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Sunday, November 27, 2005
Woodson’s wrath necessary for young team
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
He doesn’t want to talk about it these days, and that’s understandable. At Jason Collier’s funeral, the mother of the Hawks player whose 28-year-old heart stopped beating in October suggested during remarks to those gathered that Mike Woodson’s relentless style as a coach contributed to her son’s death.
Since doctors aren’t even sure why Collier died, there is no need for Woodson to respond these days to the wrath of a grieving parent. Instead, Hawks forward Al Harrington served as Woodson’s defense attorney Sunday at Philips Arena and said of the Collier situation, “There are nights when we go home frustrated and tell folks what coach did, but you don’t tell them the good stuff that coach did. One time after a practice or a game, coach may have challenged [Collier] a bit, and that’s the part that he told about.”
Whatever the case, Woodson doesn’t want to talk about it, but he sort of did in response to something else.
Let’s start with this: The always shaky trio in the NBA of youth, inexperience and immaturity is dribbling for the Hawks. Thus the reason why those in the Atlanta locker room have struggled for long stretches while trying to adjust to the intensity of the NBA on the court and the sharpness of Woodson’s tongue off of it.
As for the intensity thing, there was the Hawks’ ugliness on Sunday when they ruined their otherwise impressive afternoon in search of a three-game winning streak by not matching the explosive ways of the Portland Trailblazers. A 13-point lead for the Hawks in the third quarter became a 77-75 loss.
As for the Woodson thing, he is what he is when dealing with players. That is, he is pretty much his college coach (some guy named Bob Knight) and the person that he served under as a top assistant in the league for three seasons (some guy named Larry Brown).
In other words, Woodson is blunt. We’re taking very blunt.
Blunt is good. Blunt is needed for a franchise that had to blow up its roster due to the incompetence of previous ownership and management and is rebuilding with a slew of athletically skilled but professionally challenged players.
“Well, the name of the game is trying to teach them the right way in learning the game, and it’s not personal,” said Woodson, 47, in his second year as an NBA head coach, all with the Hawks. “Sometimes it might be harsh to get my message, but sometimes there is a pat on the butt. I come in here tomorrow, and I’ve forgotten about what happened yesterday in terms of what was said during the heat of battle. Heck, they’re liable to bark back at me.”
They have, by the way. Loudly. Earlier this season, Woodson spent the aftermath of a particularly raw loss in Los Angeles to the Clippers delivering a critique of each player’s performance. And, yes, blunt was the operative word. We’re talking blunt to the point where 19-year-old Marvin Williams, the Hawks’ normally soft-spoken No. 1 draft pick from North Carolina, ended the meeting screaming at Woodson for screaming at him.
In response, Harrington, a senior citizen at 25 on what is the NBA’s youngest roster, told the coaches and other Hawks personnel to leave the locker room. He wanted time for screaming at Williams and other Hawks youngsters who just didn’t understand Woodson’s tough love.
“Guys are just a little too sensitive, and they have to realize that we’re all in this for the same thing, and that is to win basketball games, and that you can’t take any of this as a personal attack,” said Harrington, recalling the clean version of his speech that day. In addition to scolding teammates for having a thin skin regarding Woodson, he told them to leave that college and high school stuff out of the pros.
Harrington glanced around the locker room adding, “Maybe you’ve noticed that we used to dance before games and all of that kind of stuff. Once we start winning, we can dance, flip, do whatever we want to do out there. Until then, we have to take a serious approach. We realize that we’re in a position where we get no respect, and the only way we’re going to get that is that we’re going to have to win.”
Instead, the Hawks started 0-9 before their modest winning streak. They’re passing better. They’re defending better. They’re also listening better — you know, whether they like what they hear or not.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Terence Moore
Georgia, Tech defenders provided thrills
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
As the fellow who had just watched his 56th Georgia-Georgia Tech football game said, taking leave of the press box Saturday near midnight, “This was not one for the ages. Maybe for the aged, but not the ages.”
Even the score lacked personality —14-7 — like a 3-1 score in baseball. Not dull, I give it that. Sluggish offensively, but there was nothing dull about the defense. Amazing that those young bodies could survive some of the crashing hits they took. It was trench warfare without weapons. At least you knew this, that you wouldn’t be seeing Georgia’s Gordon Ely-Kelso taking off on a run from punt formation, if he valued his life.
You must have thought it was never going to get out of the first quarter. Took an hour and 15 minutes, and four reviews from the replay crew. A Broadway musical doesn’t get that many reviews. What I’m saying is, the 56,000-or-so came to the Tech campus expecting so much and getting a yo-yo offensive performance out of both sides kind of let the air out of their balloons. It wasn’t long before their interest waned in trying to interfere with the signal-calling. It was good, though, to see old Bobby Dodd Stadium rocking again, as in the days of the Grant Field original.
Now, as for the featured match between Reggie Ball and D.J. Shockley, it was short of the luster you expected. Ball got his touchdown early, then Shockley got his, and the next 46 minutes was an offensive vacuum. Neither distinguished himself, but the decision obviously went to the senior Shockley, who performed more within himself and kept order in his ranks.
Ball, well, you just don’t know what you’ll get from him, though usually you can count on him taking the game on himself too often. He’ll bring you out of your seat on one play, then send you crashing back on the next. I trust we shall not be subjected to a preseason Heisman Trophy campaign in his behalf next season. When he is good, he is very, very good. When he’s bad, he’ll drive you nuts.
Whether his fault or not, it was significant that Calvin Johnson, with all his ability and the hype, was a factor only when he caught Ball’s 2-yard pass for a touchdown. Give Georgia’s defense a thumbs-up here, and most of it was done with single coverage, mainly by senior DeMario Minter. If there was an unofficial match between him and Leonard Pope, the towering Bulldog, it never developed. The Bulldog sophomore who filled in the blanks for Georgia was Kregg Lumpkin, who turned a cameo appearance into a full night running the ball. He had gained only 156 yards all season. Against Tech he ran for 74 yards and kept the offense alive with chunks of yardage.
This rivalry never has brought out the best in Ball, beginning with his year as a freshman, when he had an encounter on the Georgia sideline, then disappeared from the game the last half. Then there was the fourth-down miscalculation in Athens last year, and he was not to escape this time. He delivered the fatal blow when he was intercepted by Tim Jennings as the end approached. Georgia had gone ahead on Shockley’s touchdown pass to Bryan McClendon, finally, now Tech had moved swiftly down to Georgia’s 11-yard line in reprisal when the Yellow Jackets’ night came to a disastrous end.
“We were getting ready for overtime,” Gerris Wilkinson, the senior linebacker, said. “Fourteen points should not be enough to beat us.”
But alas, it was. Mark Richt is still unscathed in this old series. But let’s get one point across here: It is not a series of 12 in a row, as ballyhooed over the radio, referring to Georgia Tech’s sentence by the NCAA. “Vacated” does not mean defeat. “Vacated” simply erases the game from the books. It was never played, in other words. This one was, and Georgia won fair and square.
Permalink | Comments (66) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
Tech squanders rare opportunity
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Look at it this way. (Georgia Tech fans surely will.) Playing at home, Chan Gailey’s best Tech team wasn’t able to beat the weakest Georgia aggregation since 2001. That new contract and the famous victory over Miami to the contrary, a Tech coach cannot ever feel secure in his job until he beats the hated mutts from Athens. Against that bunch, Chan Gailey is 0-4.
Only one other full-fledged Tech coach has lost his first four games against Georgia, and that was Bill Curry swimming against the high tide of the Herschel Walker era. (George O’Leary, it must be noted, started 0-4 against the Bulldogs, but the first of those losses came after he inherited Bill Lewis’ mess in 1994.) Curry broke through on his fifth try. (So did O’Leary, for that matter.) After Saturday night, it’s hard to envision Gailey beating the hated mutts anytime soon, if ever.
The Jackets had every chance. They outgained Georgia by 61 yards and had seven more first downs and basically controlled the game on every level except the scoreboard. The scoreboard, however, tends to matter in every game, and never so much as in a rivalry game. The Bulldogs didn’t make many plays, but they made the two that mattered. And Reggie Ball, as is his peculiar and exasperating wont, undercut some splendid and resourceful work by turning the ball over three times.
When last we saw Ball against Georgia, he’d thrown the ball away on fourth down — not knowing it was fourth down — with his team five points in arrears. That egregious loss spawned all manner of hand-wringing in Tech circles, and this night commenced as if Ball and his mates were about to set things right. The Jackets scored on their first possession, flashing 78 yards with the greatest of ease, Ball keeping for two key gains and finding Calvin Johnson with a lovely parabola of a throw for the touchdown. Not five minutes in, Tech had its first lead over Georgia under Gailey. Matters pretty much deteriorated thereafter.
The Jackets didn’t score again. They kept moving, but they couldn’t move far enough. Ball lost a fumble at midfield and threw a weird interception inside Georgia territory with 14 seconds left in the first half. A sack blunted another drive, and another Ball fumble — he recovered this one — helped halt yet another. And then Travis Bell missed a field goal, which Tech fans have come to expect, and the game was left for Georgia to seize. And Georgia did.
D.J. Shockley, who had an otherwise indifferent night, found Bryan McClendon for the winning touchdown over Dennis Davis, whose interception had clinched Tech’s monumental upset of Miami seven days earlier. That, alas, remains the flaw in the Gailey system — no gain ever gets fully consolidated. The Jackets beat the nation’s No. 3 team on the road one week but cannot muster more than seven points on their ground against their oldest enemy the next. Tech rises so far but no further.
Once again, the Jackets teased their backers with a rousing drive at the end of a Georgia game, and this time nobody lost track of downs. This time, the surge ended with Ball’s first-down interception, Georgia’s Tim Jennings flashing in front of Damarius Bilbo to seal this game in much the same way Tim Wansley stole George Godsey’s pass to give Mark Richt his first victory over Tech on this field in 2001. Richt hasn’t lost to the Jackets yet, and there seems no compelling reason why he ever will.
Losing 51-7 to Georgia in Gailey’s first season was awful in its way, but the narrow losses of the past two seasons surely hurt Tech fans just as much. There was no difference between the teams Saturday, no difference except that the Bulldogs took better care of the ball. If you root for the Jackets, you came into this game wondering, “If not now, when?” And you exited, sad to say, thinking, “Maybe never.”
NOT AGAIN
After four tries, Chan Gailey still is searching for his first win against rival Georgia. How his record against the Bulldogs compares to past Tech coaches:
Coach (Years) Record
John Heisman (1904-19) 7-4-1
Bobby Dodd (1945-66) 12-10
William Alexander (1920-44) 7-10-3
Bud Carson (1967-71) 2-3
Bobby Ross (1987-91) 2-3
George O’Leary (1995-2001) 3-4
Pepper Rodgers (1974-79) 2-4
Bill Curry (1980-86) 2-5
Bill Fulcher (1972-73) 0-2
Bill Lewis (1992-94) 0-3
Chan Gailey (2002-05) 0-4
Permalink | Comments (188) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
SEC championship is the real prize
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
If some Georgia fans had their doubts about D.J. Shockley coming into this season, it’s probably because a certain rivalry game was fresh on their minds. It’s probably because it is difficult to forget when a backup quarterback is so mediocre that the starter feels compelled to come back into the game – despite a fractured thumb.
That was the lingering memory of Shockley from last season. He replaced the injured David Greene when the Bulldogs needed him most last season against Tech, then he was pulled for a guy with only four good fingers on his throwing hand.
“That was on my mind a lot this week,” Shockley said late Saturday. “It was the one opportunity I had to perform, and I didn’t come through the way I wanted to.”
Saturday’s game might not go down as a desperation game, as it pertains to Shockley trying to prove his worth. He entered the Georgia Tech game having won eight of his nine starts, and the only defeat came by one point to Auburn. But in the 14-7 win over the Yellow Jackets, Shockley did manage to wipe clean a smudge from his resume.
Albeit, belatedly.
His 19-yard touchdown pass to Bryan McClendon with 3:18 remaining voided an otherwise miserable evening. On the winning drive, he completed all four of his attempts for 44 yards.
Prior to that possession, he was 11 for 30 with an interception.
“It was a night for the defense,” he said. “A lot of things happened out there. But the important thing is, we persevered.”
It all looks good when you win.
This could have been considered the ultimate trap game for the Bulldogs, if the opponent wasn’t an in-state rival. It’s hard to imagine that an 8-2 team could have less at stake than Georgia did Saturday.
The national championship dream scenario had long been kaput. Win or lose, the Dogs were going to the SEC title game next week. Win or lose, the only way they were getting into a BCS game was by winning the SEC title game, thereby clinching a Sugar Bowl berth. Perhaps you could make the case that losing to Tech would diminish what bowl Georgia went to if it lost the SEC championship.
But for the Dogs, there’s really only two bowls, anyway: The Sugar Bowl and Not The Sugar Bowl.
Similarly, Shockley couldn’t have felt the same level of desperation as Tech’s fifth-year seniors, who were winless against the school from Athens. Shockley was 3-0, even if he didn’t figure significantly in any of the results.
As a freshman, he saw limited playing time in a 51-7 dismembering in Athens. As a sophomore, he watched from the sideline with an injured knee. Last year, he threw a touchdown pass but was mostly average.
OK, mostly miserable. His 3-yard scoring pass gave Georgia a 16-0 lead in the second quarter. But the rest of the game went so poorly that Greene came back in despite a fractured thumb on his throwing hand. Anybody skeptical of Shockley entering the year pointed to that game first.
So imagine the reaction when he completed only 9 of 23 in the first half. The Jackets’ defense pressured Shockley but not nearly to the extent it harassed Miami’s Kyle Wright the week before. The senior had several misfires, overthrowing some receivers, underthrowing others.
For a guy who entered the game with 18 touchdowns, only four interceptions and a 152.16 quarterback rating, Shockley looked borderline shaky. He was lost for an answer why, afterward, other than to credit the Jackets’ defense.
But when it mattered most, he looked under control. On second and 15 from the Jackets’ 44 following a holding penalty, he connected with tight end Leonard Pope for 12 yards, then with wide receiver Mario Raley for another 8 near the sideline. A penalty moved the ball to the Tech 19. Two plays later, Shockley spotted McClendon had a step on Dennis Davis running toward the end zone.
McClendon had dropped two passes earlier, but Shockley didn’t hesitate. “A quarterback has to have faith in his receivers,” he said. And apparently a little faith in himself.
Permalink | Comments (106) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, UGA / SEC
