For those who might have let the college basketball season sneak up on them, Georgia Tech and Georgia are offering their own personal wake-up call: The rivals meet Friday night in Athens.
This is the earliest the two basketball teams have played and only the sixth time, in the 190th meeting, when they’ll play in November.
Trying to schedule in and around final exams, when students are in session, the expanded ACC schedule, early-season tournaments, the ACC-Big Ten and SEC-Big 12 challenges, and keeping a date open for the SEC championship football game — this is what you get.
“(Georgia coach) Mark (Fox) and I tried to figure out a time to play it later,” Tech coach Brian Gregory said. “With our finals and their finals and the way the holidays fell, this was the only time that we could fit it in. I think both would like to play it a little later, but you have to play the game when the schedule allows it.”
But what better way to find out exactly what these teams have going?
The Yellow Jackets (2-0) return four starters to what they believe is an up-and-coming team that has added veteran guard Trae Golden, a senior transfer from Tennessee. Georgia (1-0) is trying to re-establish itself without NBA lottery pick Kentavious Caldwell-Pope behind some promising guard play.
And while the teams give fans an idea of what to look for this season, they already have a pretty good idea of what to expect from each other.
Of the 28 players on both rosters, 18 scholarship players are from Georgia. Tech has 14 players from the state, including walk-ons, which is unprecedented for Tech and the most in-state players of any roster in men’s Division I basketball this season. Charlotte and Wisconsin-Milwaukee have 13 in-state players, and Purdue has 12.
Tech has 10 scholarship players from Georgia, including all four returning starters in Robert Carter Jr., Marcus Georges-Hunt, Daniel Miller, and Chris Bolden (who is suspended for the first three games of the season), the transfer Golden and sixth-man Kammeon Holsey.
The Bulldogs have four starters from Georgia (and six off the bench): Charles Mann and Kenny Gaines in the backcourt and Marcus Thornton and Donte’ Williams in the frontcourt. (Forward Brandon Morris of Lithonia will miss his second consecutive game for disciplinary reasons.)
“At any time on the court there could be four or five guys that all played in the same AAU program together and are good friends,” Gregory said.
Gaines was the point guard on Georges-Hunt’s AAU team. Carter’s Shiloh High School team lost to Charles Mann and Milton in the state tournament his senior year. And that’s just a sampling.
Gone are the days when Bobby Cremins scouted New York City for his top talent at Tech. Paul Hewitt made recruiting in Georgia a top priority, and Gregory has taken it a step further in his past two seasons at the helm.
“Within the state there are a lot of high quality players,” Gregory said.
“All you have to do is look around the college basketball landscape and you see them all over. I think that’s great for the state, and we want to make sure that we’re in the mix for those players as well.”
Gregory attributes the bevy of talent in-state to the caliber of AAU coaching and both the high school athletic and education system for having talented players academically prepared for college.
The next logical question that usually comes up when Tech and Georgia and play is whether this game becomes that much more important for in-state recruiting. And the frank answer from Gregory? No, not really.
“Everybody always talks about that,” Gregory said. “I think kids are more interested in where they fit in in a program, the personal relationship they have with the coaching staff and the players on the team. … I think it’s important more for bragging rights, but very rarely does a recruit make a decision on one 40-minute game.”
Bragging rights lately have gone to the Jackets, who have won the past two meetings. Tech got its first “program win” under Gregory in Athens on Dec. 7, 2011, by snapping a 13-game losing streak at Stegeman Coliseum.
But bragging rights are only as good as the most recent game.
“It’s definitely a bigger game than a lot of the rest of the games,” Carter said. “Everybody is expecting you to win. We are expecting to win. But there’s definitely a lot of tension there, excitement. Everybody talks about it. Nobody here likes UGA, and I’m guessing nobody at UGA likes Georgia Tech.”
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