After enduring several hoaxes, this is the real deal. Here’s a shot of the little guy…only not so little really…

Official Release

…and consider me underwhelmed. Vandy looked good. Bobby Johnson has taken them to a level where they actually beat the Miami (OH)s of the world. I remember when Vandy would play lots of SEC teams close every year but would step out of conference and get whacked. The SEC has some tough teams this year but if they do well in their out of conference schedule they’ve got a shot at 6 wins and their first bowl since 1982 (I think). They’d have to knock of Duke, Rice, Miami (OH), Kentucky and two of the Ole Miss, Miss St, Wake Forest group. Considering Ole Miss is everyone’s sexy pick to be improved in the west, Miss St was the most improved team in the conference last year and Wake is picked by several folks to win the SEC, getting bowl eligible won’t be easy…it never is at Vandy.

The higher profile SEC game was the South Carolina-NC State battle. Ugh. That was ugly. NC State was game for the first half but you could see their defense collapsing in the 2nd half when they got down and knew that the only points their offense could likely score weren’t for them. SC looked ragged at best. Against a bottom tier ACC team, SC managed 1 FG in the first half. In the process they managed to make their starting QB, Tommy Beecher, look completely incompetent. Actually I think Beecher did that on his own. Rough outing for that kid. The final score was pretty impressive at 34-0, but that included 21 4th quarter points. The first half, SC gave up some yards on the ground against an offense that had absolutely ZERO threat of a passing game. Captain Munnerlyn looked good at CB though. Jasper Brinkley in his beg re-debut at LB looked a touch slow. It’s hard to say if it’s the injury lingering or the fact he weighs more than most of GT’s OL. Don’t let the stats fool you, SC struggled mightily on the ground up until the 4th quarter when Mike Davis started ripping off chunks of yards through a weakened NC State D. Backup QB Smelley looked good in the 2nd half and will likely get the nod against us (my opinion there) but that was after the NC State pass rush had slowed considerably and he had all the time in the world to find a man. Beecher spent most of the night running for his life, when he wasn’t throwing INTs. I have no doubts at all that SC will play at a different

level when they play us (they always do), but they’ve got a LONG way to go to live up to Holtz’ prediction that they can challenge for the SEC East this year.

Still getting this thing down. I changed a setting and basically wiped out the blog for a while there…awesome.

Just to clear a couple of things up. I’m still doing the .pdf because so many folks requested being able to have something to print. I’m also using it that way (for now) because the formatting here is a bit of a mystery right now. Still need to get comfortable with the way this thing formats.

Oh well, next week hopefully things will go smoother. Somehow I managed to email out two different versions of the writeup (very, very minor difference) so there’s another reason to have it available for download.

This SC game tonight should be interesting. NCSt isn’t very good (at all) so I don’t expect much from them. SC has a good defense and this inept NCSt bunch is going to make them look even better. I’m really anxious to see how Eric Norwood plays in space at his new LB spot. He was a force at DE but seems ill suited to the requirements of OLB. Watching Brinkley return to MLB will be interesting too as he’s battled a foot injury and weighs like 3 Mikey Hendersons.

Well, here’s this week’s writeup, we’ll see how it goes…

Well, it’s here…no need to say much here, we’re #1 in the country. If we can somehow pull off a 14-game win streak we’ll have a lovely crystal football as a parting gift. Is that too much to ask? According to national pundits if we win out we might play our way into the NFC playoffs due to our schedule strength, but a team bred in the heat of the SEC and particularly the SEC-East if nothing else should be ready for a tough schedule. It’s going to be fun, sit back and enjoy…

Week 01 Writeup – GSU

I had every intention of completing the positional reviews but things happened. Actually lots of things. Anyway, I won’t be completing the LB and OL notes in the interest of getting the GSU game writeup done. Sorry about that if you were dying to read those (I can’t imagine there were many folks really thinking “if I don’t gets my last two positional reviews I’m gonna go postal” but you never know. Here’s the quick and dirty on that: LB is stacked even with the loss of two guys for the season (only one of which was on the 2-deep) and OL is still solid despite the loss of Sturdivant for the year…lots of talent there and one of the top OL coaches in the country to get the job done. There.

Now about the writeups. I’ll still be doing them and based on feedback from most folks, I’ll still be doing them in a forwardable format. I’ll be emailing out a .pdf for the first game but after that the plan (I hope) is to have it here available for download each week. Instead of me composing 10 different emails and attaching the files in the crappy yahoo email program, I can just send an email saying it’s done. We’ll see how it goes. If you feel strongly one way or the other about it, email me, but I doubt much will change. It’ll still be available in a somewhat stripped down format on ugsasports.com, but I’ve always preferred the version with pictures (I like books with pictures too). So to summarize, I’m a bit lazy and look for the first writeup to be emailed out in .pdf format for week one and from then on available here for download. If you don’t know what a .pdf is, google it. If you don’t know what google is then I can’t help you and it’s probably best if you just stopped being a UGA fan. Anyway, look for the writeup to be out sometime late Wednesday night (as always). Now I’m off to nerd out on Georgia Southern…oh yeah…welcome back football season.