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Home > Jeff Schultz > Archives > 2008 > April > 05
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Expectations could bite Dogs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Athens — There are delusions and then there are SEC-fueled delusions, which are like delusions on steroids. These are the delusions that make the fall that much harder. These are the delusions that can drown a team before it ever plays Auburn or Florida or, in the case of Alabama, Louisiana-Monroe.
It’s April. It’s spring football. The real kickoff is in nearly five months. But the delusions in Athens began shortly after Georgia steamrolled Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl and finished No. 2 in the rankings.
Expectation levels? They passed absurd two blocks ago. What’s it going to be like in August?
Matthew Stafford rolled his eyes.
“It’s above and beyond,” he said when asked about the tidal wave-like buildup. “But I think we kind of like it. We realize we need to be pushed.”
It’s April. It’s spring football. The phony season kickoff, Saturday’s Red-Black game, drew 19,874 fans. Imagine if the weather wasn’t miserable. The school sold 11,000 advance tickets before cutting it off. Media coverage was at an all-time high. The game was televised by CSS and broadcast by three radio stations. The AJC even had five representatives in the press box, which is significant considering only box lunches were served.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” said Vince Dooley said of the off-season buildup. “There was a great anticipation in 1980. But that wasn’t so much for the season as it was for Herschel [Walker].”
Georgia will play 12 regular-season games next season. Theoretically, it can play 14, with the SEC championship and a bowl game. It only seems like the team can go 37-0.
The Bulldogs should be very good next season. They have legitimate national-title hopes. But meteoric expectations — particularly in April — give coaches the willies.
Mark Richt dealt with this sort of thing often when he was an assistant at Florida State. “We were preseason No. 1 [in 1988],” he said. “Then we went to Miami and got beat 31-0, so we didn’t handle it very well.”
Richt certainly won’t have a problem when the Dogs begin next season with a high ranking (anywhere from No. 1 to No. 4). It’s more the months of brainwashing he’s concerned about.
“First of all, one of the many reasons why we’re ranked high, or we’re going to be ranked high, supposedly, is because of what last year’s team did,” Richt said after the spring game. “I just tell them: ‘That team is gone. Those leaders are gone. That chemistry is gone. You’ve got to start over. To this point, you guys haven’t really proven anything. You’ve got to earn the right to be considered a great football team.’ That’s what we’re in the process of doing. The one way we can do that is focus on the moment.”
Thus far, at least the school’s marketing wing is staying grounded. There were no “14-0” shirts in the bookstore. But the former coach said it would be easy for the players to get sucked in by the expectations.
“They’re human, and they’re young,” he said. “It’s hard for it not to affect them. So you do everything you can as a coach to keep them focused. It starts in spring practice. The problem is, you don’t know if what you’re saying to them is enough compared to what the alumni is saying to them, or what they’re reading.”
The extreme example of this happened in Tuscaloosa. Nick Saban’s arrival at Alabama led to 90,000 fans attending the spring game. Some had improbable BCS bowl projections. When the Tide won its first three games, some fans expected the team would be 8-0 going into the LSU game. Instead it lost at home to Georgia and nose-dived, going 4-6 the rest of the season, including the loss to Louisiana-Monroe.
You can already see the potential for disaster here. Some already are making bowl plans for Miami (home of next season’s BCS championship). Open with easy wins over Georgia Southern, Central Michigan and South Carolina and some will skip ahead several games in their mind to Florida week.
Beat the Gators and it will be, “How would we have done against Nebraska in ‘71?”
“There’s always a danger factor,” Stafford said, “when people talk about you being No. 1 or No. 2, but only if you treat it the wrong way.”
So far, the Dogs are 0-0. The trick is remembering that.
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