Georgia teams a work in progress
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Welcome to a new season of college football in Georgia, a huge construction project unaffected by economic trends.
Your View
Which team will have the most wins this season?
Work proceeds day and night -- and all overtime has been approved.
A year ago, the Georgia Bulldogs were a solid preseason No. 1 -- turns out, that’s about as reliable as picking a good restaurant on the basis of its tableclothes. They now fend off predictions of relative mediocrity.
Who is this senior quarterback who has waited so patiently? He is even too unknown even for Wikipedia, that’s who. Enter the name Joe Cox, and the result is a cricket batsman who died in 1971.
Mark Richt had two of the top 12 draft picks in the last NFL draft, which is a nice little advertisement for the program. But now he has to start replacing those stars.
In one season, the Bulldogs went from No. 1 in the country to No. 2 in the state. Georgia’s Reshad Jones tried to tackle Tech’s Roddy Jones with his clavicle instead of his two good arms and everything changed.
Oh, so you think Georgia Tech is a finished product now that the Yellow Jackets finally have a victory over Georgia in pocket -- and Paul Johnson can find his way to the Varsity without a GPS?
There is all the room in the world for more improvement on the Flats, based on the evidence of Tech’s last game, a 38-3 Chick-fil-A Bowl blowout at the hands of LSU. Nothing like a hometown humbling to recalibrate your confidence.
The new coach with the offense that can run imaginatively wild, mimicking fiddler crabs on a Teflon skillet, will tell you that he still only has six scholarship seniors on the roster. And only two of them may start. This remains a team young enough to back up the Jonas Brothers.
In Statesboro, Georgia Southern continues to look for a way to channel Erk Russell. Meanwhile in downtown Atlanta, they are attempting to raise an entire program up from the asphalt.
This will be the oddest kind of season for Georgia State and its new coach Bill Curry, one of practices but no games, Saturdays in limbo, high spirits with nowhere to go. A team begins to take form this year, but will not actually begin play until 2010.
One safe prediction for the 2009 campaign: The Panthers will go unbeaten, likely the only team in the neighborhood able to make that claim.
Any certainty beyond that as to how the rest of these jobs will finish out is all a bluff. But at least we’ll get to see actual results in this lifetime, unlike that other kind construction activity taking place around the 14th Street bridge.
So, just buckle up your hard hat, cinch tight the steel-toed boots, and let’s start moving some heaven and earth.
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