The Georgia basketball team tends to be as predictable as the “Magic 8 Ball,” especially when you have to bang it on the side of the noggin a few times to spit out an answer.
Everybody returns to the team and they're supposed to be good. "It is certain." Then they open the season with a loss to the remains of Georgia Tech. "Outlook not so good."
They get on a nice roll, rise to 20th in RPI rankings, resemble a semblance of a threat in the NCAA tournament — "Signs point to yes" — and then drop consecutive home games to the flotsam of the SEC, Auburn and South Carolina. "Don't count on it."
Going into Tuesday’s game against the NBA’s unofficial 31st NBA franchise — Kentucky — the Bulldogs again seemed to be getting things together. They followed a series of injuries and hiccups with road wins at Alabama and Ole Miss. Kentucky coach John Calipari praised coach Mark Fox, calling him “one of the better coaches in our country.”
I know. You ask: Is Georgia a legitimate tournament team. Capable of winning a game, or two, or three? Then that little triangle message thingie in the ball says: "Reply hazy, try again."
Or maybe spits water at you.
But I have a feeling buying in won’t get you burned this time.
Georgia played a Kentucky team that was 29-0 for the first time in school history, that beat Kansas by 32 points and lines up 7-0, 6-11 and 6-10 on the front line. One projected NBA mock draft has eight Wildcats being taken in two rounds. That’s two-thirds of an NBA roster. It’s also eight more players than Georgia is expected to have drafted.
But the Bulldogs nearly achieved the improbable and illogical. They were tied at halftime at 32-32. They led by three points when Kenny Gaines opened the second half with a three-point shot. Then they led by seven points, then by nine at 56-47 with 9:23 left.
The Republic of Montenegro (Nemanja Djurisic) was outplaying the Republic of McDonald’s All-Americans.
Eventually, there was a market correction. The Bulldogs couldn’t grab a defensive rebound, couldn’t make a shot. Kentucky won, 72-64.
But we may have learned something about Georgia in defeat that we never learned in any win: The ceiling is high.
“We played hard, we played very well but we weren’t perfect,” Fox said. “They’re so damn good, you almost have to be really perfect.”
Fox struck the right tone. No coach will celebrate a defeat. But he wasn’t about to to bang his players for blowing a lead. Kentucky is better at every position, in every way. It only started to play that way at the end. When the Dogs missed three straight front ends of one-and-ones (and 5-of-7 in the second half), their chance was gone.
“I’m going to look at the tape tomorrow and say we should’ve won the game,” Fox said. “I don’t believe in moral victories. But hopefully they believe that when you saddle up and get after it, we have a good team.”
Seeing this level of effort now was well timed. The Dogs almost certainly will be in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2011, Fox’s second season in Athens. Maybe then some critics will come to the realization that he’s doing a pretty good job.
Some perspective: Georgia (19-10) is one win short of its third 20-win season in the last five years. Do you know how many 20-win seasons they had in the previous 12 seasons? One. That came under Jim Harrick in 2001-02, before that house of cards burned up.
Fox can coach. Whether he has mastered the art of recruiting in a talent-rich state is up for debate, but there has been improvement in that area. The Dogs also are making noise on a campus that normally sleeps until spring football begins.
Yes, the Stegesaurus was rocking. Anybody who believes it’s not possible to create a great basketball atmosphere in the old barn should have been there.
Athens was on celebrity watch: Bill Belichick, Charles Barkley, Ashley Judd all were all there. At a basketball game.
“I can’t tell you how it was before, because I wasn’t here,” Djurisic said earlier. “But I do see a big difference, especially from my freshman year to my junior and senior year.”
Georgia never will be Kentucky in basketball. The question is whether Georgia can ever be Florida, a football school with a substantial basketball presence. The question is whether the corner has finally been turned?
“We’ve gotten our program to a point where we’re healthy,” said Fox, who finally signed a two-year contract extension recently. “Now it’s about making a commitment to go to the next level. We’ll obviously worry about how we take that next step after the season. But I feel good about where we are.”
Suddenly, so should everybody.
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