The offer of an athletic scholarship seems like it should be a pretty cut and dried process, but it can be as muddy as the flip side of the process – the commitment.

We hear about offers (especially in basketball) to younger and younger prospects to the point where the NCAA is considering regulating contact with seventh-graders.

But a formal written offer can’t be made until September of the prospect’s junior year. So, yes, there are non-binding verbal offers as well as commitments. Often these "offers" come with plenty of strings attached. We’d like to offer you a scholarship – if we have one available, if you bring your grades up, if you have a strong senior season, if we don’t sign two other guys at your position, etc. Many prospects stop listening after "we’d like to offer you a scholarship," and so there is often confusing and conflicting information about a prospect’s status. Sometimes even the prospect himself isn’t the best source to find out if there is an offer on the table.

That brings us to the case of Kwame Geathers. If the last name is familiar, that’s for good reason. His brother Robert played at Georgia and is now in the NFL. His other brother Clifton is a contributor at South Carolina. That’s quite a strong family legacy, and Kwame seems to be just as good of a prospect.

Geathers has still not signed with a school, and Georgia has always been among those listed as a favorite. Georgia’s continued interest and Geathers’ status as a top prospect led many to assume or report that he had an offer from Georgia.

Then questions emerged around Signing Day. Did Geathers even have an offer? Even his high school coach was unsure. It turns out that Geathers didn’t have an offer. That led to another round of conflicting information. Rivals.com National Recruiting Analyst Mike Farrell reported that "Georgia apparently is out of room and had to pull its offer (to Geathers)." That wasn’t the case, and Steve Patterson of UGASports.com had to set the record straight yesterday. Georgia has room not only for Geathers but also for unsigned TE Orson Charles.

There’s still more. Today we learn that Geathers did in fact finally get that Georgia offer on Thursday. But now he is postponing his decision again as he weighs a recent visit to Tennessee. Once assumed to be a Georgia vs. South Carolina battle, Geathers is now considering Georgia, Tennessee, and Central Florida.

RELATED: Read some additional thoughts about the recruiting process over at HP. Interesting thoughts about the emerging “‘soft offer” to go along with the “soft commitment”. I’m not sure it will catch on though. There is a much greater stigma attached to pulling an offer as there is to switching a verbal commitment. Coaches might be getting tired of it, but in the public perception it’s still the coach making $2 million per year vs. a prospect who is often a lower-income minority.

While the current basketball team continues to go through the motions on its way to an inauspicious finish, the program did get a bit of good news. Fall signees (G) Demario Mayfield and (C) Daniel Miller both plan on sticking with Georgia and will play for the new coach.

“I’m still 100 percent going to Georgia,” said Mayfield, who also had offers from Clemson, South Carolina, Auburn and Florida State.
…
“Even with (Felton’s dismissal), I am still going to Georgia,” (said Miller).

Now while neither is in the Derrick Favors class of instant program-changing prospects, each is considered to be a quality player. The AJC notes that Miller “is now considered the nation’s eighth-best senior center prospect by ESPN.” Mayfield’s offer sheet speaks for itself.

This news already puts the new coach a step ahead of the last time we changed coaches. The Georgia administration did everything but pack the bags of the 2003 recruiting class to encourage them to transfer to other programs. As a result, Dennis Felton had to piece together an entire recruiting class within a couple of months in the wake of a scandal that made national news. That first class ended up being Levi Stukes, Steve Newman, Corey Gibbs, and Marcus Sikes. Stukes and Newman were the only contributors from that class, and they became the core of the team as sophomores.

With Miller and Mayfield solidly committed, the new coach can focus on other needs in the spring period. The most obvious need is shooting help from both the 2 and 3 positions, and the ability to sign a scorer from the wing will be an immediate and early test for the new coach.

The possibility of opening the season at Oklahoma State on a Thursday night has been kicked around for a while, and Mark Richt even gave the idea his support, noting the advantage it would give the Dawgs in preparing for the SEC opener against South Carolina. Richt doesn’t think it will happen, and I agree for two reasons.

First, OSU already has one Thursday night game on their home schedule. The final home game of the season, against Colorado, has been moved to November 19 and will be broadcast by ESPN. Now, as our Thursday night experts on North Avenue will remind us, multiple Thursday home games aren’t unheard of, but it seems a bit much to expect a school that hasn’t had a Thursday home game since 1995 to suddenly go for not just one but two in the same season.

An even bigger reason is the stadium itself. The Georgia game will be the first in the newly-renovated Boone Pickens Stadium, and the Cowboys will want to show it off. A Thursday night slot is definitely a big stage – especially that first week when everyone is starving for football – but playing at night isn’t necessarily the best time to see the new stadium. I would think that a Saturday afternoon on a major network would be their ideal situation to spotlight a renovated stadium where many of the improvements are to the exterior. It’s nowhere near as thought out as all of this, but 3:30 on ABC makes the most sense from what OSU wants out of the game.

First read pwd’s take on why we’d rather certain basketball programs do well down the stretch. That’s exactly right. It’s just like competing for an at-large tournament spot. If you’re a bubble team, you want the favorites to win their conference tournaments. Otherwise they get knocked down to at-large status and take a bid that could have been yours. Similarly we want to avoid as many high-profile coaching vacancies after this season as we can because that’s our competition for available coaches. Who we get depends on who would even consider the Georgia job, and that pool shrinks if there are openings at places like Maryland or Arizona.

Meanwhile it wasn’t the best week for many of the prospective candidates.

Anthony Grant’s VCU team lost a key midweek conference game to UNC-Wilmington. VCU is 10-3 in conference and 17-7 overall.

Sean Miller’s Xavier team rose into the Top 10 but were upset by Duquesne last week.

Lon Kruger’s UNLV team have lost their past two games by a combined four points. They’ve dropped from 5-2 in conference to 5-4.

Even Oliver Purnell, whose Clemson team beat the daylights out of Duke last week, couldn’t avoid the upset bug. Clemson blew a 19-point lead at home and lost to FSU.

But Jeff Capel and Oklahoma are riding an 11-game winning streak and are 23-1 overall. Speaking of Capel, the Oklahoman has a look at what is attractive about the Oklahoma job and what might drive a successful coach away. Naturally it’s written from the Oklahoma perspective, but the things that make Oklahoma a great job could so easily apply to Georgia. Of course Georgia has nowhere near the basketball tradition of Oklahoma as a program; that’s not my point. Just consider these lines:

When you’re in a league like we’re in… It’s not the strongest year for the SEC, but it’s usually at least on par with the Big 12. …when you have the resources like we have… Georgia doesn’t lack for resources, and it’s shown the willingness recently to invest in hoops. …an athletic director and athletic department like we have… Again, Damon Evans is saying all the right things about supporting basketball, and the athletic department is positioned to make the necessary investments.

Lloyd Noble Center isn’t a basketball cathedral and can’t be turned into one in these economic times, but it’s still not a bad place to watch a ball game. And OU’s practice facility is state of the art. Ditto Georgia. Stegeman isn’t the new UVA arena, but the improvements to the seating area have made it a good place to watch a game. And I’d put UGA’s new practice facility up against any in the nation.

Capel sits in fertile recruiting territory. Not many areas produce basketball talent on a year to year basis than Georgia.

Big-time football means big-time money for resources, facilities, even contracts. Yep. We know.

Again, I don’t claim that Georgia is on par with Oklahoma right now. It is still, to some extent, “career roulette.” We have to admit that. We don’t have nearly the tradition of success on which to stand. But I couldn’t help reading those points that were compelling evidence to keep Capel in Norman and realize how, almost point for point, how they apply to Georgia. We’re in a strong league, in fertile recruiting territory, and we have an athletic department squarely in the black that sounds as if it is willing to commit to a successful basketball program. When people talk about lofty expectations for the Georgia program, those are the reasons why we think Georgia could, under the right circumstances, become every bit the program that Oklahoma is. It’s also why we might get a coach like Capel of the #2 team in the nation to at least listen.

It’s bad news if you used to scalp student tickets to get into the game, but otherwise the new online system seems to be a good step forward. The Red & Black agrees.

Instead of waiting in line at Stegeman for hours in the summer heat, “tickets” will be bought online, added to the student’s account, and a scanned student ID at the gate will verify the admission – there will be no paper student tickets. There will also be a pool of unused or returned student tickets if someone can’t use the tickets they purchased.

One development I really like is the official recognition of first-come, first-served seating in designated student seating areas. Of course much of student seating has operated more or less along these lines for years, but doing away with reserved student seating in certain sections will only encourage students to arrive early for the games. (Now if they could only do something about the alums…) If there’s going to be a challenge, it’s going to be enforcing that the first-come, first-served seating only goes to students. I’m surely not the only one who knows fans who have tickets elsewhere in the stadium but head over to the student section as soon as they’re in the gate.

As for the rest of us, don’t forget that the Hartman Fund deadline of February 15th is just ten days away.

Signing Day has mostly come and gone, though there are still a few big undecideds out there. Georgia currently has eighteen signees which is second only to 2005 as the smallest class in the Richt era. The Bulldogs’ attrition from seniors and NFL-bound underclassmen was relatively small but still significant. Of course the real value of the class won’t be known for years, but there are still some initial impressions about the group as a whole after a long day.

Positives:

• Quality. Even though it’s a relatively small class, Georgia still has one of the top 10 recruiting classes in the nation. The late addition of someone like Orson Charles could boost that ranking even higher.
• Zero defections. All of Georgia’s verbal commitments ended up signing with the Dawgs.
• Needs met. It was hairy for a while, but the signing of Marlon Brown gave Georgia two receivers and filled one of Georgia’s bigger needs. The all-important quarterback position is solid, there were some nice additions to the defensive backfield, and the interior offensive line is stout.
• Impact players. Though the Dawgs are no longer in the spot of needing immediate help along the lines, there will be opportunities for newcomers to make an immediate impact. Receiver and defensive back are two of those positions, and Marlon Brown and Branden Smith fit the bill perfectly.

Negatives:

• Needs not met. Though overall Georgia got a lot of help where they needed it, there were a couple of holes. Montez Robinson was a big pickup at defensive end, but he was the only end signed after Toby Jackson failed to qualify out of prep school. Austin Long was the only offensive tackle signed, and if you doubt that’s a position of need, look at the juggling that occurred once Sturdivant went down last year.
• Academics. Georgia already lost one high-profile commitment (Jackson) due to academic issues, and an already small class could be further reduced later in the summer as high school grades are finalized.
• Closing the borders. Six of the top ten and 13 of the top 20 prospects in the state left Georgia. The good news is that the seven who did remain in state all chose Georgia. If it helps, the Dawgs did sign the top two prospects in Tennessee – a nice welcome for Lane Kiffin as he begins to target the state of Georgia.
• Tilted to the offense. Branden Smith excepted, it seems as if more of the marquee players in the class were on the offensive side of the ball. Though there will almost surely be big contributors down the road among the defensive signees, a defense that needs to take a big step forward in 2009 will have to rely mainly upon returning players for that improvement. On the bright side, there is some impressive firepower being stockpiled by the Georgia offense.

For the first time in several years, Georgia will have as many as five or six prospects undecided entering National Signing Day on Wednesday. Any of them would be a tremendous addition to a strong class, and any combination of them would make for big news.

Georgiadogs.com will have the official list of signees, and G-Xtra will have live broadcasts throughout the day.

You can also follow our Twitter feed for quick bursts of news through the day as it comes from Athens, the message boards, and the official site.

It’s been an eventful few days around the Georgia basketball coaching search. Just to recap:

• Furman Bisher, who hasn’t covered Georgia basketball since it was played at Woodruff Hall, started the Knight-to-Georgia talk on Saturday.
• Georgia players expressed interest in the idea of playing for Knight. Corey Butler demonstrated why players usually aren’t in the best position to make these kinds of decisions. "To be honest, I don’t know that much about college basketball," he said. "I just play it."
• The governor of Georgia, a former UGA football player who probably couldn’t find Stegeman Coliseum if you dropped him off at the Georgia Center, is reported to be a possible broker of a deal if Knight decides to persue the job.
• Dick Vitale joined the campaign. Just take it easy on all of the "General" references though…we’re a little nervous in these parts about generals born in Ohio.
• Through everything, both Knight and UGA maintain that there has been no contact.

Say what you want about the opinions of everyone from Furman Bisher to Dick Vitale, but the one thing they have in common is that the best interests of the Georgia basketball program are secondary at best to them. Knight’s friends in coaching and in the media will support him in anything he wants to do. Local media have to be drooling over the thought of the Knight circus coming to town. Knight is certainly an accomplished and respected coach, but Damon Evans and those making this decision cannot allow themselves to be the rubes who allow this torrent of outside interests to shove someone into the job who might not be the best fit for the long-term success of the program.

Look, I’m not saying that Knight is a bad coach. How can anyone say that? The question isn’t whether Knight can improve Georgia basketball. First, it can’t get much worse. Second, it’s not a Knight-or-nothing discussion. Knight can and likely would improve the program. So can some of the other candidates mentioned. Given the downward trend during Knight’s last few years in Lubbock, the abrupt way in which he left the program, and the current struggling state of that program, it’s valid to ask whether someone else might be just as able to turn the program into a winner while doing a better job of positioning the program five years from now.

But at least he’d be entertaining.

If I’ve heard one line more than any other this week, it’s that one. Knight would be exciting! He would fill the stands if only because people want to see the inevitable explosion. He’d put Georgia on the map. You know what else would do all of that? Winning.

We’ve seen that even a moderately successful program will pack Stegeman Coliseum. The interest in and demand for Georgia basketball in 2002 and 2003 was sky-high. Every single SEC game was sold out. That was a team that barely cracked the Top 25. Harrick’s bittersweet final home game against Florida in 2003 was basketball at its best, and the Coliseum was second to none that night for a big-time college hoops atmosphere.

Fans weren’t scalping tickets during those years to see the antics of the coach on the sideline. They weren’t there to see tantrums and gimmicks. Though there was a strong personality coaching the team, fans packed the house to see a winning team, quality basketball, and a group of guys playing their tails off. Right up until the end the interest that was building in Georgia basketball was happening for all the right reasons.

So what now?

Georgia is not going to hire anyone now and not without talking to several candidates. (They’re not, right? Right!?) It’s going to be at least six weeks before those candidates begin to become available. Between now and then the attention around Knight will die down and shift. Hey, look, now he’s interested in the Alabama job.

This week’s news hasn’t been without its benefits. It can’t hurt to have the Georgia job as a story on most national sports shows over the past few days. Instead of some bogus test making the Georgia program a national joke, we’re hearing now how great an opportunity it is. And it is. At the same time, the frenzy that would otherwise be around the usual list of hot candidates is squarely on Knight. That’s a good thing – Georgia can go about its search, and those men can continue coaching their teams with much less distraction.

The Alabama basketball team pulled out all the stops for its Saturday night showdown with a Georgia team that was 0-5 in the SEC.

Turns out that on Friday night, a day before the Alabama basketball team played Georgia, Saban sat them down and gave them some sort of a fiery pep talk. Who said the man couldn’t whip any team into a frenzy? And it worked.

Yep. It worked all right. A 75-70 win over a team that had just lost by 26 at Florida and fired its coach. Way to go, Lombardi.

Trippi (L), “Red” Grange, and Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice (from LIFE magazine)

A familiar name is all over the news this week. One of the big storylines in this year’s Super Bowl is the return of the Cardinals franchise to the league championship for the first time since 1947. The star of that 1947 Chicago Cardinals squad was of course Georgia’s own Charley Trippi.

This sentence says a lot about what kind of player Trippi was. Remember that during this 1947 season the future Hall-of-Famer was a rookie.

Never was Trippi more magnificent than in the 1947 NFL Championship Game when the Cardinals defeated the Philadelphia Eagles, 28-21. Playing on an icy field in Chicago, Charley wore basketball shoes for better traction and totaled 206 yards, including 102 yards on two punt returns. He scored touchdowns on a 44-yard run and a 75-yard punt return.

Have you ever seen Trippi in action? Bear Bryant called him the greatest college football player he’d seen. The UGA Libraries Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection has a pair of videos from the Trippi-era Bulldogs of the 1940s.

The best is from the 1947 Sugar Bowl, a 20-10 win over North Carolina and Trippi’s last game as a Bulldog. Trippi played the entire 60 minutes of the game on both offense and defense. Though John Rauch was the quarterback (and a damn good one), Trippi threw the 67-yard touchdown pass that put Georgia up for good. In fact, in the first five plays of the game, Trippi runs the ball, passes the ball, punts, and makes a tackle.

The second Trippi-related video is a silent movie from the 1943 Rose Bowl. Trippi and Frank Sinkwich led Georgia to a 9-0 win over UCLA.

Bobby Knight might be interested, but hopefully the feeling isn’t mutual.

A week ago, the Georgia women’s basketball team was reeling. They were 11-7 overall and 1-2 in the SEC. They hadn’t defeated a ranked team all season and struggled to break 50 points against the better teams they faced. Worse, two of their next three games were against Vanderbilt and Auburn. Both were ranked, both were undefeated in the SEC, and Auburn was a perfect 20-0 after running over Tennessee last weekend.

They pulled off the upset of Vanderbilt last Thursday. Then they survived a late game collapse against Alabama to come away with their first SEC road win of the season. But Auburn was an entirely different challenge. Georgia hadn’t defeated a top 5 opponent since Tasha Humphrey’s freshman season – a 78-64 win over Texas in November of 2004. It took over four years, but Thursday’s 67-58 win over Auburn couldn’t have meant more to a program that has completely turned their season around in just one week.

It started, as it has all season, with defense. An active 2-3 zone kept Auburn to more than 20 points off their season average, and the outside shot wasn’t falling for the Tigers. Player of the Year candidate DeWanna Bonner got her 27 points, but no other Auburn player could muster consistent offense. Georgia meanwhile found a balanced offensive attack with four players in double-figures. Angel Robinson was effective inside with 17 points, and a combined 25 from Marshall and Puleo gave the Lady Dogs a needed punch from the wing. A 15-4 run midway through the second half put them up by 11, and they hit free throws and avoided turnovers down the stretch to hold on for the win.

It was the program’s biggest win in a while and on the heels of last week’s win over Vandy gives Georgia a huge shot of confidence heading into February. Of course life gets no easier. Mississippi State is a tough team this year, and then it’s Tennessee in Knoxville next week. Georgia still has return games with Vanderbilt and Auburn left. They still don’t have the firepower on offense to overcome a letdown, but the defense has been a pretty consistent factor all year. Nothing is given though, and things would look a lot better with a win Sunday over Mississippi State.

Georgia is now 14-7 and 4-2 in the SEC. They’ve scored over 60 points in three straight games for the first time since early December. They’re just one game out of the SEC lead near the midway point of the conference slate. NCAA Tournament chances that seemed hopeless now, though hardly certain, seem much brighter. If they can win four of their eight remaining games, they’ll finish no worse than 8-6 in the SEC and 18-11 overall and in the top half of the conference. That would put them squarely on the bubble heading into the SEC Tournament, but with these very quality wins and with the fact that they are the host team for NCAA Tournament opening round games in Gwinnett, you’d have to like their chances.

The benefit of pulling the trigger now is that Georgia has plenty of time to consider prospective coaches. Most candidates will be coaching for at least another six weeks. Damon Evans can be as thorough as he needs to be with the decision, and the fact that Georgia is looking for a coach will be on the minds of interested candidates right away.

Rather than focusing on a random list of names at this time, I’ll be satisfied with this assurance from Evans’ press conference this morning (courtesy of Anthony Dasher of UGASports.com):

“I’ll say this. Our commitment and my commitment to build University of Georgia basketball is strong. And when I say strong, I’ll add very strong to that. We are going to go out and get the best possible person for this job. That may mean we have to commit more resources than we have in the past but I don’t want to hold us back from doing what we need to do to have a successful men’s basketball program.”

Translation: we’ll pay – and pay well – for the right coach.

The Dennis Felton era at Georgia is over. It began under a cloud and never really emerged. There were fits and starts but ultimately setbacks that eroded what progress had been made. A program that wanted to return its focus to the court couldn’t avoid damaging off-court incidents that cost it some of its best players. Fair or not, Felton was behind the 8-ball from the beginning, and his program never gained enough positive traction to bootstrap itself up from the pit in which it started.

In the short-term, the most important thing will be keeping much of the current team and recruiting class in place. This isn’t 2003 – there is no scandal from which to run away. Any releases this time, if requested, should be evaluated much more closely than during the "let ’em all go" period following the last coaching change. The collapse and loss of an entire recruiting class put Dennis Felton in an even tougher spot when he took over, and this is no time for history to repeat itself. The new coach will have enough challenges out of the gate, and keeping the core of the team intact should be a priority. The news that Pete Hermann will be taking over as an interim coach is a good sign. Hermann is respected and is the best person to keep the team from disintigrating.

A college head coach wears many hats, but the job boils down to this: get good players and put them in a position to succeed on the court. Much of the analysis of the Felton years will focus on the latter (win totals, lethargic offense, etc.), but what did him in was the inability to attract and retain enough quality players to field a consistently competitive team.

It was a two-fold problem. First was getting the players to begin with. The stigma around the program in 2003 didn’t help, and it begat a cycle where no one wanted to play for a bad team, so the team remained bad. There were a handful of recruiting successes. The first was Sundiata Gaines, a point guard from New York. Felton landed a handful of the top players from talent-rich Gwinnett County. Channing Toney, Louis Williams, Mike Mercer, and Billy Humphrey were all quality signings. The Dawgs even pulled in a top JUCO forward, Takais Brown.

It’s there that we come to the second part of the problem – retention. If you look over the list of Felton’s better signings, few lasted four years in the program. Louis Williams of course went right to the NBA as expected. Toney transferred, and Mercer, Humphrey, and Brown were all dismissed from the team. Georgia was actually making progress two seasons ago, but the knee injury to Mercer started a freefall that saw the 2007 season end just short of the NCAA Tournament, the dismissal of three key contributors within a year, and put Georgia in its current situation of almost no backcourt production. In this sixth season under Felton, only four players made it through four years with the program (Gaines, Bliss, Newman, and Stukes).

Is Dennis Felton a good coach? We might not be able to answer that. I don’t think anyone can argue that he had a complete team with which to work except for maybe a brief period in 2006-2007. But that of course is as much a part of the job as anything else. He was, by my own observation, an intelligent man with a good grasp for the game. That didn’t matter as long as the personnel remained incomplete.

To be fair and clear, this is not a new problem that began with Felton. Even Georgia’s more successful coaches faced recruiting problems. Tubby Smith did well with a solid senior class in his first season, but there is no question that his second team overachieved. Good coaching? Sure. Good recruiting? Not so much.

Even Jim Harrick couldn’t turn the tide. In fact, the situation Felton inherited was exacerbated by Harrick’s own recruiting problems. Between the 2000 class that gave us Rashad Wright and Chris Daniels and Felton’s first class in 2003 that included Levi Stukes and Steve Newman, Georgia did not add a single four-year player in 2001 or 2002 that stuck with the team. The Hayes twins were the only significant additions during those lean years. The result was that after the departure of the 2004 senior class, Felton was left to rebuild a program with only his rising sophomores.

When top-rated Atlanta center Derrick Favors chose Georgia Tech over Georgia recently, his reasoning was an indictment not only of Dennis Felton but also of Georgia basketball history.

"Just the history, how many guys Georgia Tech put in the NBA and how many guys Georgia put in the NBA."

Ouch. It’s that simple. Over the lifetime of a current high school senior, how many Bulldogs have made any kind of impact in the NBA? Maybe three: Shandon Anderson, Jumaine Jones, and Jarvis Hayes. Anderson and Jones aren’t in the league anymore, and Hayes is an 8 PPG guy. Georgia’s most celebrated players since Hayes are tough point guards Wright and Gaines – solid and admirable college players but not exactly pied pipers for NBA-quality talent. That legacy didn’t start with Felton, but it certainly didn’t improve with him either.

The situation at Georgia is and always has seemed ideal for success. You’re smack in one of the most talent-rich basketball regions in the nation. You have an athletic department with deep pockets that has shown its commitment to basketball with one of the best facilities in the nation. You have a large fan base that has shown it will support a winner and can turn Stegeman Coliseum into a vibrant home for college hoops. Thanks to a strong overall program, you have instant brand recognition. Even though the SEC is down this year, you still play in a major conference with plenty of TV exposure. Yet for all of these advantages, Georgia basketball has never been a consistent winner, and it starts with recruiting.

Job #1 for the next Georgia coach will be to do what no recent Bulldog coach, not even Smith or Harrick, was able to do: stop the flow of Georgia talent out of the state. Get that done, and all of the pieces are in place for a successful program.

On a personal note…

I can only speak for myself, but I found Dennis Felton to be an engaging and passionate man who had the highest goals and expectations for Georgia basketball. He jumped into a dire situation with great enthusiasm. Even with the wheels coming off he handled himself with professionalism and class. Though it didn’t work out, he ran his program openly and above-board. He’ll be just fine.

There is word this morning that embattled Georgia basketball coach Dennis Felton has been terminated. A press conference is set for 11 a.m.