'm really starting to wonder if Steve Spurrier's errant vote for Snead in the preseason All-SEC balloting didn't carry some kind of voodoo curse.

· The ACC is starting to remind me of that exchange from "The Incredibles":

Dash: You always say 'Do your best,' but you don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do?
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.
Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

Pretty much. If Maryland and Virginia are special, then no one is.

· UAB Blazers Watch: UAB, which had never beaten Southern Miss in the program's history coming into this season, lost to the Golden Eagles by scores of 37-7 and 70-14 the last two years. So what happens when I publicly pick USM to beat an outwardly easy-peasy 10-point spread at Legion Field on a Thursday night? The Blazers win by two touchdowns. Blazers Watch will continue each week, as they appear to have something to play for after all, but I hereby recuse myself from predicting any more games involving UAB, for gambling purposes or anything else.

· Wofford Terriers Watch: The Terriers got outscored 16-0 in the third quarter and lost to Georgia Southern, 26-21. At 1-4, WU is one loss away from having the Terriers Watch suspended indefinitely.



· And if that happens, it may be replaced by the Cheerleader Curse Watch, as we had a possible relapse this weekend: UNC's Brittney (above) got to watch her Tarheels hand Virginia their first win of the season, in Chapel Hill, no less. If that ain't cursed, I don't know what is.

I've been hurt, and we've been had . . .

Well, that wasn't how this was supposed to go.

Gotta tell you, kids, I'm kind of at a loss here. Only twice since I first moved my freshman ass into Lipscomb Hall back in the fall of 1995 has Georgia failed to win its season opener (the other being Jim Donnan's debut in 1996); only five times in that span have we not started a season 2-0. (Actually, Kyle says this is the first time we've ever had a losing record at any point in the Mark Richt era, which is amazing to me.) I didn't realize what a luxury that was until now, but we've always been fairly fortunate to begin seasons with tangible evidence that we were at least a pretty good team, or barring that, evidence of what we were good at and what we weren't.

But after the first season-opening loss under Richt, I'm still not really sure what kind of team we have here. And as Senator Blutarsky explains, our coaches don't appear to be either, at least on offense. We were a well-oiled machine on that first glorious offensive drive, repeatedly running over Oklahoma State's front seven and slinging the ball with authority, but whatever made that first drive work so brilliantly was a fleeting memory halfway through the second quarter. From there we downshifted into a series of head-scratching passes that were neither thrown nor caught particularly well, and what few good runs we broke off after that never came at junctures in the game where they were able to amount to anything.

A lot of people have questioned Mike Bobo's philosophy (or whether he even had one) during this game, and while I don't usually consider myself knowledgeable enough about the deeply technical X-and-O aspects of football to question anyone's playcalling, this time I can see where the naysayers are coming from and sympathize with them. The thing is, I can kind of see where Bobo was coming from, too: Cox had laced a couple nice-looking passes on the opening drive, and certainly anyone who watched any game tape of last year's OSU defense could've reasonably come to the conclusion that blasting away at their pass defense was the way to go. But when Cox followed up the opening drive by going through a stretch where he completed only four of seven passes for 9 yards, the logical thing to do would've been to throttle back the burden placed on the passing game and re-invest in what was working, i.e. the running game. It looked like a classic case of depending too much on a pre-conceived game plan and not adapting the playcalling to the circumstances on the field, and while I guess the temptation to do that is always gonna be greater when you're just starting out the season and don't really know what you have yet, I would've thought Bobo would have grown out of that after two-plus seasons flying solo as the OC.


No Colorado-in-2006 heroics this past Saturday, yet no thrown toasters, either. (But only because I was watching the game at someone else's house.)

Then there's Cox. I don't know how much of his ineffectiveness was due to his recovering from the flu and how much was due to him perhaps just not being all that good; either way, I hate to see him get compared too closely to Joe Tereshinski, which is like the "she has a nice personality" of faint-praise QB assessments. But unlike 2006, when I started the season pretty solid in my conviction that Tereshinski gave us the best chance to win and took a lot of convincing (and freshman struggling by Matt Stafford) to believe otherwise, this time around I find myself nodding a little and tapping my foot to the beat of the people who want to see Murray or Mettenberger get their shot earlier rather than later. I love Cox's work ethic, attitude, and devotion to the team, but if all that stuff translated directly into Ws, JoeT3 would've been hoisting a Sugar Bowl trophy at the end of 2006.

The thing is, looking at how tough our schedule is this year, we don't have a true breather game until we host Tennessee Tech between the hedges in November, and that dramatically decreases the likelihood we'll have an opportunity to empty the bench and give any of the backup guys some playing time. Which means that if we do see Murray or Mettenberger on the field before then, more than likely it will have come about due to a Cox implosion. At which point, of course, we'll be throwing a true freshman to the wolves. Are we having fun yet?

The reason for hope, of course, is our defense, and who the hell thought anyone would be saying that after last year's second-half debacle. We held the Cowboys nearly two hundred yards and 17 points below their per-game 2008 average, and all but one of OSU's scores came on drives they were fortunate enough to start deep inside Georgia territory thanks to a turnover or long kick return. Even the avowed anti-Willie Martinez factions within Bulldog Nation have, for the most part, been stepping up to defend Willie in the wake of the defense's solid performance in Stillwater, and while the paranoid fatalist in me wants to believe that our season must already be on the brink if lions are willing to lie down with lambs like that, the greater part of me is just thrilled we've figured out how to fucking knock people down again. (Even if, as poor Reshad Jones found out, we only end up getting penalized for it. Dude, I take back every bad thing I've ever said about you.)



So yeah, it was a bad afternoon, made that much more worse by the fact that we still don't know how much trouble we're in just yet. We could be the kind of 2006-mediocre where we lose a couple games to teams we have no business losing to but are still solid enough to regroup to an inspiring finish and nine wins, or we could be bad bad enough to be entering the stretch run in November still wondering how we're gonna put together six wins and back our way into the Papajohns.com Bowl. But let's please keep in mind that we've only played one game, and barring further evidence to the contrary, two factors mitigate against the latter outcome. The first is that Mark Richt has never won fewer than eight games in a season -- heck, 10-win seasons have become the rule rather than the exception in Athens, even when we're demonstrably not even trying that hard -- so it might not be time just yet to start seriously weighing the possibility of a 6-6 (much less 5-7) finish.

I realize that that might not be comforting some of the antsier, more shit-can-happy segments of our fan base, so let's also take at least a minute or two out of our busy rageahol-consumption schedule to consider: What if Oklahoma State is really as good as advertised? I mean, the "OSU as trendy top-ten pick" meme started getting outpaced by its own backlash as far back as early June, and nearly every pundit who predicted a Georgia win in Stillwater (which was most of them, myself included) predicated that pick at least partially on the assumption that OSU was a) overrated and b) preordained to wilt before remotely challenging opponents. What if the Cowboys' offense really hasn't lost a step despite losing all that receiving talent, their defense really has made a quantum leap under Bill Young, and they really are a solid top-ten team (if not top-five, where they'll more than likely ascend to sometime in the next month)? Particularly with Oklahoma sustaining a direct hit not only to their hopes of a BCS national title but to their hopes of any kind of title at all -- even the Big XII South -- is it possible that we're going to be looking back on this game in January thinking that actually wasn't the absolute worst performance we could've put up against an eventual Fiesta Bowl team?

Well, we'd better hope that that's what we end up saying, because we already know Georgia's not as good as advertised, and if Oklahoma State turns out not to be as good as advertised either, then that's a double suckerpunch back into the ranks of the mediocre, and one I'm not sure I can quite take, given my fragile mental state and all. For now, at least, I'm going to try not to think about it, instead investing all my energies into preparing for an all-day tailgate when South Carolina comes to town on Saturday. Our players need to get better at a lot of things, and I need to get better at alcohol consumption; just as Georgia's offense was exposed this past weekend, my tolerance was exposed on Saturday as not being nearly what it's been in past years, and that's got to improve. Being 31 and broke is no excuse.


Whuuhhh . . . so did we win?

· I'll come out and admit it right now: One other thing I need to get lots better at is prognosticatin'. Obviously I whiffed on picking Georgia over Oklahoma State, but over the past week I also figured that Alabama's rebuilt offense wouldn't accomplish a whole lot against Virginia Tech (the Tide rolled up nearly 500 yards on the Hokies and won 34-24); that neither Tennessee's nor USC's similarly regrouping offenses would cover massive spreads against gimme opponents (Tennessee won 63-7, USC won 56-3); that Louisiana Tech had a reasonable chance of upsetting Auburn (they were outscored 24-3 in the second half and lost, 37-13); that Nevada would be able to score points of some kind on Notre Dame (they got shut out, 35-0); and that Troy would roll Bowling Green in Dave Clawson's first game as BGSU head coach (Troy lost 31-14). You are hereby absolved of any responsibility to listen to anything I say for the remainder of the season.

· One of the things I was right about: With only one returning starter on either of its lines, Oregon has no presence whatsoever in the trenches and may struggle to win four games in the Pac-10 this year. That was an ugly scene long before the clock hit 00:00 and LeGarrette Blount started fine-tuning his Woody Hayes impression, and despite being one of the earliest beneficiaries of the "coach-in-waiting" trend, Chip Kelly has probably worked his way onto the hot seat faster than any new coach of 2009.

· The Big 10 didn't have such a hot weekend, either -- only one Big 10 team actually lost this past weekend (Illinois' 37-9 dismantling vs. Missouri), but the others included Indiana, who was shut out in the second half against D-IAA Eastern Kentucky and had to hang on to win 19-13; Minnesota, who had to beat Syracuse in overtime after trailing for most of the game; Ohio State, who needed a bizarre two-point-conversion runback late in the fourth quarter to survive Navy; and Wisconsin, who had to survive a late Northern Illinois rally to win by a single score at home. It also included Iowa's one-point win over Northern Iowa, which came only after the Hawkeyes blocked two UNI attempts at a game-winning field goal in the final seconds and spawned what was hands-down the funniest comment of the entire day, from Black Heart Gold Pants blogger Oops Pow Surprise via Twitter:



· Oh, one more thing I was right about: Al Groh is as good as roadkill at UVA this year. And not even the OK kind of roadkill where the animal in question is pretty much intact and you can still tell what species it was, but the nasty, spread-across-two-lanes kind of roadkill that's probably been run over three or four separate times and is pretty much just a greasy splatter of unidentifiable organs. (Two words, UVA administration: Charlie fuckin' Strong. OK, three words.)

· UAB Blazers Watch: I may no longer be employed at Dear Old UAB, but I can still take pride in their 44-24 stomping of Rice in their home opener, in which they never trailed and were never seriously threatened. Sure, it was only Rice, but mark my words, you will know the name of Joe Webb -- who rushed 20 times for 194 yards and two TDs in addition to completing 12 of 15 passes for 221 yards and another two scores -- by the end of the season.


For y'all's sakes, though, I will refrain from making any "Black Tebow" references. (For now.)

· Wofford Terriers Watch: Not so good -- they got whacked 40-7 by South Florida Saturday night. But they were tied at the end of the first quarter and behind only 16-7 at halftime, so that's something, right? C'mon, people. I need a reason to believe here.