Time to get busy.
That’s the bottom line for the Georgia Bulldogs, who emerge from a brutal stretch to open 2020 with a battered ego and record to match. But hope awaits in the remainder of the schedule, which features not only more home games than away, but also some relief in caliber of competition.
That starts Saturday as the Bulldogs play host to Ole Miss (5:30 p.m., SEC Network) at Stegeman Coliseum, where they’re 9-1 this season.
The Bulldogs (11-7, 1-4 SEC) went 2-4 in the six games they’ve played since the calendar flipped to 2020. But few SEC teams have endured a tougher stretch to start the year. Those contests all came against 2019 NCAA Tournament participants, featured two games against No. 10 Kentucky and road contests vs. No. 5 Auburn and a better-than-advertised Mississippi State squad.
Georgia very realistically could have emerged from the stretch winless. Instead, it managed snatch a road win against then-No. 9 Memphis and a 17-point victory at home against Tennessee.
As a whole, that opening stretch came against teams averaging a 40.8 RPI ranking. Compare that with an average of 85.5 from the opponents in the 13 games remaining and it’s clear that the Bulldogs, who feature a No. 58 RPI rating of their own, should be in position to win a higher rate down the stretch.
They must if there is to be any notion of returning to postseason play in Year 2 under coach Tom Crean.
“They have a shot,” said Jay Bilas, ESPN’s lead college basketball analyst. “They still have some work to do, obviously.”
Right now, Georgia is barely a bubble team in the national conscious. Basketballmatrix.com, which takes into account every postseason projection in the country, currently has the Bulldogs in the “others receiving votes” category. That’s behind “First Four Out” and “Next Four Out,” where Georgia at one time resided.
The Bulldogs made a brief appearance in some of those brackets. They can still play their way into the real one.
Georgia is one the youngest teams in America. The Bulldogs feature 10 newcomers this season, including nine freshmen, three of whom will start Saturday against the Rebels. Only Navy, TCU and Utah, with 11 each, and Air Force, with 10, have more freshmen on their roster.
However, none of those teams have a freshman the ilk of Anthony Edwards. The 6-foot-5 guard known as “Ant Man” is the nation’s highest-scoring freshman (18.9 ppg) and a projected NBA lottery pick in this year’s draft. But while he’s been fascinating to watch and a scintillating player in spurts, he has struggled for long stretches against the Bulldogs’ best opponents.
Getting more consistent output from Edwards could do wonders for Georgia’s profile. His first-half performances against elite competition on the road has been frightful. Edwards scored six points combined in the opening 20 minutes of play against Auburn, Mississippi State and Kentucky. That has come on 2-for-16 shooting, 0-of-9 from 3-point range and 2-of-4 from the free-throw line. He was blanked for a half for the first time in his career against Kentucky at Rupp Arena on Tuesday.
Conversely, Edwards scored 47 in the second half of those games, or an average of 15.7 points. Also, in Georgia’s only two SEC home games so far, against Tennessee and Kentucky, he scored 26 and 23 points, respectively.
“I think he probes a little too much without being on the attack,” Crean said. “Eventually he settles in. … He commands so much attention. The bottom line is he’s learning, he’s growing, he’s getting better. He’s just got to continue to see the impact he has when he plays on the attack.”
It’s all relative. Regardless of how it’s broken down, Edwards is having a phenomenal freshman season. He has been 18 years old since only Aug. 5, and at the halfway point of his first college season, he leads his team in scoring, minutes played (544), 3-pointers made (39), free throws made (70) and attempted (96) and is second in steals (23) and assists (57). He also leads the team in turnovers (46), not surprising as much as he handles the basketball and the defensive attention he attracts.
Edwards still could be the reason Georgia gets on a run.
“Edwards is still a developing player,” said Bilas, who has called Georgia games twice. “He’s extraordinarily talented, maybe the most talented player in college. But he doesn’t know how to use it yet. He’ll learn that, but it’s not going to be a light switch overnight where all of the sudden he knows how to play. ... His shot selection needs work and he needs to learn how to defend. But he’s an earnest kid and he plays hard and I like him very much as a player.”
How Georgia does during this one season with a purported generational player could impact Crean’s ability to attract similar players in the future. Kentucky coach John Calipari has made a career out of stockpiling “one-and-done” NBA prospects and getting them to mesh well enough to carry the Wildcats deep into the postseason. The Bulldogs are attempting only to earn a bid with a player that’s likely to be checked out of his dorm room the morning after the season’s last game.
There’s plenty of young talent that will return from this roster, but none of them attract two dozen NBA scouts to a sold-out Stegeman Coliseum every home game. Surely that ramps up the pressure on everybody involved as the Bulldogs sit three games below .500 a quarter of the way into conference play.
“We try to focus on each game and remind the guys how long this season is and that it’s still so early in the conference season,” Crean said this week. “We don’t come in and talk about, ‘Hey, we’ve got these games against NCAA tournament teams and this is what we have to do.’ It’s really about how do we prepare for each game. We as coaches have to keep it in perspective.”
The Bulldogs really do have an opportunity to change the narrative on a season that has so many eyeballs focused on the program. The fact is, according to current data, the remaining stretch of schedule should be less challenging than what Georgia has negotiated to date.
Using College RPI as a measurement, the Bulldogs’ remaining games are against competition with an average ranking of 85, which is about half as tough they’ve just encountered (41). UGA’s next three games are against 155th-rated Ole Miss (9-9, 0-5), Missouri (128) and Texas A&M (150). Also, the Bulldogs (rated 58th) have seven home games left versus six on the road, and two of those away tilts are against A&M and Vanderbilt (186).
Meanwhile, there still are some Goliaths in Georgia’s path. It also has to play Florida (30) and South Carolina (103) twice, gets Auburn (3) again, and has Alabama (45), Arkansas (15) and LSU (13) still ahead. It’s important that some of those teams are toppled.
“The schedule easing up kind of cuts both ways, honestly,” Bilas said. “When you win lower-valued games it doesn’t help you. So, they really have to pick off some of the higher-valued Quad I, Quad II games. That’s really what they’re looking for.”
Crean’s working hard to keep all this down to bite-size portions. He’s been down this road before. At Indiana, he inherited a scandalized program from Kelvin Sampson that left him with a roster of just two walk-ons. Playing with eight freshmen that first season, the Hoosiers logged the first of three losing seasons before emerging from the ashes to win two Big Ten titles and play in four NCAAs in five years, opening the 2013 tournament as the nation’s top seed.
“What you worry about with your team, especially a team as young as this one, is are they keeping their confidence?” Crean said. “Our job is to make sure we’re coming in and giving them the energy and atmosphere that allows them to get better, stay focused on improvement along with getting ready for each individual game and hopefully they’ll all be better for it.”
The key is that Georgia continues to get better. Obviously the Bulldogs must to have any hope of returning to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2015.
Even if they don’t, Bilas doesn’t believe that should be considered a failure.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Georgia’s a big rebuild, and it’s a program that has not had established success for a long time. Establishing a foundation of success isn’t something that happens with one NCAA appearance or one miss. That’s not what that’s about. It’s about sustained recruiting classes over time and establishing a culture and leading that forward. You’re not going to do that in one or two years.”
Yes, but a little postseason run could do wonders for Crean’s rebuild and give Edwards a fitting sendoff.
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