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Sunday, September 2, 2007
Georgia quells upset jitters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Athens — News of two major football crafts capsizing in the Midwest blew from South Bend and Ann Arbor, and coming just before you kick off on your home field, a fellow wonders how that might weigh on the minds of the lads in your own precinct. Everything is new. It’s the first game of the season, and not even a coach can read the mood of a bunch of college kids.
Not even Charlie Weis or Lloyd Carr. They must have thought they knew. Could Georgia coach Mark Richt be any different? First games can be treacherous. At least Georgia players knew about Oklahoma State. It’s in Oklahoma. Michigan players had no idea that Appalachian State sprouted from a teachers college, and is in Boone, North Carolina. No more than those Harvard players knew what Centre College was back in 1921, the first and greatest upset in college football before this one. Don’t laugh, Harvard was a power back then.
Well, it didn’t take Georgia long to exorcise the jitters. First offensive play, Matthew Stafford stuffed the football into Thomas Brown’s stomach and the Bulldogs running back cruised into the end zone. Less than one minute of play and the Bulldogs had the lead. The Cowboys had made it simple. The snapper had fired the ball over the punter’s head and Mohamed Massaquoi tackled the desperate would-be kicker on A&M’s — oops, sorry — State’s 14-yard line.
Oklahoma State would tie the score later, but truth to tell, the outcome would never be in doubt again. That’s the way a coach likes a first game to go. Establish your ground, give the other team no reason to think they have a chance. Understand, that’s easier to say now that you know the score was Georgia 35, Oklahoma State 14.
Those faceless mystics who decide what the “line” should be had looked at this game with some caution. Six and a half points was as far they would go with the Bulldogs. The Cowboys hadn’t made this trip to sightsee Athens. They had a quarterback Georgia had tried to recruit out of Houston — Bobby Reid. They had a big, rangy end on the order of Calvin Johnson — 6-foot-6 Brandon Pettigrew. They had the leading rushing offense in the Big 12 last season, second in scoring to Texas. They had such expectant backing that their colors filled the third-level aerie like a cloud of orange across the way, and even T. Boone Pickens, their generous benefactor, and his court, made the trip. Left early, though, I heard later.
And not without good reason. What Georgia put on the field was a show of talent that surprised many a Bulldog, some so young it seemed they were barely out of the cradle. Fourteen real, live, actual freshmen got into the fray. One, Bruce Figgins from Columbus, built for heavy duty, caught a touchdown pass. Probably the most productive first-timer was one we’d been reading much of lately, Knowshon Moreno, a redshirt freshman from New Jersey. He has moves that discourage tacklers, and in the process, led his mates carrying the ball, 73 yards in 20 carries.
You’d read much about Mike Bobo as the new play-caller. One-time Bulldog quarterback, surely knows the requirements for the work, but when you take over from the head coach, you’re under a microscope. Based on what you saw Saturday in Sanford Stadium, you had to like his results. For one game, at least.
Young Stafford collected a few merit badges for his work. He’s not one of your pull-it-down-and-run quarterbacks, but that’s not what he’s there for. Passed for two touchdowns, got off on a couple of lumbering scrambles, mainly to save his life. When it came to excitement, you had to leave it to Mikey Henderson, who’s barely larger than a horse jockey. He got away on the most exhilarating dash of the evening, ran about a mile and a half to pick up 63 yards, returning a punt that set up Georgia’s last touchdown. He darted, he dodged, he picked up a block here, another there and wove his way through traffic like a sports car on the freeway.
That was it. Pretty nice evening for a Bulldog’s night out, and all those among the 92,746 on scene. Next week: “Gamecock Time,” starring Steve Spurrier.
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Braves playoff chase is history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s over now — the division race, the wild-card chase, everything. We know it and the Braves know it. Late Sunday afternoon Jeff Francoeur spoke of the immediate future in the professional way, saying, “We’re not giving up,” and “We’re still going to play hard.” Finally he offered something approaching a concession: “It was unbelievable with our record we were even in it.”
The Braves are 69-68. Since the beginning of the 2006 season they’re 148-151. It’s not a raging fluke they’ve fallen to pieces these last 18 days; the oddity is that it took so long. But on Sunday even the old reliable failed: The Braves and John Smoltz couldn’t beat the Mets and Tom Glavine and, as Smoltz allowed, “If we wanted any chance at all, any glimmer of hope, we had to win today.”
But they didn’t win once in this series. They managed an extra-base hit only in the 27th and last inning of the three-game set, and only then did they score a run on an actual hit. (Their first three runs of the weekend came on a wild pitch, a sacrifice fly and a groundout.) And that’s the story of the season: When at last the Braves stopped hitting, they had nothing else.
“The pitching’s been good basically all year,” Bobby Cox said Sunday in one of those Cox-isms you know even he doesn’t believe. The pitching hasn’t been good all year. Sixty percent of the rotation has been substandard, and inexorably the laggards dragged down the two horses. Smoltz and Tim Hudson both lost over the weekend, and this whole we’ve-still-got-a-shot thing was predicated on the assumption those two would never lose. Alas, even Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale couldn’t win ‘em all.
Said Chipper Jones: “The amount of pressure on John Smoltz and Tim Hudson is tremendous. We haven’t gotten enough wins late in the rotation, and you see it starting to wear on Smoltzie and Huddy. Especially when our offense is struggling like it is now, they’re so uptight.”
The Braves made the biggest move of any team at the trading deadline, landing Mark Teixeira and thereby rounding off what should be the National League’s best batting order. But you don’t win division titles with batting orders. (Ask the Phillies.) You win with rotations. (Ask the Braves of the 1990s.) For all the fuss made over Teixeira — team president Terry McGuirk fairly gushed, and two guys from Auburn wrote a funny little song — the cold truth is that the Braves are 14-17 since his arrival.
This isn’t to suggest Teixeira has been anything shy of terrific. He’s batting .310 with 10 homers and 32 RBIs in 30 games as a Brave. By way of comparison, Fred McGriff hit .310 with 19 homers and 55 RBI in 68 games as a Brave in 1993. Those Braves, by way of contrast, won 51 of those 68 games.
“The biggest [recent] deadline moves, in terms of hullabaloo, have been the Braves getting Teixeira and us getting Freddy McGriff,” Glavine said Friday. “And Teixeira has probably had a bigger [statistical] impact than Freddy did for us. But we [meaning the ‘93 Braves] had fewer question marks everywhere else. This team had question marks we didn’t.”
This team has sought for five months to find someone who could assume the duties of the long-suffering Mike Hampton, who hasn’t thrown a big-league pitch since July 2005 and on whom way too much importance was placed. Francoeur was still keeping the faith Sunday, saying, “If you think about next year, we’ll have Smoltz, Hudson and Hampton — three No. 1 guys.”
The 2007 season will be remembered as a fizzle because the Braves never found a No. 5 guy, let alone a No. 3 or a No. 4. They got further than they should have through the kindness of their opponents, but now the Mets and the Phillies and the Diamondbacks and the Padres have turned surly. And now it’s over on Labor Day weekend, the time when pennant races are supposed to begin; over because the team that once had all the pitching keeps waiting for Mike Hampton.
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Petrino’s here, Vick’s gone — bad timing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Say what you will about Michael Vick the person — by now, pretty much everybody has said pretty much everything — but no one can dispute that Michael Vick the player is a singular talent. And those who think quarterback Joey Harrington will offset Vick’s loss are living in the land of make-believe.
Reality check: Vick’s record as an NFL starter is 38-28-1; Harrington’s is 23-43. Vick has been to three Pro Bowls, Harrington to none. Vick has presided over two playoff victories; Harrington hasn’t yet reached the postseason.
As smart as head coach Bobby Petrino is, he cannot turn Joey Harrington into Michael Vick. And Petrino, we should remember, never bought into that Vick-isn’t-a-real-quarterback rot. On the week he took the job, Petrino’s first words to this correspondent about coaching Vick were, “That’s why we’re here.”
To be precise, Petrino is here because Jim Mora failed to maximize what Arthur Blank and Rich McKay believed, correctly, to be a gifted roster. But a disproportionate chunk of that talent was housed in No. 7, who’s now a Falcons player in name only. Minus Vick, this team looks infinitely less imposing. Minus Vick, there are only three or four difference-makers on the roster, and that’s too few to make an aggregate difference.
It would have been nice to see what Petrino could have made of Vick, and it’s reasonable to assume this coach will make the most of Harrington. Alas, there’s not much to be made. Harrington throws the ball to the wrong people too often — he has 77 career interceptions against 72 touchdowns. (Vick’s ratio, since you asked, is 52 interceptions to 71 touchdowns.) The Falcons won’t lead the league in rushing again because Harrington won’t gain 100 yards. (Vick, as we know, had 1,039 in 2006.)
The guess is that Petrino will do his absolute best with what he has, but in the end he won’t have nearly enough. Jerious Norwood could and maybe should emerge as the new Warrick Dunn, which isn’t to say the old Warrick Dunn is anywhere near finished, but Alge Crumpler’s knee might not hold up and the wide receivers are still nothing special. The play-calling will be upgraded, but it won’t take long to grasp that Greg Knapp, for all his limitations, was operating with better players.
When all else failed for Knapp, as it often did, there was still the possibility that No. 7 would do something sublime simply because he (and only he) was Michael Vick. Harrington, who wears the unlucky No. 13, cannot approximate such capability. Harrington can only hope to manage a game and hope the defense will hold up its end, and this defense, with injuries along the front and uncertainty at the back, isn’t ready to bear such a load.
The guess is that Petrino will coach well enough to give his team a chance in almost every game, but ultimately his team, through lack of manpower, will flub most of those chances. It’s weird how things work out: Mora had enough players but didn’t know how to deploy them; Petrino, who would have known, doesn’t yet have enough players.
After the (mis)doings of the spring and summer, it would be easy for the Falcons to fall to pieces come the fall. Petrino won’t let that happen. His team will go 5-11, but it will be an honorable 5-11. They’ll play hard and they’ll be resourceful and they’ll give every indication that, given another good draft and a new franchise quarterback, they’ll know what to do when the requisite resources arrive.
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Dogs’ win much better than beating a cupcake
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Athens — The trouble with playing your opener against somebody decent is that — duh — you could lose and mess up your nice pretty season. (Ask the former genius Charlie Weis.) The benefit is that if you win, you can’t say you haven’t been tested. And being tested early is, provided you pass the exam, a wholly beneficial thing.
As the Georgia historian Jeff Dantzler noted Saturday, most every big Bulldog autumn has begun not with a whimper but with a bang. Each of Georgia’s last 10 championship years commenced with a victory — or, in the case of 1968, a famous tie on the new-fangled Astroturf of Neyland Stadium that Sports Illustrated labeled “A Rouser On A Rug” — against a brand name. (Yes, we’re including the now-feared Boise State, which came here and got blitzed on Sept. 3, 2005.)
Think about it. Would Herschel Walker have become an instant legend had he trampled Joe Blow from Kokomo, as opposed to Bill Bates of high-falutin’ Tennessee? Would the breakthrough Bulldogs of 2002 have had the wherewithal to win at South Carolina and Alabama and Auburn if they hadn’t been pushed to the limit by Clemson on opening night?
Oklahoma State, as has been noted, isn’t to be confused with Utah State or Arkansas State or Western Kentucky. The Cowboys hold membership in the brawny Big 12 and are largely bankrolled by the billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who was on hand with Mrs. Pickens, who was wearing orange slacks. (Christian Dior? Karl Lagerfeld? Donna Karan?) OSU beat both Nebraska and Alabama last season — granted, this would have seemed a bigger deal 35 years ago - and arrived bearing a statistically imposing offense. Mess around with the Cowboys and you might get lassoed.
Georgia didn’t mess around. This wasn’t a wipeout-from-the-very-first-minute on the order of that Boise State thrashing, but it was comprehensive enough to indicate the Bulldogs are primed yet again. Said tailback Thomas Brown: “There was a lot more hype because it was Oklahoma State.”
To their credit, the Bulldogs answered every Cowboy challenge and were clearly the more talented and more disciplined side. If they didn’t do anything that made you say “wow” — or, this being Georgia, “woof” — it was only because Georgia under Mark Richt has established such exalted standards.
Matthew Stafford threw the ball only to teammates. Brown and Knowshon Moreno ran hard and well. (It’s already apparent Knowshon knows all about the spin move, which he popped to spectacular effect in the first half and called “mostly reaction.”) The receivers dropped only one pass.
The defense yielded two touchdowns but held the Cowboys to 266 yards, 145 off last season’s average. Said tackle Jeff Owens: “We knew they were a great football team and we had to stop the run early and take all their momentum, and that’s what we did.”
It not quite artistry, this was still more than a simple exercise. Georgia scheduled outside its Southern comfort zone and lived to tell about it. This augurs well for next week, when the Evil Genius comes calling, and the weeks beyond. Lest we forget, one of the reasons last season went so wrong so fast was that September had been so soft.
The 2006 Bulldogs got to 5-0, barely, without playing anyone of consequence. Then Tennessee rolled into town and rolled out having scored 51 points. Georgia would win only one of its next four games, infamously losing to Vanderbilt and Kentucky. These Bulldogs won’t lose so many. These Bulldogs should win at least 10.
Sure, they could’ve posted bigger numbers against lesser opposition, but that would have served no purpose. There’s nothing to gain by picking on some small helpless school like Appalachian State.
OK, bad example.
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