AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > October > 06
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Bad Bulldogs show up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Knoxville — Barely into October and Georgia already has slipped into that darkest of corners in the SEC. It is doomed in the conference and wondering if it can avoid that annual dilemma for borderline bowl teams: What’s better — Shreveport or bupkis?
They drill Oklahoma State.
They lose to South Carolina at home.
They thump Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
They make Tennessee look like a BCS wrecking ball.
Congratulations, Georgia. We dub thee, “Georgia Tech.”
“It’s not that surprising to see Tennessee’s D-line handle our guys like that,” coach Mark Richt said Saturday.
That should go over well in the Bulldog Nation. Look what you have to look forward to.
The Bulldogs lost to Tennessee 35-14 Saturday. This is a defense that gave up 104 points to Cal and Florida, was scraping conference bottom in scoring defense (37.5) and total defense (439 yards) and allowed 178 yards rushing to … Arkansas State?
They were dreadful on offense. They were dreadful on defense. And special teams — not so hot. In the Sun Belt, they call that balance. In the SEC, they call it Vanderbilt.
Destroy. Crumble. Inspire. Implode.
Halfway into the schedule and they’ve turned into a psychologist’s final exam.
“Youth,” offensive coordinator Mike Bobo said when asked about the Dogs’ extreme highs and lows we’ve already witnessed. “This game was a little different than the one in Alabama. We were able to come out and score on the first drive there. Here we went three-and-out and then they scored. Then they scored again, and we did not react very well to the environment.
“We got outplayed and outcoached. We didn’t put ourselves in position to make plays, and when we did we didn’t make them.”
The Volunteers kissed their checkerboard end zones four times in their first five possessions. After 28-0, they slowed the pace, presumably for fear a tuba player would hyperventilate from excessive renditions of “Rocky Top.”
Watching from the sideline, receiver Mikey Henderson recalled: “The first thing I was thinking was, I hope they don’t put up 51 like they did last year.”
The Volunteers rolled a 37-point second half last year in Athens and won 51-33. There was no such drama Saturday.
If Georgia isn’t officially dead in the SEC, it needs at least an unlikely sweep of Florida, Auburn, Kentucky and Vanderbilt. Even that guarantees nothing.
It can be done. There have been similar awakenings. There was that whole Dr. Frankenstein thing.
How does this happen?
The Dogs had won three straight since the South Carolina loss. If they weren’t great, they at least looked well north of catastrophic. They were getting better. They were winning. Now it turns out this whole season may evolve into a wrestling match between multiple personalities.
The Bulldogs’ greatest feat Saturday might have been giving Phil Fulmer job security.
It isn’t 1998 any more in Knoxville. The Volunteers haven’t won an SEC title in nine years. The locals have long since stopped paying attention to those career winning-percentage statistics that the school’s PR machine keeps churning out and pointing to others. Like: Before Saturday, the Vols were 2-8 in the past 10 games against ranked teams, 7-16 against LSU, Florida, Auburn and Georgia.
This game may have added years to Fulmer’s longevity. We can’t be certain what it did to Richt, at least not without X-rays.
The Volunteers drove the ball 81 yards on 12 plays for a touchdown on their first drive. They punted on their second drive. Embrace the highlight, Georgia fans. Tennessee scored touchdowns on its next three possessions, including a 56-yard pass from wide receiver Lucas Taylor to LaMarcus Coker.
Richt had won three straight in Knoxville. Torch that sucker. Georgia didn’t look at home Saturday. It didn’t look to be on earth.
Last year’s collapse to Tennessee started the Dogs’ downward spiral. They lost to Vanderbilt the following week and dropped four out of five.
Next week? At Vanderbilt.
Maybe they win. Maybe they spiral. Maybe it doesn’t matter because a nice couch awaits them in Shreveport.
Permalink | Comments (218) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, UGA / SEC
Jackets sink closer to mediocrity
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
College Park, Md. — Now that Georgia Tech is flirting with mediocrity again in football, the choice is yours. That said, the wrong way to look at the Yellow Jackets’ 28-26 loss on Saturday at Byrd Stadium is to say they were maybe six feet away from inside the right upright in the west end zone of a comeback victory.
The right way to look at what I just typed is to say why were they even in that situation against an inferior Maryland bunch?
“Basically, we didn’t execute the way we should have at the beginning,” Tech defensive end Darrell Robertson said of their ridiculous 21-3 deficit early in the second quarter. “We came out sluggish and we just didn’t play the way we’re capable of playing.”
No, the Jackets didn’t. In other words, something is terribly wrong here. They have too much talent to own a 3-3 record overall and 1-3 in the ACC, especially when you analyze their three losses. There was that Boston College beating on national television, when they showed their No. 15 ranking was a fraud after resembling not-ready-for-prime-time players. They dropped yet another game in Charlottesville to so-so Virginia. Then there was their disaster against Maryland, which is not to be confused with Clemson, which was ranked No. 13 when the Jackets used much of that talent for an upset two games ago.
But back to the Maryland game and why Tech is sitting among the leaders when it comes to the nation’s most underachieving teams. In sum, the Jackets were clueless during the first half. They also were listless. Courtesy of Taylor Bennett’s errant passes and sloppiness overall by others, the offense was a mess, and the usually potent defense kept allowing the Terrapins large chunks of yardage at the worst of times.
Then came the second half, when Bennett did his Tom Brady imitation, and Demaryius Thomas became Randy Moss, and the defense evoked memories of the ‘85 Bears. Before long, with the suddenly aggressive Jackets playing as they should have all along, they just missed overcoming themselves when Travis Bell’s kick sailed just wide right from 52 yards inside the final minute.
This is becoming a pattern for the Jackets, by the way. They often lack fire at the start of games before turning into an inferno later.
What’s up with that, and why can’t the Jackets stay on autopilot more often than not?
“If I knew what was going on, I’d do something about it,” said Tech coach Chan Gailey, clearly frustrated in the aftermath, with his sixth Tech team edging closer to having their bowl named Emerald than, say, Orange at the end of the season. “You know, it’s the same thing we’ve done in years past. It’s the same routine. It’s the same everything.”
Sounds as if it’s time for a different routine and a different “everything” for the Jackets. For instance: Whatever bottom-string quarterback Kyle Manley told Bennett at halftime against Maryland needs to be pounded into the first-string guy before, during and after games. “I can’t tell you [what he said], but he set me straight,” said Bennett, suggesting that he used Manley’s scolding to throw for nearly twice as many yards in the second half (202) as he did in the first (107).
As for Tech’s rejuvenated defense that stopped making Chris Turner resemble more than just the backup that he is for Maryland, well, that’s a little different.
There were no pep talks. No chairs thrown across the locker room.
“I mean, there wasn’t any need for a lot of talking,” said Robertson, among the few highly motivated Jackets from the beginning with a fumble return of 32 yards for a touchdown just before halftime. “We all knew that we just had to come back out and play, so that’s what we had to do.”
Now the Jackets have to keep doing those things from the start.
That’s the problem.
Permalink | Comments (81) | Categories: Tech / ACC, Terence Moore
Keep Renteria, find young arms
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
OK, you’re the general manager. The Braves had a season that darn near defies description. They waffled. They came back, then took a snooze, then turned up the volume again. They still darn near made the playoffs, and could have with another high-powered starter or two. And even an average Andruw Jones kind of season.
He’s gone now. You could see that one coming. Oblivious to his starvation batting average, he had said that this time he would take no discounted deal just to stay in Atlanta. Not that he was exactly a Wal-Mart kind of bargain at $13.5 million. How generous of him. Marked down? Discounted? He could cover center field like a one-man platoon, but at his wage he was a luxury too rich to afford.
This may test his bulldogged agent, Steve Boras, who doesn’t get nearly enough doors slammed in his face. The price tag on Andruw is $20 million. This time Boras has reached his extreme. John Schuerholz can see far more value in $20 million worth of starting pitching. He can find any number of .220 hitters who can chase down fly balls for far less. Maybe this season was just a blip on Andruw’s radar screen, but at no time during the season did he give any extended promise of breaking out of it.
Jeff Francoeur could handle the job. He has the arm that Jones doesn’t have, and he has the range for it. But, he is so perfect for right field, the powerful arm, plus range to cover some of center field as well. Well, a bit of a stretch, I guess. There’s a kid named Jordan Schafer down at Myrtle Beach who gets high grades — and who is known by some as Grady Sizemore-like — but the last time the Braves found a center fielder capable of making the leap from Class A to the major leagues was Brett Butler in the early 1980s. Rafael Furcal later made the graduation at shortstop, which brings up a matter of another nature.
There’s nothing uplifting about the thought of Edgar Renteria in some other team’s cloth. He has given the Braves two years of solid joy at shortstop, but here’s the deal: If the Braves are looking for a place to readjust the payroll, they could deal Renteria and go with the younger and more agile Cuban, Yunel Escobar, for a bundle less. A cruel thought, but baseball is a game that breaks hearts.
Pitching is the soul of the Braves’ complexities. John Smoltz and Tim Hudson, yeah. Where do you go from there? Tom Glavine, indeed, may not be the answer, not that he’s even on the Braves’ want list, while in truth, he may not be the answer anywhere. Schuerholz does not speak of such matters, carefully avoiding any hint of tampering. Tom has already turned down a $13 million option to stay with the Mets, so what could the expectation be to be a Brave again, a $5 million cut? Hardly. Because Glavine has a residence in the area makes him no more likely to land here, though it is a nice, cozy thought. You know the weary old line: “To spend more time with the family.” You begin with John Smoltz and Tim Hudson, and finally, at last, after two seasons of not throwing an official pitch, Mike Hampton should be, must be, ready by this time. He owes them.
So, instead of working the free-agency market, retreading with aging, leathery arms, is there not the possibility of transferring one of those young, vibrant riflemen from the bullpen to starting? Just asking. Chuck James appears better suited for short-term duty, so swap him for Soriano, Acosta, Ascanio or Devine, who, for the most part, are merely names at this stage. One thing for sure, leave Peter Moylan just as he is, the best thing that happened to Braves pitching this year.
First base, as we all know, is in the smooth and powerful hands of Mark Teixeira for a year. Then comes the hellish matter of dealing with him on a future contract. Hellish, because he, too, is a client of the bovine of agents, Boras. Having a Georgia Tech connection will have no softening effect in the dealing, you may be assured. Is there no escaping this wretched genius Boras?
Permalink | Comments (65) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
