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AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2006 > November > 16
Thursday, November 16, 2006
A signature game?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With most successful college quarterbacks, there comes a particular game where you know they’ve arrived, that the lightbulb has clicked on and the steep learning curve has leveled off.
Sometimes, of course, you get a sort of false-positive in such tests. Remember Quincy Carter against LSU his freshman year? There were a lot of reasons he never lived up to his promise, but let’s not go there. He didn’t. Enough said.
But then there was David Greene leading the Dawgs down the field to beat Tennessee in Knoxville. You knew watching that game that he was something special, and the end result was college football’s all-time winningest QB.
Then last year, we had a pretty good idea after the Boise State game that D.J. Shockley the starter was head and shoulders above D.J. Shockley the backup. But it wasn’t until the Tennessee game, again in Knoxville, that you KNEW D.J. was the real deal.
Did last Saturday’s win over Auburn mark Matthew Stafford’s signature game as Georgia QB? It kinda felt that way, though we’ve been down this road before this season, with people declaring him the Second Coming of John Elway after the South Carolina game. A couple of weeks later, folks were wondering if they’d been wrong.
No, just premature.
Stafford is going to be a remarkable quarterback. But the win over the Gamecocks wasn’t a true measure of where he was in his development at that time. He still had a bunch of learning (and a whole lot of interceptions) ahead of him.
But the Auburn game felt different. He still made a few mistakes, but they weren’t momentum-killers. He didn’t throw any picks and, to his head coach’s delight, he actually threw the ball away when the play wasn’t there rather than trying to force it. As Coach Richt said after the game: “He finally listened to me. That was nice.”
Stafford also showed himself to be more of a running threat than anyone had predicted. (The Athens Banner-Herald summed it up nicely by noting that his rushing output against Auburn was just two yards shy of Shockley’s career high of 85 yards against Boise State last year, and was 12 yards more than Florida’s much-heralded running QB Tim Tebow’s single best game so far this season.)
Yeah, he fumbled a couple of times, leading QB coach Mike Bobo to say he “ripped him pretty bad” after the second one, telling Stafford that after he gets a first down he should go down. Period. “But, coach, I can score,” Stafford protested. “I don’t give a crap,” Bobo told him. “Go down.” And the next time Stafford ran for a first down, he then slid, even with no Auburn player near him, rather than risk losing the ball or getting knocked out of bounds and stopping the clock.
The sight of a student athlete learning is a wonderful thing.
Obviously, Stafford still has a lot to learn and a lot of room for improvement. But watching him in the Auburn game, I got a feeling that the worst is behind him (and I don’t just mean the Kentucky game).
Whether or not he leads the Dawgs to a victory over the Jackets, you get the feeling he won’t be responsible for Georgia beating itself.
