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Thursday, February 2, 2006
Dogs improve, but pay the price
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Athens — They’re far better than they were, but deep down Dennis Felton wonders if these Bulldogs, or any Bulldogs to come, will ever work as hard as last season’s motley crew. That overmatched lot was the least talented SEC aggregation since the league started taking basketball seriously, but somehow those untalented Dogs never allowed themselves to become truly hangdog.
“They kept up their effort against very discouraging odds,” said Felton, Georgia’s demanding coach. “I don’t know whether those players would ever admit it, but there had to be nights when they thought they had no chance.”
Most nights they didn’t. Georgia did well to finish 8-20 last season. Because Felton has developed the players he had and has added five gifted freshmen, the Bulldogs have a chance in most every game now. They beat Georgia Tech by 16 points in December and beat Alabama, the preseason choice to win the SEC West, by nine Wednesday night. They’re 13-8, which Felton believes puts them in the NCAA mix, though the NIT seems a more likely destination. This seems a program on the clear rise. Thing is, no program rises without turbulence.
“We’ve taken some steps backward,” Felton said, and those retreats have been in the only area in which the 8-20 Bulldogs actually excelled, and that’s effort. And that’s the way of the basketball world.
A team strapped for resources will play defense because it has no choice. A more talented team will be tempted to cut a corner. Even a coach as forceful as Felton can’t always persuade his men to defend if some of those men believe their true calling lies at the offensive end. Yes, Georgia has started to score points at a major-college rate — it had 46 points in the first half against Alabama, against which it managed 47 in a game last season — but the all-court ferocity Felton tries to foster sometimes goes missing.
“We have not defended with the tenacity I want,” he said. “We’ve been soft on defense and in rebounding more nights than I would have imagined.” He smiled. “Last year we dreamed of scoring like this.”
With an eye toward ramping up intensity, Felton changed his lineup for Alabama — freshmen Mike Mercer and Terrance Woodbury started ahead of Steve Newman and Channing Toney — and the revamp achieved the desired effect. Four days after a deflating loss at Auburn, Georgia played hard and well.
When nine of a team’s top 11 men are freshmen or sophomores, there will always be inconsistency in production. What Felton seeks is a benchmark for sheer will. When Georgia achieves that, it will have something.
Felton can really coach, and more than a few of these guys are learning to play. Witness Younes Idrissi, the Blockin’ Moroccan. As a freshman, he managed 38 baskets in 27 games. As a sophomore, he has developed a hook shot and scored 14 baskets against Nevada’s Nick Fazekas and Alabama’s Jermareo Davidson, two of the nation’s better big men. Witness Dave Bliss, who infamously was called for five fouls in four minutes against Tech last season but who whirled around Davidson for the biggest basket of Wednesday’s victory.
“Alabama’s a pretty good team,” Bliss said, “and to be able to beat them really says something. We’ve got enough guys now.”
There will be wobbles ahead. Georgia could lose six of its last eight regular-season games, which would render even the NIT problematic. Mercer could decide he needs to shoot even more — he already leads the team in shots — or the Bulldogs could figure that a team capable of scoring 88 points on Alabama doesn’t need to guard all that hard. Felton sees the potential, but he also sees the potholes.
“We’ve traveled some distance,” he said, “but we’ve got so much more distance to travel. I feel pressed to continue to move forward.”
He’s a coach. That’s what he’s supposed to say. But the most talented Bulldog since Jarvis Hayes senses, correctly, that a corner has been turned. “One of the reasons I came here was to be part of building something special,” said Mercer, and he’s on track.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Mark Bradley, UGA / SEC
This Super Bowl controversy is contrived
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Detroit — This isn’t Joe Namath doing what he did, or Eugene Robinson getting caught while failing to do what he was trying to do. This isn’t the constantly flapping tongues of Shannon Sharpe, Ray Buchanan or Jim McMahon. This isn’t John Matuszak terrorizing the French Quarter after curfew or Stanley Wilson and Barret Robbins finding their Super Bowl highs without the use of adrenaline.
This thing between Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Joey Porter and Seattle Seahawks tight end Jerramy Stevens is wonderfully ridiculous. In fact, speaking for all of us who have spent the past few days yawning over what has become Super Bore Week, we’re thrilled to have this controversy that really isn’t.
It’s a start. It’s a contrived one, but who cares when No-Doz sales are on the rise throughout Wayne County? As a strikingly calm Stevens mentioned Thursday at the Seahawks’ team hotel in nearby Dearborn, where he sat high on a podium before slightly more than half of the media in the free world, “I was pretty sure there would be a backlash from what I said on Tuesday and a great deal of coverage, because there seems to be a lack of stories.”
Yeah, well, until this came along (whatever this is), you only had that increasingly tired stuff about Jerome Bettis’ homecoming and that vehicle carrying a few Seahawks players to a press conference hitting a security barrier. Now you have Porter claiming that he was forced to hate the Seahawks. Something about Stevens saying nothing worth repeating on Tuesday during Media Day.
If you must know, Stevens said Bettis’ homecoming was “heartwarming,” but that it will be a “sad day” when he leaves Sunday without a trophy. I mean, is that different than Bettis telling 30,000 folks waving Terrible Towels in Pittsburgh that the Steelers would return home with one for the thumb — as in a fifth world championship for the franchise? Nope, and that was even worse on the scale of guaranteed victories. Stevens also claimed that Porter will have trouble coming off the blitz against the mountain that is Seattle left tackle Walter Jones, and Porter will. So where’s the problem?
There isn’t one, but Porter likes to invent controversies in his sleep. Two years ago, he sprinted across the field before a game in Cleveland to give his opinion to an opponent jawing with a teammate. While his teammate played in the game, Porter was in the locker room after he was thrown out before the opening kickoff. He also spent this postseason blasting the Indianapolis Colts for suggesting that they thought they were more physical than the Steelers. That was before Porter saw a grassy knoll at the RCA Dome by accusing the officials in that game of conspiring against the Steelers in favor of the great Peyton Manning.
So Porter is fuming these days, or he says he is. He spent long stretches on Thursday at the Steelers’ team hotel in nearby Pontiac with enough sizzling words to heat up the chilly breezes outside. Said Porter of Stevens, “I am not going to personally sit there and stand for anybody to show disrespect to any of my teammates. Now the true feelings are out, and they’re going to hear my true feelings, and we don’t have to play the game about, ‘Oh, yeah, they’re great over there.’
“It’s official. I don’t have to hold any punches anymore. It is what it is. They are looking for a fight. I have been ready for a fight.”
Even though it’s a phony fight, Porter is throwing real punches. He said of Stevens, a former No. 1 draft pick who has spent much of his career on the bench, “Personally, I think he’s soft. That’s just me. This is his fourth year in the league, and you have never heard anything about him until right now. He is just starting to play.”
Porter said his team would make the Seahawks quit. “We’re going to try to tap out as many people as we can, I’m going to put it like that. We’re going to try to send as many people to the sideline as we can.”
Folks have heard of Stevens in the past, but for the wrong reasons. In addition to a couple of DUIs, he once drove his car through the front window of a convalescence home. Now, to hear Porter tell it, Stevens is near Sharpe, Buchanan and McMahon territory. Said Stevens, sounding like he already is in Sharpe, Buchanan and McMahon territory, “I hope this isn’t my Super Bowl lore. I plan to make the game my Super Bowl lore.”
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Signing Day? Eh…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I’m of two minds about Signing Day. It’s important, yes, but it’s not quite as important as the tonnage of coverage suggests it is. And yet we at the AJC, which provides a goodly chunk of that tonnage, would be derelict in our duties if we didn’t address an issue that is so clearly of interest to our readers.
I’ve done a lot of Signing Day columns over the years, and I’ve tried about every angle there is. I talked to two recruiting mavens who’d never actually met but who corresponded via e-mail every day during the recruiting period. I’ve done the fans-in-the-lobby-watching-the-big-board thing. I’ve done the local guy who got away — J.R. Lemon, who signed with Stanford. I’ve done the scene in Athens and the scene at Georgia Tech, and I’ve made the usual column-type pronouncements, one or two of which might actually have come true. But every time I cover Signing Day, I feel I should attach a big fat asterisk to every word I write.
- Who really knows?
Who knew David Pollack, a middling prospect, would be the best Georgia defender since Terry Hoage? (Who was himself the recipient of Georgia’s last available scholarship in 1980.) Who knew Sterling Boyd and Odell Collins and Jasper Sanks would be utter disappointments? Who knew P.J. Daniels (a walk-on) would lead the ACC in rushing? Who knew Derrick Steagall (remember him) wouldn’t be half as good as advertised?
You have to recruit well — which isn’t necessarily the same thing as being ranked in Tom Lemming’s or Max Emfinger’s top 10 in a particular year — to sustain a program, but recruiting without coaching is… well, it’s exactly what Steve Spurrier said after he beat Georgia and Ray Goff in 1991. Remember? “Georgia gets all these recruits, but I don’t know what happens to them.”
Signing Day is fun for the zealots, but it’s important to note the nickname that was pinned to Mack Brown before his guys actually went out and won themselves a national championship. Before the night of Jan. 4, 2006, Brown was known as Coach February. And it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
Permalink | Comments (59) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
