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AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2008 > March
March 2008
Springtime in Athens
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nothing says spring is really here to me like getting back inside Sanford Stadium for the annual G-Day game.
There’s a good turnout every year for the scrimmage between the Red and Black teams, though last year’s winter-like chill probably held down attendance a bit. There aren’t as many question marks about the team this year as last spring, but because of all the anticipation about the Dawgs’ prospects this coming season, the Athletic Association is expecting a larger than usual crowd for the 2 p.m. game on April 5. So they’re encouraging fans to buy tickets in advance to avoid long lines at the gates on game day.
Through midnight Sunday, March 30, you can purchase tickets online through georgiadogs.com, and they say all tickets will be mailed on Monday. Or if you’re in the Athens area, you can buy them in person at the ticket office in the Butts-Mehre Building between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday. Cost is $5 for adults and $3 for kids.
Usually, they keep the G-Day crowd confined to the North stands but, who knows, maybe this year they’ll have to open up the South stands as well.
And a little extra incentive for a spring Saturday trip to Athens: The baseball Bulldogs will play the second of a three-game stand against South Carolina at 4 p.m. that day, so fans can head straight from G-Day over to Foley Field. You can also buy “print at home” tickets in advance for Georgia baseball games at georgiadogs.com.
A reminder on one other spring ritual: Monday, March 31, is the deadline for Bulldog Club members to order their six-game football season tickets. They’re $240 each.
Another fixture of spring at UGA is Suzanne Yoculan’s national champion Gym Dogs, who’ll be competing in the SEC Championships at Gwinnett Arena in Duluth this Saturday. And, taking a page from Mark Richt’s book, the Gym Dogs are asking UGA fans to “Black Out” the arena. Special black “On Target” T-shirts for the event are available at georgiadogs.com. Earlier this season, the Gym Dogs had a successful “Pink Out” at Stegeman Coliseum in support of breast cancer awareness. Looking ahead, the Gym Dogs will be going for a fourth consecutive national title at the NCAA Championships, this year being held in Athens April 24-26. Less than 800 tickets remain and they can be purchased at the oft-mentioned georgiadogs.com or by calling the UGA Ticket Office at 877-542-1231.
So let’s get out and support our teams!
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A team that won’t be forgotten
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, we’ll always have Atlanta.
The basketball Bulldogs’ remarkable post-season run of bucking the odds may have come to an end Thursday, but that doesn’t make their achievement in winning the SEC tournament and making it to the first round of the Big Dance any less remarkable.
And although the team will miss Sundiata Gaines and Dave Bliss considerably, there’s promising talent on the way and the nucleus of a pretty good team, if only Dennis Felton can coach a little more consistency into them. In the end, the season-long tendency to get up by a double-digit lead and then go cold caught up with the Dawgs. In the SEC tournament, they were somehow able to shake it off and get back in the games. This time, they appeared to have run out of gas.
Let’s just hope that next year we finally get a chance to see what a season under Felton is like WITHOUT a ton of personnel losses and off-court drama.
In the meantime, this bunch of Bulldogs can hold their heads high. They’ve written a chapter in UGA athletic lore that will be long talked about.
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Bibbity Bobbity Bulldogs!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What a weekend, as the lesson was taught again: Never bet against a team that thinks it’s playing for its coach’s job.
I don’t know whether Dennis Felton really has a fairy godmother, but this has to be the biggest feel-good Cinderella story of the year (or many years) in college basketball. Georgia’s run to become the unlikeliest conference champs in the country is the stuff of Disney movies, only this time we didn’t have Fred MacMurray in the locker room ironing flubber onto their shoes.
A team that had lost 10 of 11 games becomes only the second No. 6 seed to make it to the SEC tournament semifinals thanks to a pair of last-second overtime wins secured by unlikely heroes — senior scholar-athlete Dave Bliss, an occasional offensive force but more often mainly a defensive presence, and Zac Swansey, a freshman put into a pressure-packed position after Sundiata Gaines had fouled out.
Wait, not dramatic enough. Throw in a tornado that shook the Georgia Dome and postponed and forced the relocation of Georgia’s second game to the normally unfriendly environs of the Trade School’s sometimes leaky-roofed Alexander Memorial Coliseum, where they had to then turn around and play again just six hours later. They win, thanks in part to the sudden effectiveness of Billy Humphrey, who couldn’t buy a point for most of the tourney.
And then they manage to jump out ahead of Arkansas in the championship game and then hang on despite increasing fatigue. And, again, Humphrey comes up big, sinking a 3-pointer with just over a minute and a half left that was the dagger in the heart for the Hogs. As Felton said post-game, after having to go through all that and play three games in two days, “We found out that we had more than we ever thought we did” in terms of perseverance.
And to make it all even sweeter, the Dogs got to enjoy winning the program’s first SEC tournament title in 25 years and the ritual cutting down of the net at their arch rival’s home court.
Nah, even Disney in its “Pollyanna” heyday wouldn’t go for that!
This, of course, ends any speculation about Felton being let go by UGA, though actually even before the Dogs’ tournament showing, it appeared the consensus view in the Bulldog Nation was that Damon Evans might as well give Felton one more year to turn things around. Too many coaching vacancies elsewhere, no real stellar candidate to replace him, and what looks like an outstanding freshman class coming in next year.
Now, keeping Felton seems like the easy call. But in the midst of the euphoria of the past few days, fans can’t help but ask: Where was this team during the regular season?
Actually, some of the hallmarks of the past few months were still evident in Atlanta, including the tendency of the team to get a double-digit lead and then let it slide away. But where the Dogs seemed to give up several times during the regular season, they did exactly the opposite in the tournament. And once they got past Kentucky, they seemed to sense they were what the Georgia broadcast crew called them Sunday: a team of destiny.
The key to Felton making progress from this point on is figuring out how to inject that urgency into his teams’ play on a regular basis, especially on the road in conference play, where the Bulldogs have had an abysmal record under him.
The other concern about Felton is his problem with keeping players after he’s gotten them into school. A program where the coaches outnumber the backup players on the bench is going to have a hard time sustaining success.
So while we enjoy this unexpected championship and hail the job that Felton and his players did this weekend, let’s keep in mind that the 2007-2008 season is hardly a blueprint for building a program.
Felton needs to make whatever changes are necessary so that at next year’s SEC tournament the defending champs don’t have to depend on repeatedly defying the odds (and that fairy godmother) in order to have a chance at repeating.
Bulldog highs and lows
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Stegeman Coliseum can really rock when it’s packed with fans and students for a Georgia team that’s playing the way UGA athletic teams are expected to play.
None of that was the case Saturday as Dennis Felton’s basketball Bulldogs closed out their regular season with a typically frustrating game against Ole Miss.
The official attendance was 7,774, but it looked like only about half that number were actually there. It was Senior Day, a particularly bittersweet time this year with Sundiata Gaines and Dave Bliss closing out their careers in an extremely disappointing season. Plus there was a long, loud final ovation for the late Kevin Brophy, who would have been playing his last game as a Bulldog.
Always a streaky team this season, Georgia managed to build a lead in each half and then go completely cold. The Dogs’ shooting was abysmal most of the day, but because Ole Miss wasn’t really impressing anyone, the game stayed close for the first two-thirds.
Then Georgia went into its typical tailspin and you sat there wondering. Why did Felton just sit on the bench watching instead of calling a timeout and trying to rally his troops while there was still time? Why didn’t he pull Jeremy Price, who seemingly could do little but foul and allow the Rebels to pad their lead at the free-throw line? What might this season have been like if Felton had recruited kids who bothered to go to class? Was this the end of the Felton era we were watching, or will he get another year?
All in all, a depressing day at the Steg. One UGA fan, who’d been loudly trying to support the defense in the second half, summed up the mood when he greeted the final whistle with a sing-song chant: “Let’s play football!”
Speaking of which, a stop by the Borders store at Beechwood in Athens after the game produced a nice surprise when I spotted the official BCS DVD release of the 2008 Sugar Bowl. Included is the complete Fox telecast of the black-clad Dawgs’ dismantling of Colt Brennan and Hawaii (minus the commercials but unfortunately not minus the Fox crew’s pro-Warriors whining), plus some bonus features: “Shortcuts” (highlights of each quarter), unnarrrated season highlights for each team, both fight songs, the post-game show, and a wrap-up discussion of the role the polls play in teams’ thinking nowadays.
A nice treat for Dawg fans, especially those like my son who were at the game and didn’t get to see the original telecast.
Big-time pay for a big-time job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
First, a disclaimer. The idea of ANYONE being paid more than $2 million to coach college football is crazy.
But in big-time athletics these days, it’s also reality.
So is the fact that people rank EVERYTHING in college football nowadays, including how much your coach makes. And it all counts in how seriously your program is taken.
Given all that, the idea of Mark Richt being in seventh place in the SEC in compensation, as he was before today’s vote by the UGA athletics board, is also crazy. Richt quite obviously is among the elite coaches in the country, as well as the conference, and based on what the other guys are making, the raise he’s being given up to $2.8 million a year makes good sense.
Even after the raise, he’s only the fifth-highest paid SEC coach. But the guys ahead of him have either won a national championship or gone undefeated.
All that having been said, it is indeed possible to pay a college coach too much. Notre Dame quite obviously isn’t getting their money’s worth out of their $4 million man. And the verdict’s still out on St. Nick at Bama.
But the bottom line is: Richt deserved the raise.
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