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Saturday, September 23, 2006
Cox’s passing leaves QB situation up for grabs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Athens — Among quarterbacks in the Bulldog Nation, you have the incumbent Joe Tereshinski, and then you have the anointed Matthew Stafford. Now you have the clutch Joe Cox.
You also have Georgia’s Mark Richt doing the unusual by refusing to run a post pattern (like the one Cox threw for a touchdown to slay Colorado on Saturday at Sanford Stadium) away from a question that most coaches despise.
The question: Given Cox’s perfect rainbow of 20 yards to Martrez Milner in the final seconds to seal what was a stormy afternoon for Georgia, is your quarterback situation up for grabs? Richt caused the graves of old football coaches to quake with his blunt answer: “Oh, yeah. It’s hard to say exactly what we’ll do for sure. Joe Cox threw his hat in the ring pretty good.”
All Cox did was seal Georgia’s 14-13 victory that will help the 4-0 Bulldogs during tight moments the rest of the season against Tennessee, Florida, Auburn, Georgia Tech, maybe a foe in the SEC championship game and who knows what? What we do know is that with Colorado still holding a six-point lead, and with the clock ticking inside the final two minutes, and with 93,000 folks trying to keep their hearts from pounding out of their chests as Georgia moved from the Colorado 43, Cox smiled when he wasn’t laughing.
“You know, you think it would be so nerve-racking,” said Cox, a redshirt freshman from Charlotte, looking as calm in the aftermath as he did near the end of the third quarter after he replaced Stafford, the struggling true freshman. “That was the most fun time that I ever had in my life. I mean, we were just talking in the huddle, and there was no breakdown of confidence or anything like that.”
How strange that there was peace for a Georgia bunch that trailed 13-0 through the third quarter after dropping four passes, getting stuffed twice on fourth-and-4 attempts in the red zone and watching Colorado resemble the best winless team in history.
For the longest time, with much of the crowd substituting booing for woofing, the only buffalo that those associated with Georgia managed to contain was Ralphie, Colorado’s 900-pound female mascot. The only thing Ralphie did after making a rare road trip by traveling 1,505 miles in a customized van from Boulder was have a bunch of cowboys race her out of the tunnel to lead the Colorado players onto the field before the game and after intermission. Then Ralphie was back in her van and off to the Rocky Mountains.
Those other Buffaloes stayed behind, and they kept running and passing at will against what supposedly was such a potent defense that Georgia’s two previous opponents failed to score. This time, the Buffaloes had such an efficient option attack that you’d have thought they were the West Virginia Mountaineers or something.
“Oh, no. They weren’t West Virginia, because that was an eye-opener right there,” said Georgia linebacker Danny Verdun Wheeler, recalling how West Virginia used a couple of blurs named Pat White and Steve Slaton to baffle Georgia in last season’s Sugar Bowl. Although Colorado’s Bernard Jackson and Hugh Charles weren’t traveling at the speed of light compared to those Mountaineers, the Buffaloes still had the same kind of zigs and zags at will against Georgia defenders.
This made no sense. Although we’re talking the lesser offensive likes of Western Kentucky, South Carolina and UAB, Georgia entered the game ranked fifth in the country in total defense. Plus, only four of the NCAA’s 119 I-A teams were ranked lower than Colorado in total offense and passing offense. That said, Colorado tight end Riar Geer had just three catches before the Georgia game, but he managed seven during it. If you combine that with Jackson and Charles playing the games of their lives — and definitely of this season in which Colorado opened with a loss to I-AA Montana State — Georgia needed something good to happen in a hurry.
That something good didn’t happen to Georgia for a while. The Bulldog Nation didn’t mind the wait. Neither did Cox, who promptly threw Georgia’s quarterback situation into the air again — just like his game-winning throw.
Permalink | Comments (165) | Categories: Terence Moore, UGA / SEC
One game can’t mask misery of New Orleans
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
New Orleans — The man in the blue suit stands in the end zone of the refurbished Louisiana Superdome and affixes the prevailing spin. “We’re here,” said Mark Nicholls, the president of Sportexe, which has installed the new synthetic turf, “to witness the rebirth of a city.”
The three men sitting alongside St. Claude Avenue don’t feel like expectant fathers. They’re selling barbecue sandwiches from a trailer parked in an abandoned strip center just beyond the bridge over the Industrial Canal. Business is slow. St. Claude is one of the main arteries in the Lower Ninth Ward, but the cold truth is there are no main arteries is this devastated district.
Thirteen months after Katrina hit and the levees broke, the desolation in Lower Ninth Ward remains beyond belief. Thirteen months on, Harold Black says, “you expected more.”
Says Lance Edwards: “For this to happen in America …”
“You said it right there — in America,” Black says. “It’s like a third-world country in the United States.”
The media has descended on this city to witness the reopening of the Superdome and the accompanying Saints-Falcons game, and chamber-of-commerce cheerfulness holds that Monday night will enable New Orleans to put the ravages of Katrina in its rear-view mirror. Harrison Smothers, the third man in the St. Claude parking lot, is asked if a sporting even can make such a difference.
“A difference in what?” he says. “It’s a football game. It’s not doing much for the people of the city. It might do something for the politicians.”
According to Superdome flacks, FEMA is paying 90 percent of the cost to rebuild the stadium. (Total price tag, not all of which comes from the federal government: $185 million.) According to Smothers, FEMA still hasn’t come through with the trailer he has awaited for 11 months. He pats his shirt pocket. “They’ve never called this phone,” he says.
It’s too much to ask any team, even one named the Saints, or any ballgame to override the trauma that befell this famously good-natured city. But those who tune in Monday to watch Reggie Bush and Michael Vick and Bono — can’t have a big American event without the preachy band from Ireland, can we? — might be fooled into believing New Orleans is far down the path to recovery. It isn’t. It might never be.
The Hyatt Regency, essentially the host hotel for events at the adjacent Superdome, remains closed. (The Hyatt became Mayor Ray Nagin’s headquarters after the storm.) The French Quarter attempts to frolic on in signature style, but foot traffic is down to the point where it’s possible to drive a car down the formerly jammed streets. What merriment there is seems forced. You can’t see the statue of Fats Domino at Musical Legends Park on Bourbon Street without cringing over the memory of the man himself having to be rescued by boat after his home in the Lower Ninth Ward flooded.
“The people aren’t around,” says Jeffrey Diket, who’s playing his clarinet for tips on the corner of Toulouse and Royal on a sleepy Saturday morning. “What can I do? I can’t make them come.”
But what about the game? Will it convince anyone New Orleans is again the place to come and work and play? “I don’t know,” says Diket, who left town before Katrina hit and didn’t move back for three months. “So much is gone, and so much has to be brought back it’s not funny.”
The Superdome itself looks as nice as it possibly could inside — the building’s exterior remains stained and faded — but that’s one tiny part of a sprawling metropolis. A drive through the Lower Ninth Ward yields a rather different slant. Nearly every window is broken. Nearly every structure is damaged and vacant. An animal-rescue center has the word “relocated” spray-painted in red across its front. A sheriff’s substation has a chain over what used to be its door. Says Edwards: “If we don’t get something done quick, the rats are going to get us. … They’ve redone the dome by throwing money at it. See what money can do? Throw some over here.”
The football game? “All that’s good,” Smothers says, “but that’s not going to help anything down here.” And then, thinking globally: “Here we are to trying to build a city in the desert [in Iraq], and we’ve got a city to be rebuild right here.”
He shakes his head. “Why would you build a city in the desert?”
Permalink | Comments (41) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
