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Thursday, April 10, 2008
The REAL question about Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Augusta—I think I’m detecting a pattern here.
I’ve taken a bunch of calls from radio shows this week and they all have asked basically the same two questions:
1) Is Georgia good enough to win the national championship?
2) Can Georgia handle the hype that will come with these great expectations?
When I hit the front door of Augusta National yesterday, two guys wearing Georgia hats stopped me and wanted to know exactly the same thing.
Here are the answers I gave to all of them.
1) Yes. But there will be about 10 teams good enough to win the national championship in 2008. If last season taught us anything, it’s that no matter how good a team is, there is certain amount of good fortune involved when it comes to winning a national championship.
LSU, you’ll recall, was supposedly finished when the Tigers lost to Arkansas on the day after Thanksgiving. But good fortune stepped in and gave LSU another chance. LSU probably had the best team in the country when the Tigers were healthy but if Missouri and West Virginia don’t lose on Dec. 1, Les Miles and the gang never get the chance to prove it.
Until we get some kind of playoff, just being good will not be enough to win the national championship in most years. You’ve got to be good AND a little lucky.
2) It’s up to the leaders on this football team. If Georgia has good leaders, and I think they do, the Bulldogs can handle the hype that will inevitably be coming their way. That’s not the issue.
Georgia has talent. Lots of it, in fact. And handling the hype is a much bigger deal to fans that it is to the players.
What they might not be able to handle is playing LSU and Florida in back to back weeks away from Athens. Even if you win in Baton Rouge, you’ll be physically beat up. If you count Florida as a road game, Georgia will play at Baton Rouge, Jacksonville, Lexington, Ky., and Auburn on consecutive weeks. It would take some research, but I’m guessing there aren’t many teams with four straight road games like that.
What they not be able to handle is going against six coaches who have won national championships. There are five in the SEC and one at Arizona State (Dennis Erickson).
What they might not be able to handle is a key injury at the wrong time. What happens to Georgia in 2005 if a healthy D.J. Shockley plays against Florida?
What Georgia fans need to be concerned about right now is not how this team handles the pressure from the outside. It’s what happens from the inside. Over the years I’ve found that national championship teams usually have one thing in common. There are a few guys who set the standard for the rest of the team. And if you don’t meet that standard, they will call you out.
The players on the 1996 national championship team at Florida pretty much toed the line because they didn’t want to answer to Donnie Young or Jeff Mitchell, who were two very tough offensive linemen.
At Tennessee in 1998 it was linebacker Al Wilson. Al was a great football player and a true gentleman. But you did not want to make him mad.
That is what Georgia has to have if it hopes to successfully navigate what is to come.
The talent is there. The schedule is what it is. The question people should be asking about Georgia is this:
Will the players on this team do all the right things and stay intact between now and August? If you ask coaches, this is the scariest time of the year. The next few months are when a national championship can be lost before a team even gets on the field.
