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Friday, September 2, 2005
Uncertainty principle rules at QB
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
There are two kinds of quarterbacks in college football this year. One kind is Matt Leinart, who won the Heisman Trophy last season, has thrown 71 touchdown passes in the past two, is romantically linked to swimsuit models and will play his first game this season in Honolulu. (We’re still waiting for word on whether he is an heir to Bill Gates.)
The other kind of quarterback this season is almost everybody else.
College football often differs from the NFL in that a team’s fortunes aren’t necessarily linked to the quarterback. It is possible to have a great defense or a power running game and win it all. That can happen in the NFL, but it’s rare.
But it seems more teams’ seasons are linked to uncertain quarterbacks this year than usual. Georgia Tech is never sure what to expect from Reggie Ball. Georgia can’t possibly know what to expect from D.J. Shockley. Auburn, Tech’s opponent, transitions from a senior quarterback who was drafted in the first round (Jason Campbell) to a sophomore (Brandon Cox) coming off a nice sideline view.
“Any time you have a brand new quarterback, things function differently,” Jackets coach Chan Gailey said. “Everybody has certain talents and abilities, and you’re trying to turn things toward that. But you don’t just turn everything on a dime. It takes time.”
Tech’s defense should be solid. Wide receiver Calvin Johnson and tailback P.J. Daniels are legitimate weapons. But Ball is the X factor, and it isn’t stretching things to say Gailey’s future may be linked to a 20-year-old. In two years, Ball has shown a remarkable tendency to string together conflicting highlights: One for me, one for you, two for me, two for you.
At Georgia, we have been reminded almost daily that while the school lost Division I-A’s all-time winning quarterback (David Greene), the Bulldogs’ new starter has 26 games of experience. That sounds a lot better than saying Shockley has never started a college game.
We know he has talent. We know he is admired for his demeanor and patience. But we don’t know how he’ll react the first time things go wrong or some yahoo yells, “You ain’t no David Greene!”
This year, Georgia’s defense might not be good enough to make up for average play from a quarterback.
Work your way south to Auburn and through Florida. The Tigers are coming off an undefeated season. That not only gave coach Tommy Tuberville unforeseen security, it minted Al Borges as one of the game’s top offensive coordinators. He’ll need to be. Last year, Borges worked with Campbell. This year, he’s tutoring Cox, who has attempted just 34 passes.
Bobby Bowden seems to have forgotten how to develop quarterbacks or an offense. Last year, the Seminoles had their lowest scoring average (24.7) in a quarter-century. Chris Rix was a mess, and Wyatt Sexton is being treated for Lyme disease.
Just this week, Drew Weatherford was named the Seminoles’ starter. His reaction: “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.” Not really. He’s a redshirt freshman. He had to beat out another redshirt freshman. Welcome to the new Seminoles.
In Gainesville, new coach Urban Meyer might have a championship contender. Or he might have a problem. Chris Leak has the skills, experience and leadership to win. But now he has to run an offense previously foreign to him, the spread option.
Miami used to be Quarterback U. More recently, it survived Brock Berlin. This season, the job goes to sophomore Kyle Wright, who appeared in two games last season. Wright has attempted nine passes in his career. That’s nine more attempts than the freshman he beat out.
Virginia Tech might win the ACC again. But Marcus Vick, while more talented than predecessor Bryan Randall, has not been the model of stability in his life.
Gailey believes head coaches, offensive coordinators and quarterbacks always get too much of the credit or blame. It follows that all three are under the gun at Tech.
It’s a situation nobody at Southern Cal can relate to.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
S.C. hails Spurrier’s latest fling
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Columbia, S.C. â€â€? Eighty-two thousand in the seats. ESPN’s “College Gameday” on the premises. Fifteen writers from the state of Florida in the press box. Who knew George O’Leary was such a magnet?
You might have thought that Hurricane Katrina and the great gasoline scare would have kept an ordinary football coach off the front page of Thursday’s newspapers. Well, you’d have been right â€â€? and also wrong. An ordinary coach wouldn’t have been featured on the front page of this city’s The State and pictured on the cover of this nation’s USA Today, but Steve Spurrier, as has been noted, is extraordinary.
Spurrier doesn’t come just to coach football. He comes to change programs. This marks the third time he has arrived somewhere hailed as nothing less than a savior: In Florida at the dawn of the ’90s, in this nation’s usually jaded capitol four Januarys ago, and now here.
South Carolina fans have a long and amusing history of getting worked up over not very much, and they’re worked up as never before. This is where, you’ll recall, folks were so moved by the novelty of winning that they tore down the goalposts on consecutive weekends in September 2000. This is where the beloved Gamecocks have managed to win fewer bowl games in their entire existence than Jim Donnan did in his brief time at Georgia.
And this is now where the Ol’ Ball Coach coaches his stylized brand of ball, and that alone makes South Carolina a must-see. Thursday night marked the great man’s official debut, and such was the hysteria that Spurrier was mentioned by name in Rev. Frank Anderson’s pregame invocation. (Though not, it should be noted, as an omniscient deity. Just as a new coach in need of blessing.)
Then Spurrier blessed the masses with his presence. Thirty cameras recorded his steps as he took the field through a fog of fabricated smoke and, in vintage Spurrier style, he wrong-footed the shooters by ducking behind the assembled band. (Not that Coach Superior is keeping a low profile: He was pictured 51 times in the 144-page game program.)
Then the actual football began, and barely half the first quarter had elapsed before fans were ready to raze another set of goalposts. The Gamecocks scored on their fifth snap and again on their 11th. The man beneath the visor was calling his pretty plays, and nobody ever dubbed Spurrier the Evil Imbecile.
“It felt very similar, calling plays,” Spurrier said afterward. “We chucked a few in there.”
South Carolina nearly chucked the game away. The Gamecocks couldn’t run the ball all night, and then they started fumbling, and in the last 13 minutes Central Florida scored 12 points. “They outplayed us,” Spurrier said. “They probably outhit us… . It was tough out there. It looked easy early, but all of a sudden it got tough.”
And here we pause to consider: Central Florida is tough? The same Central Florida that has yet to win a game under O’Leary, in his second year at the Orlando school? Well, yeah. The Golden Knights took what was supposed to be a coronation for the new king of Columbia and turned it into something of a fizzle, and the nervous moments at the end provided ESPN what the network wanted all along â€â€? the first toss of that new black visor.
So now we need ask: Can the scheming Evil Genius wreak the sort of havoc upon the SEC from this posting that he did while based in Gainesville? The answer: Not yet, and probably not ever. Even the Ol’ Ball Coach needs big-time ballplayers, and Carolina doesn’t have — and will never have — half as many as Florida did.
The dynamics will change for his Spurrier and his new crew eight days hence, when the Gamecocks play in Athens. Georgia could beat Spurrier only once when he coached the hated Gators. If the Bulldogs lose to him so early in this salvage mission, they might as well drop football and take up roller hockey.
Permalink | Comments (45) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
