AJC > Sports > Blog > Archives > 2008 > January > 02
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Goodbye Sugar, Hello BCS championship
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New Orleans-Today is transition day in New Orleans. The Sugar Bowl crowd will get out of town early and the LSU and Ohio State fans will begin to come in and start getting ready for the BCS championship game Monday night.
The teams arrive here and those of us in the media have been invited to meet with Ohio State coach Jim Tressel and LSU coach Les Miles at their respective hotels this afternoon. I’ll start filing reports on the BCS championship game starting with Thursday’s newspaper.
But before we move on to the BCS championship and the end of an unforgettable 2007 season, here are a few final thoughts about what all took place on New Year’s Day.
The Sugar Bowl really helped Georgia: Early this morning I was asked by a friend what the 41-10 win over Hawaii meant for Georgia as it prepared for next season. I think it was huge from this standpoint. A lot of the national media were at the game last night because it was a compelling story line and because they were going to stay over and cover the BCS championship. Those national media saw how athletic and talented Georgia is. They will remember that when it comes time to mark their preseason ballots. I’ll be stunned if Georgia is not a consensus top five team this August.
Is the Rose Bowl sorry? Mike Bell at 790 The Zone asked me this morning if the Rose Bowl had egg on its face for not taking Georgia to play Southern Cal, which just destroyed Illinois. I had to remind him and I’ll remind you. The Rose Bowl is not embarrassed by that game at all because they don’t care what the fans think. They had their parade and their game. The more and more I talk to people I become convinced that the Rose Bowl was never going to take Georgia because it would have changed their traditional Big Ten-Pac-10 match-up and it would have hurt the Sugar Bowl, which needed Georgia to sell out.
This was Mark Richt’s best year as a coach: Forget the black jerseys. Forget storming the field in Jacksonville. Those were just fun snapshots at a much larger picture. In his seventh season at Georgia, Mark Richt has grown into a big-time college football coach, one of the five best in the country. He better understands the big picture, he knows how to delegate, he knows how to motivate, and he knows how to recruit. He is now the complete package. There should be a very nice raise in his immediate future.
Just thinking: Add redshirt freshman running back Caleb King and incoming receiver A.J. Green to this mix and what do you have in 2008? I’m always skeptical of freshmen in this league until they actually prove it against SEC competition. But if just half the hype on these two kids is true, then Georgia offense will be the best in the SEC. And I will say this. On defense, Georgia has the best collection of players who can run that I have seen in a long, long, time. They are certainly faster as a team than LSU, which I saw a bunch this season.
There is still a big difference in the Division I-A leagues: The five non-BCS conferences were really encouraged by Boise State’s win over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl last year. They hoped that a Hawaii win would prove once and for all that one of them belonged in one of these five games each year. But Hawaii’s loss, because it was so decisive, will reopen the argument and make a BCS bowl less likely to take one of the little guys unless they automatically quality. There is a big difference between football programs like Georgia and Hawaii and it showed.
Will June Jones stay?: Jones, the former Falcons coach, has done a magnificent job at Hawaii but you have to wonder is he will move on after this magical season. It will be hard to put together another collection of players as good as this. He has told friends that he only wants to coach about 5-6 more years. SMU is still looking for a coach and with his offense, Jones could probably win that league (Conference USA) in a short amount of time.
