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Monday, January 29, 2007
Felton’s Bulldogs are worth watching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
It has been some time since Georgia basketball represented anything but a connecting airport (Tubby Smith), a punchline (Ron Jirsa) or a sales stop for somebody pitching voodoo potions that promise one thing but ultimately make your hair fall out (Jim Harrick).
But this is Georgia basketball now: Not short term. Not a joke. Not a grease spot.
The Bulldogs have forever operated in the shadow of the football team. Also women’s basketball. Also gymnastics. And tennis and golf and animal sciences. But after consecutive upsets of Kentucky and LSU, Georgia is 5-2 in its conference, which would be the inverse of Georgia Tech.
They are getting better (unlike Tech). The Dogs are selling out the storage facility of college arenas (Stegeman Coliseum). They are creating an atmosphere. And though they have yet to crack any rankings or shake bracketologists, they would be on a six-game win streak in the SEC if not for a late-game collapse at Alabama (somewhat aided by logic-challenged officials).
Georgia has a basketball team.
Who knew?
The next thing you know, we’re going to start hearing smack talk about how hoops in the SEC are superior to hoops in the ACC.
Next thing: “I’ll say this,” Georgia coach Dennis Felton said Monday, “Since I’m looking for easy wins, I’d rather play in that other league right now. I can’t find anything but difficult games here.”
Coach K: Line 1.
Georgia is not stuffed with McDonald’s All-Americans. It would settle for one. But the Dogs have some pretty good players (Sundiata Gaines, Takais Brown, etc.) who play hard, and generally together, and generally smart.
This team’s margin for error is not big. An upcoming stretch of games — at Tennessee, at Vanderbilt and home against Florida — could define this season. Regardless, Felton has engineered a remarkable makeover for a program that was wrecked by the human virus, Harrick. He has not only disinfected the program, but he also has created something worth watching — today, next week, next year.
Georgia was 8-20 overall two years ago, and had lost 25 of 32 SEC games the past two seasons. It wasn’t even a fallback choice for top recruits. Now, with the SEC’s basketball stock up and the school funding a new training facility that will include a practice gym, locker room and offices for the basketball team, you wonder about the potential.
If Florida can do it, why can’t Georgia?
“There isn’t any reason,” Felton said. “That’s what we’re working toward. We believe the SEC is the best conference going right now, and one reason is the facilities that are being built. Florida built a facility similar to the one we’re going to have when Billy Donovan went there. It’s a statement about how serious we are about this.”
The team has excited students, and Felton has tried to reciprocate. After the LSU game, he sent players into the stands to shake hands with the fans. If he had tried that in the past, the problem would’ve been finding somebody.
“It was just a spontaneous thing,” he said of the players’ handshakes. “It’s been sheer pandemonium in the stands. It was a response to how helpful they’ve been.”
It’s not football. To say it never will be football doesn’t qualify as crawling out on a limb. But success in one sport doesn’t preclude having success in another.
This is Felton’s fourth season, but his first team with NCAA tournament aspirations. Nobody could have imagined the Dogs’ presence would be at least as plausible as Tech’s (the Jackets have dropped three straight since beating Duke and Florida State).
“We’ve had obstacles but we’ve been able to fight through them — nothing really has taken me by surprise,” Felton said. “I knew we would hit rock bottom in the second year. We inherited four guys and none were going to be with us in the second year. But I’ve always felt we were progressing. We’ve come a long way, but we’re still a long way from where we want to be.”
Just success. Nothing funny, nothing greasy and probably nothing brief. And all in the middle of football recruiting. Who knew?
Permalink | Comments (37) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, UGA / SEC
Super Bowl shame recalled
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Miami — We’ll have the rest of the week to discuss Bears and Colts. Let’s spend today rolling our eyes over the last time the Super Bowl was in south Florida. To that end, I’m standing at the corner of N.E. 22nd Street and Biscayne Boulevard, right near the spot where the Falcons lost the world championship nine years ago.
Remember? The Saturday before the biggest game in franchise history, Eugene Robinson, the undisputed team leader and celebrated disciple of spirituality, made the earth spin backward. He spent that afternoon lounging around the hotel pool with his wife and two children after receiving the NFL’s highest award for moral character. He spent that evening wearing handcuffs after allegedly offering an undercover Miami policewoman $40 to perform oral sex.
Falcons 19, Broncos 34.
“Gosh, I’d never throw Eugene under the bus, because he brought such a light and energy and a positive force to our team, but that was dumbfounding, and you couldn’t think of 100 different fables from Aesop’s to explain what happened,” said Jamal Anderson, who ran and danced the Dirty Birds into fame before Robinson led them to infamy. Former Falcons wide receiver Terance Mathis still is seething, and not only because the plays called by his coaches in the red zone during the Super Bowl were from the ozone. Said Mathis, “It’s a shame that, despite all the great players, and despite all the great moments that we had to go 14-2 in the regular season, and to play one of the best games in the history of NFC championship games (a thriller in Minnesota), it was all marred by that one incident.”
Added Mathis, “Wherever you go, even to this day, when people find out that you were in that Super Bowl, the first thing that comes up is Eugene Robinson. It was an unfortunate situation that happened to a really good guy.”
Time has been kind to that really good guy who lives in Charlotte with his supportive family. When Robinson isn’t working as a color analyst for Panthers radio games, he is coaching football, track and wrestling at a local high school. He was asked over the phone if he wished to reflect on why he lost his mind on this street corner, but he punted away the chance. “I don’t want to be the center of a story with two historic black coaches (the Colts’ Tony Dungy and the Bears’ Lovie Smith) in the game,” Robinson said. “I don’t want to be a side story. I know that I probably will be, but I don’t want to add to it or anything else. They’ll just have to write without me.”
That’s what I’m doing, especially after standing at what has evolved into the antithesis of the corner that Robinson visited around 9 p.m. that Saturday night in his rented Ford Taurus. Back then, the corner was a haven for prostitutes. Run-down buildings and vacant lots were everywhere. Now the corner has Yuppies and their high-rise condominiums that start around $500,000. Just a block away, there is a store full of shiny Cadillacs. Can a Starbucks be far behind?
Even so, memories of that old corner remain with Robinson’s teammates who thought they were involved with a perverted version of Candid Camera when they first heard the news. There was a groggy Jessie Tuggle, awaken just after 7 a.m. on Super Bowl morning at the team hotel by a call from his wife, DeJuan. She told her husband to turn on his television. “It was everywhere,” said Tuggle, the former linebacker, who can chuckle about it now. He screamed back then from the middle of his bed. Said Tuggle, “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. No, no, no. Not today. I mean, of all the days, don’t let this happen on the day of the Super Bowl.’ “
Soon afterward, Tuggle rushed to Robinson’s room to find the free safety losing his battle with tears and guilt. “He looked like he hadn’t slept all night,” said Tuggle, who later saw Robinson play exactly like he looked.
So did the Robinson thing cost the Falcons the Super Bowl? “Well, there were a lot of variables, including a game plan that guys weren’t comfortable with,” Mathis said. “On the opening drive, it’s first-and-goal, and we’re inside the five. They blitz and (Chris) Chandler gets sacked, because somebody missed their assignment. We missed a field goal in the first half. We went for it on fourth-and-one when everybody knew what we were doing. We had our chances to be up 21-3 at one point.”
That said, weren’t many of those gaffes courtesy of that Robinson thing rattling around the Falcons’ subconscious? Said Anderson, “It was the first time the Falcons had ever been there, and Denver was a seasoned organization with respect to the Super Bowl, so I’m sure we didn’t need any outside distractions.”
Tuggle laughed, saying, “It’s an intangible. It’s something that didn’t affect the game, but it did affect the game.”
Permalink | Comments (76) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
