The AJC reports that junior point guard Kevin Brophy was killed Thursday in an auto accident near Greensboro, Ga. on Hwy. 15 while driving home to Savannah.

There’s just not much more to say. This is terrible and devastating news, and we offer our prayers to Kevin and those close to him.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better kid if he was my own,” said Mark Sussman, the athletics director at Memorial Day School in Savannah and the person with whom Brophy lived the last three years. “He came to this country to play basketball and get his education. His dream was to play at a big-time college and he was able to do that.”

Update: WSB radio in Atlanta reports that Brophy wasn’t wearing his seat belt. The most tragic thing about this story might be the fact that it might have been prevented. Brophy was driving a borrowed car (his girlfriend’s late-model BMW), probably wasn’t terribly familiar with the handling of the car, lost control in a storm, and wasn’t wearing his seat belt. Be careful out there folks!

Coaches Felton and Hermann had to identify the body. That must be one of the hardest things they’ve ever had to do in their coaching careers.

Further coverage:

• ABH
• Teammate and coach comments (ABH)
• AP story
• Legacy.com guestbook
• Nice tribute from UGASports.com’s Brad Harrison

Yep. Exactly.

I’m surprised I hadn’t blogged about this before, but I’ve promoted this exact idea articulated so well by HeismanPundit for years on the message boards. You have performance majors in art and music, and physical ("sports") performance should be right up there as well. People often forget that a key part of a classical education used to be physical – the Greeks especially were fascinated with it.

A formal study program would have to be legitimate and not the throwaway Jim Harrick, Jr. courses everyone always imagines when this topic comes up. From theory to sports medicine (or physiology) to sports business, you’d be training a better class of professional athlete and a better class of coach and analyst down the road. How many people enter the NFL without a second’s thought of how to manage the millions of dollars coming their way?

The first school to make this happen would get ridiculed, and they’d have to be watched closely to make sure that the course of study was valid. Done properly, the results would be very interesting, and the pioneers in the field would gain a nice recruiting edge while everyone else caught up.

The SEC coaches have released their preseason all-SEC teams, and Georgia has placed 12 players on them. Auburn leads all teams with 14 selections. Interestingly, there was only one unanimous first team selection (Mississippi LB Patrick Willis). The SEC is waiting for some stars to step up.

Several of the selections were quality players who will be coming back from serious injury. It would be an amazing story if Prothro played this season. Broussard is a key for LSU. Andre Caldwell was scary good early last year. Can they overcome those injuries to play at an all-SEC level this year?

As expected, DE Quentin Moses leads the Bulldog delegation on the first team. Surprising to some might be who joined him on the first team. The supposedly-depleted Georgia offensive line placed C Nick Jones and OT Daniel Inman on the first team. Former walk-on Tra Battle is a first-team safety.

I know some will be upset that Thomas Brown was the only Dawg RB on the list, and he was only third-team. Blame it on the rotation or whatever you’d like, but the backs as a unit or as individuals have to be more productive and consistent to move past the other guys on the list.

Some might also wonder where Massaquoi is. He wasn’t among the top 10 in RPG or YPG. He also had very few impact/highlight catches that would get the attention of voters. You have to do more than get 3 or 4 catches a game and 50-60 yards. Good hands guy as a freshman, and there we are.

Now as a more experienced player he should expect more chances each game and the opportunity to have a bigger impact on games. It’s not automatic though as he’ll face double-teams and tight coverage until other threats step up.

For most Georgia fans, the name Glen Mason evokes unpleasant memories about the mess that was Georgia football in the mid-1990s. In these parts, Mason is more a bit of trivia than a football coach taken seriously. I would imagine that many Dawg fans are relieved that some midwesterner who managed moderate success at Kansas and Minnesota didn’t get his hands on this program. But I’ve got to give him some credit.

Some of the other Dawg blawgs like Georgia Sports Blog and DawgSports were kicking around numbers on which states produced the most NFL talent. The states you’d expect showed up at the top of the list, and Georgia was in a respectable position right up among the best.

Among the states with the fewest players in the NFL were Kansas and Minnesota. And one man has had success with the flagship football program of both of those states: Glen Mason. First, he took lowly Kansas and had four winning seasons in the early 1990s including a 10-2 mark in 1995 which attracted Georgia attention. Now he’s turned Minnesota into a respectable mid-tier Big 10 program.

Winning in the upper midwest is a tough assignment. Colin Cowherd maintains, and I agree, that Barry Alvarez will always be criminally underrated for the job he did at Wisconsin. He took a weak program in a talent-poor state and turned it into a program that played for Rose Bowl titles, produced Heisman-quality backs, and established themselves among New Year’s Day bowl regulars. At least Wisconsin had a rabid fan base and a place in college lore with its fight song and band.

Minnesota has none of that. It lies on the periphery of the Big 10 and, though it plays for axes and jugs and whatever else they use for trophys up there, there’s just not much tradition. They too lie in a relatively talent-poor state, they play in a dismal dome, and they’re typically….well, bad. There are a few homegrown success stories such as Marion Barber, but they’re pretty scarce.

Now Mason hasn’t taken the Gophers to the Rose Bowl, and they haven’t really been able to take the next step beyond the 7-4 or so plateau. But even that level of success, given what he has to work with up in the frozen tundra, is quite solid. He’s found a way to win games behind a bruising running attack, and his team will head to a bowl game in most years. They’re capable of knocking off the better teams in the Big 10, though they won’t do it every week. That’s pretty rare air for Minnesota. Actually, it’s only a win or two a year away from what Georgia had in the late 1990s while working with much less.

A lot of coaches wouldn’t even touch Kansas or Minnesota – they aren’t high profile, the fan base isn’t particularly rabid, and they are stuck in some pretty competitive conferences. We don’t know how Mason would have done in the SEC, and though his turnarounds have been steady, they haven’t been immediate. Georgia fans wouldn’t have had much patience especially given the lack of name recognition. Still, as we enter the 2006 season ten years after the season Mason was to have started at Georgia, I have to tip my cap at the job he’s done and continued to do. He’s earned a good measure of respect as a coach.

UCF, for a paltry $10k cancellation fee, has backed out of their September 29th game at Tennessee. The Vols travel to Athens the next week. Tennessee has replaced O’Leary’s team with Louisiana-Lafayette, and the Ragin’ Cajuns should put up much less of a fight while Tennessee gears up for the Dawgs.

UGASports.com breaks the news: Elite 11 QB Logan Gray of Columbia, Missouri will attend Georgia. Mark Richt’s reputation as a developer of quarterbacks carried a lot of weight, and his impressions of Georgia made him feel right at home.

Gray knows that he’s coming into a crowded and competitive quarterback situation at Georgia, and he’s expecting to redshirt as a freshman. Assuming Matthew Stafford plays this year as a freshman, Gray could potentially start as a junior. Don’t expect Richt to sit still, though. The Dawgs seem willing to add a quarterback each year, and Richt has had success in attracting some outstanding prospects who aren’t afraid of the depth chart. Gray’s commitment marks the third consecutive year in which the Dawgs have landed an Elite 11 quarterback.

With Gray’s arrival on campus next year, it’s hard to imagine a time when Georgia has had more quality depth at quarterback. The mission now for Richt and staff is to find receivers who want to catch passes from elite quarterbacks and linemen who want to protect them.

Georgia’s offense has been decent but certainly not as productive as some others around the nation. I’ve maintained that it’s a talent issue, particularly at QB and WR. With few exceptions (Lindsay Scott comes to mind), Georgia hasn’t had better than third-round NFL talent at those skill positions. As much as we revere and respect guys like Greene and Zeier and Terrence Edwards, we’ve yet to see this offense in the hands of truly special talent.

Think of the defensive end position: Georgia took a nice step up with Josh Mallard, Demetric Evans, and Robert Geathers. They had solid college careers and went on to the NFL. But we hadn’t seen anything like Pollack, Moses, and Charles Johnson. Sorry to use a business buzzword, but that’s a paradigm shift. I’m hoping we’ll soon see a similar shift on offense. It looks as if the quarterbacks are in place. There is promising young receiver talent starting with Massaquoi, but the Dawgs haven’t had the recruiting success there that they’d like especially when contrasted with a haul like Florida had last year.

Will these quarterbacks become pied pipers for the best receiver talent? Can Georgia turn this abundance of quarterbacking talent (not to mention the tailbacks on campus) into a better offense? That’s Mark Richt’s job now. As playcaller and director of the Bulldogs’ offensive scheme, he has to fill in the surrounding cast around these signal-callers.

I’ve only skimmed the now-infamous New York Times story about alleged academic fraud at Auburn. I find it hard to get interested in off-the-field stories, and one of the favorite offseason pasttimes in the SEC is hoping that this year’s allegations against your rival(s) will finally nail them good. Still, the story leads to a few thoughts.

We put up with a certain amount of hypocrisy to support college sports. Schools across the board from Georgia to Stanford lower their admission standards for athletes. We admit guys and gals with triple-digit SAT scores alongside the cream of the academic crop and expect our athletics programs to graduate people at a rate equal to or greater than the rest of the student body.

In order to resolve that apparent incongruity, there is an entire academic support system beneath the surface whose job it is to keep student-athletes on track and, at the minimum, eligible. From coaches to adminstrative staff to academic professionals, most of these people do their jobs well, above-board, and they contribute to the education of those in their charge. But when this system fails, things can quickly become ugly.

Problems occur when the support systems we all know and accept get taken too far. Tutors are great. Having tutors allegedly write your papers isn’t great. All students can appeal and discuss grades, but few have an academic support team preparing and pleading their case before a professor or department. Grades get reconsidered all the time. Intimidation and outright grade fixing isn’t so hot. All schools have certain easy classes and professors, and students know how to seek them out. Special treatment for athletes in those classes or abuse such as that alleged at Auburn isn’t kosher.

The pressures are intense, and the system gets bent very far at most every school with a major athletics program. It’s there, and it’s not something we like to talk about. We know that a disproportionate amount of athletes have declared certain majors, and we joke about Underwater Basketweaving courses knowing that it’s not far from reality. We like a great steak, but we don’t want to see the inside of the slaughterhouse. We want top-level sports teams, and we don’t really care to see the messy details of how marginally qualified athletes remain eligible and graduate. When a Kemp or a Bensel-Myers or a Gundlach comes along and shows that a line has been crossed, we get exposed to a part of college sports that we realize is there and omnipresent but is still distasteful.

All that said, there are still some basic guidelines, and the "everybody does it" excuse can only be stretched so far, especially when used in a progression of rationalizations that usually goes a little something like this:

1. We didn’t do it.
2. You can’t prove we did it.
3. Even if we did it, it’s not against the rules.
4. Even if it’s against the rules, it’s not a big deal.
5. Everyone does it.

You can’t help but laugh that this kind of behavior led to triumphant announcements about Auburn’s academic standing alongside schools like Duke and Boston College. But that’s what the APR rewards. Keep ’em eligible, keep ’em graduating. Remember basic principles – whatever gets rewarded gets done.

Ticket cut-offs for the 2006 season have been announced, and demand is at record levels again. For some perspective, here’s what it has taken to get tickets over the past few seasons. Florida is the best barometer for changes since our allotment remains more or less steady from year to year.

2003:
Clemson: all cumulative scores above 11,175
LSU: all cumulative scores above 13,860
Tennessee: all cumulative scores above 11,616
Vandy: All orders were filled
Florida Club: all cumulative scores above 25,051
Florida Regular: all cumulative scores above 4,301
Georgia Tech: all cumulative scores above 15,700

2004:
South Carolina — all cumulative scores above 11,187
Arkansas — all orders were filled
Florida — Club – all cumulative scores above 27,001
Florida — Regular – all cumulative scores above 5,986
Kentucky — all cumulative scores above 5,651
Auburn — all cumulative scores above 14,101

2005:
Miss. St.: all orders were filled
Tennessee: all cumulative scores above 15,601
Vandy: all orders were filled
Florida Club: all cumulative scores above 30,701
Florida Regular: all cumulative scores above 5,301
Georgia Tech: all cumulative scores above 18,751

2006:
South Carolina: all cumulative scores above 16,000
Mississippi: all cumulative scores above 12,850
Florida Club: all cumulative scores above 32,400
Florida Regular: all cumulative scores above 6,800
Kentucky: all orders were filled
Auburn: all cumulative scores above 19,506

Josh Kendall caught up with Joe Cox and family and discussed his darkhorse position in the quarterback derby. The most important point for many of us is that Cox will remain at Georgia regardless of the outcome of the competition. But there’s a lot more to take away from the article:

• Cox’s attitude is outstanding, and you can see where it comes from. Lots of heads screwed on properly in this family.
• This is the reality of coming in to an elite program. There will likely be other quality guys competing for the same position. Georgia seems to be making that turn where the quality of the program outweighs concerns about competition for a starting job. Knowshon Moreno signed on this year despite Georgia’s crowded tailback position. Three quality quarterbacks have now signed on over the past three seasons, and (knock wood) a fourth could commit this week. It’s good that Cox recognized this reality, and he seems to be dealing with it fine.
• The perspective of Cox’s father is tremendous. Joe Cox really does have a great opportunity at one of the best programs under a proven developer of quarterbacks.

Cox has received a bit of a bad rap for his G-Day performance which is all most fans have seen of him. They don’t know that he received raves leading the scout team last year. They overlook the fact that despite the interceptions, Cox moved the offense better than anyone else on G-Day. He might not win the starting job and might end up as a career backup. That still means he’ll likely get his chance under center at some point. Every Georgia starter for as long as I can remember has missed a series or even a game, and I can think of several instances over the past decade alone when I wished we had someone with Cox’s ability coming off the bench.

Now to the fans: Blake Barnes had similar comments recently. Now Cox has said it. No one is transferring. They all want to play football for Georgia and are quality guys we want in the program. We need the depth. Can we please stop trying to pack their bags for them and push them out the door? What a blessing to have this kind of depth developing at this critical position.

OK, I know Dennis Dodd probably had a deadline and it’s the slow preseason months. But naming the all-decade team of the 2000s before 2006? It’s not that I disagree with his point that we’re in a great age of college football. If anything, that just makes me look forward to what the next few years might produce. The traditional powers are strong, there are lots of interesting upstart programs looking to break through, and there is no shortage of talent coming into the game.

Just a sampling of players who might not have made a college football “best of the 1990s” list compiled right before the 1996 season:

• Peyton Manning
• Ron Dayne
• Peter Warrick
• Michael Vick
• LaVar Arrington
• Jevon Kearse
• Ricky Williams
• Andy Katzenmoyer
• Charles Woodson
• Takeo Spikes
• Plaxico Burress
• Corey Simon
• Champ Bailey
• Hines Ward

Look. We get it. No one likes the state of college football scheduling. No one likes defending their team’s practice of playing cupcakes. We’d all love to play Texas one week and then Miami the next (see my promotion / relegation daydream). Great for the fans, etc. etc.

But college football at the highest level is a multi-million dollar industry. No matter how much you stomp your feet and threaten to hold your breath, emotional appeals to shame don’t bring about real changes in that environment. You might get the occasional throwaway “safe” non-conference game, and then it’s right back to the diet of 1-AA teams. No one is going to risk a BCS payout because of – gasp! – shame and scorn in scheduling.

With all that is at stake, you’re going to have to come up with an actual, tangible incentive to reform scheduling. Instead of criticizing teams for “running away from competition and potential losses”, a more rational approach might examine why the current system provides incentives to do just that and disincentives for more aggressive scheduling.

I’ll give a hint. Why was Louisville a darkhorse national contender pick last year? Why is West Virginia a trendy pick this year? It’s not the offensive scheme. The system rewards records first and schedules much, much later. Fix. That. Problem.

Imagine John Elway throwing a punch in his final Super Bowl. Imagine Roger Clemens’ swan song being a pitch at someone’s head in the World Series. Imagine Michael Jordan doing his best Ron Artest impersonation in the NBA Finals. Imagine sprinter Michael Johnson using those golden shoes to trip the guy next to him during the 1996 Olympics 200 meter finals.

If you can imagine all of that, you might understand how Zinedine Zidane decided to exit international soccer: with a vicious head to the chest of Marco Materazzi during the World Cup final in the last game Zidane will ever play for his nation. Provoked or not, part of being the star is being the statesman. This isn’t Zidane’s first explosive outburst in high-profile games. In most any other context he’d have the stigma of a hothead or a sideshow like Dennis Rodman. Instead he’s celebrated, gushed over by the rudimentary ABC broadcasters, and even awarded the Golden Ball award as the tournament’s most outstanding player. Yes, I realize that the media vote on the award before the final, but FIFA needs to step in and strip the award. Zidane deserves a kick in his Golden Balls before he receives that honor. His career was going to be remembered for the 1998 title and the amazing resurgence during this year’s tournament. Had he remained in the game, he certainly would have participated in the penalty kicks and possibly even changed the outcome. Now he’s a punchline and will leave the world stage with as much scorn as admiration.

I’ve played, coached, and refereed soccer. I’ve watched and followed the game for most of my life. The World Cup is supposed to be the world’s greatest sporting event, but nothing has done more to turn me off to the game than the past month. This is the “highest level” of the sport? The great stories like Ghana and the other underdogs or the German youth movement or Zidane’s tournament prior to the final have been overshadowed by dives, questionable refereeing, and prima donna sportsmanship. ABC and ESPN covered the tournament with the grace of Weird Al’s UHF station.

Look at it this way: while Italy celebrates a well-deserved championship, the nation awaits the consequences of a game-fixing scandal which could affect the careers of several participants in the World Cup championship game. Is this really what international soccer is all about?

OK…last soccer post for four years. American sports isn’t without its needless drama. We have owners screwing up NBA Finals, shoddy refs in the Super Bowl, and baseball looking the other way on steroids. Still, as much as I like and will always respect the World Cup as the planet’s biggest sporting stage, I saw nothing over the month that even came close to the Texas-USC Rose Bowl. Less than a month ’til practice starts.

No, not in Stegeman.  Georgia will be the host team for the 1st and 2nd round games at the Gwinnett Arena in 2009.  Gwinnett is a great arena for the women’s game…it has all of the amenities of a modern arena, it’s moderately-sized enough to sell out yet still seat a good number of fans, and there’s plenty of parking.

Georgia is starting to make better and better use of the Gwinnett Arena, and that’s a good thing.  It’s not a matter of Gwinnett vs. Athens as much as it is Gwinnett vs. Atlanta.  The arena and the Sugarloaf area has things that Stegeman and Athens just don’t – hotel space among them.    Georgia’s promotion of the Gwinnett Arena means that UGA is now coordinating events that might have otherwise been hosted in Atlanta by Tech or Georgia State.
There have been gymnastics events there, the men’s basketball team played there last year, and the Lady Dogs play there annually since the Russell Athletic Shootout moved from Philips Arena to Gwinnett.  UGA will also host the 2007 women’s SEC tournament at the Gwinnett Arena.

Georgia’s basketball program is under incredible scrutiny after the wake slimy trail of the Harricks.  They certainly don’t need news like this threatening the program.  While there are a ton of regulations that everyone involved in a program must keep track of, this seems more like a communication and oversight problem with an assistant coach and head coach.  I would expect that staff members in the current climate be overzealous to a fault about decisions involving prospects, players, and benefits.

UGASports.com is killing some time this summer by having folks votes on Georgia’s best player. Of course we know who will win, but the process spawns some other interesting discussions.

Take quarterbacks. Georgia hasn’t really produced a clear “best” quarterback, and not many Bulldog signal-callers have had much pro success. Not many fans were around to see Tarkenton and fewer were there for Rauch and others from that era. Georgia’s offense during the successful Dooley years was based on the run, so you had quarterbacks who could run the option and pass every now and then. Since the McDuffie revolution in 1991, we’ve had a slew of passers come through the program but none has really had much success beyond Georgia. Without some clear stars at quarterback, some of Georgia’s better players don’t get their due sometimes.

Some quarterbacks make it easy. Manning, Leinart, Vick, Frazier, Marino…they all showed obvious talent in college and could be appreciated for their roles on some very good teams. For those with less-obvious talent or in systems that don’t lend themselves to gaudy numbers, it’s very possible to underrate some very good players.

Buck Belue. Critics will be quick to point out that “all he did was hand off to Herschel.” Sure. He also brought Georgia back off the mat down 20-0 to Tech in 1978, and he saved the 1980 season with a scrambling pass against Florida. Quarterbacks like Belue who might have been overshadowed by a superstar tailback or a dominant defense often aren’t appreciated. Even David Greene – no one in Division 1 has had more wins as a starter – gets slighted because as some fans put it, “most of those wins belonged to the defense”. Unbelieveable. It’s possible to give too much credit to the quarterback; football is a team game of course, and rarely can a single player overcome serious deficiencies elsewhere. Still, the quarterback is a focal point in any system, and there are reasons why teams have a bit more success with some quarterbacks than with others.

Jay Barker is probably the poster boy for this type of quarterback in the era of modern offense. Alabama in the early 90s had a defense you simply didn’t score on, and they relied on the run within a conservative offense. Barker as quarterback was seen as a guy whose job was simply not to screw things up. His team bested those of higher-profile quarterbacks like Shane Matthews and Gino Torretta. Faced with a deficit against Georgia in 1994, Barker showed off his arm and outdueled Eric Zeier in a comeback win. He finally received some overdue recognition as a senior with SEC and national honors, but you probably won’t find Barker on most people’s list of the Top 5 SEC quarterbacks of the 1990s. He should be high up on such a list.

Ohio State’s Craig Krenzel is a more recent quarterback from this mold. He was the man who handed off to Maurice Clarett, and most assumed that Ohio State was much too one-dimensional to survive from week to week. But they kept winning, and Krenzel was surprisingly at the center of a lot of plays that kept the Buckeye’s record perfect. In the end, it was fitting that this unheralded quarterback was the leading rusher in the national title game and scored twice. He was only 7-21 passing, but five of those completions were for first downs. Clutch. Clarett said, “He maybe doesn’t have the best arm out there, and he’s maybe not as fast. But, I’m telling you, when it comes down to it, he can play. I’d take him over anybody in the world.” He was talking about Krenzel, but he gave a perfect description for this type of underappreciated quarterback. They’re not superstars, but they’re leaders and, when it comes down to it, winners.