With the 2006-2007 academic and athletic year completed, Georgia finished a respectable 12th in the 2007 Director’s Cup – not the best showing in recent years, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Two national titles (gymnastics and men’s tennis) were at the top of the highlights, and we’ll get to those top stories soon. But first, we’ll take a look back first at some of the lower points from the past year.

10. "I’m Georgia!"

OK, I understand the proceeds went to a really, really good cause. I bought a few towels myself for that reason alone. But manufactured enthusiasm always seems a little artificial and often cheesy. The "I’m Georgia" campaign was both. It became painful watching former Georgia greats trying to rally the Sanford Stadium crowd in their middle-aged monotones. "You want me to wave this towel and say what?!" But because they distributed so many towels and the kids love them – kids love anything free – the "I’m Georgia" towels are barnacles on the Georgia program that will be hanging on for several years.

9. Basketball collapse at Alabama.

It’s unfair to label any particular game as the reason why Georgia missed the NCAA basketball tournament. It’s not even clear that another win would have made the difference. Still, a double-digit lead against Bama represented a rare chance to get a quality road conference win. The questionable finish only made the missed opportunity more painful. This game wasn’t the only time that the Dawgs blew a decent lead late in the game; Western Kentucky handed Georgia its first loss of the season with a late rally from ten points down. Either one of those wins would have been nice to have. Both together might have earned the Dawgs a bid.

8. Women’s golf embarassment.

The mysterious resignation of women’s golf coach Todd McCorkle turned into an uncomfortable if not creepy story filled with charges of harrassment and other conduct inappropriate for someone in his position (and most anyone over the age of 14). McCorkle resigned his position but remains with the athletic association, an arrangement that I agree creates a lose-lose situation.

There’s another angle to the story that didn’t get much play – the spokesperson-parent. Art Leon, father of star player Taylor Leon, triggered an investigation by complaining to administrators "after his daughter said she was berated by McCorkle at the Bryan Intercollegiate (tournament)." While I consider the harassment charges very serious and worthy of the reaction they received, I am not so quick to sympathize with parental claims of "verbal abuse" that resulted because a coach got in a player’s face.

Mr. Leon comes across a bit differently in this quote from the AJC following McCorkle’s resignation: "I’m shocked, surprised, just flabbergasted…Todd’s a great coach. I just saw him at SECs and everybody was happy and jubilant." A week later, Leon told the ABH, "He’s the type of guy you feel like you’d like to have a beer with, but he has no place being a coach of women’s golf." Hm. OK.

7. UGA: home of the minor alcohol-related incident.

From Akeem Hebron to Ian Smith to Tasha Humphrey, the campus crackdown on underage drinking left its mark on Bulldog athletics. For the football team, the incidents resulted in another round of early-season suspensions, and Hebron was suspended by the University. In the case of Humphrey, her suspension led to chemistry issues on the team that weren’t really sorted out until the final month of the season. Given the climate withing the campus administration, the overzealousness of local police, and the automatic suspensions mandated by the athletic department, you’d think the message to be smarter about drinking might be getting out to student-athletes. But this next academic year hasn’t gotten off to a great start either.

6. Quarterback indecision.

A year later, it seems like a hazy dream. But a year ago, Georgia fans were debating whether or not Joe Tereshinski’s unproven ability to "manage the game" (whatever that meant) was enough to give him the nod at quarterback over less-experienced but more talented options. Ideally, the question would have played itself out in August. Unfortunately, the quarterback question ended up dragging into the middle of the season and not settled for certain until the Mississippi State game, the eighth game of the season. Along the way we had an injury to the starter, a solid debut from the freshman phenom, an off-the-bench rescue by a third quarterback, and several close calls. Eventually the job was won by Matthew Stafford, but his on-the-job training during the middle part of the season included some very harsh lessons. It’s impossible to say how the season would have turned out had Stafford started the whole time, but that doesn’t keep fans from wondering.

5. Big Three vs. Florida.

0-fer. Sweep. Georgia’s "big three" men’s sports of football, basketball, and baseball all played their part in the Year of the Gator. The Gator football team held off a second-half comeback from the Dawgs en route to SEC and national titles. Florida’s outstanding basketball team was never seriously challenged in three games against Georgia including the quarterfinals of the SEC Tournament. Georgia’s best chance for a win was against a struggling Gator baseball team, but even a Florida team that would finish under .500 and fire its coach managed to sweep a three-game series in Athens. Thank goodness for other sports like tennis, gymnastics, and women’s basketball which took care of their own business against Florida, but a turnaround in the "big three" can’t come quickly enough.

4. Baseball roller coaster hits bottom.

I guess we should have seen it coming. Georgia baseball has had a strange pattern of feast and famine lately, and the calendar said that they were due for another downturn in 2007. But the severity of the downturn was the news this year. The talent drain after the 2006 trip to Omaha hurt, and those expected to carry the team this year didn’t. Georgia produced no all-SEC players this season, and they clearly lacked the clutch star power they’ve enjoyed recently. Georgia finished the season under .500 with their worst record in several years and far out of contention for the postseason.

The season was in trouble out of the gate as the Dawgs dropped early series to PAC 10 members Oregon State and Southern Cal. A sweep of Auburn to start SEC play provided a small glimmer of hope, but reality set in quickly. Taking two of three games from Georgia Tech was one of the few bright spots of the season, and those two wins might have had the added benefit of keeping Tech out of the NCAA Tournament.

The odd-even schedule that seems to rule the Diamond Dawgs lately says that Georgia baseball should be back on top next year, but they’ll be looking for answers and improvement at nearly every spot.

3. Mike Mercer’s season-ending injury.

Ouch. You knew the moment it happened that Mike Mercer’s knee injury at South Carolina was severe. In fact, it was considered "good" news that the injury was only season-ending. Similar injuries have ended careers. A lot of Bulldog programs had significant injuries last year, and some like Thomas Brown’s were season-ending too. But a major injury to a basketball starter is magnified, and Mercer’s injury turned out to be too much for the fragile Georgia depth to handle down the critical stretch run. Though they fought until the regular season finale against Tennessee, Mercer’s injury gave them very long odds for a postseason bid with no margin for error. Still, the team scrapped by and were able to record their first postseason win in nearly five years.

2. Football losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky.

We sensed that inexperience at the quarterback position would cause problems, but few would have guessed that the defending SEC champions would fall to the traditional doormats of the SEC East. Even worse is that Georgia held the lead in each game but saw Vandy and Kentucky drive late in the game for the winning scores against a relenting Georgia defense. Following the loss at Kentucky in November, things were as bleak as they’ve looked at Georgia since 1996. How the Dawgs turned things around to beat three consecutive ranked teams is an incredible story, and I don’t think we’ll ever know just how much negative momentum the team had to overcome in order to make that turnaround happen.

1. The death of Kevin Brophy.

The Georgia basketball world was rocked in July when point guard Kevin Brophy was killed in an auto accident. The Australia native was driving to Savannah when he wrecked during a rainstorm south of Athens.

Though I consider the death of Brophy the bottom story of the past academic year, the response by the team and the fan base was far from a low point. The team embraced the memory of the popular player, and an emotional win over LSU in the presence of the Brophy family topped off a season dedicated to Kevin. Fans and the University worked together to start a Kevin Brophy Memorial Scholarship Endowment Fund, and its trademark circular "3" patch was a ubiquitous reminder all season on the court and in the stands.

Usually it’s left to Tommy Tuberville to stick his foot in his mouth about a tough schedule or an unfair system before they actually play the games. Now it’s Les Miles’ turn. Miles, who doesn’t have an SEC title to his name yet, is already knocking down other preseason contenders and flashing his SEC membership card (H/T: Get the Picture).

"I can tell you this, that they have a much easier road to travel," Miles said of the Trojans. "They’re going to play real knockdown drag-outs with UCLA and Washington, Cal-Berkley, Stanford – some real juggernauts – and they’re going to end up, it would be my guess, in some position so if they win a game or two, that they’ll end up in the title (game). I would like that path for us."

"I think the SEC provides much stiffer competition."

Has anyone checked the LSU schedule? There are two, maybe three games which should give a preseason Top 10 team any problems. Virginia Tech, yes. Florida, yes. Auburn, maybe. Arkansas, maybe. They don’t play Tennessee or Georgia. There will be a ridiculous amount of hype with the Alabama game, but there is no reason why a rebuilding Bama team, even under Saban, should be on the level of this LSU squad. That Bama game is LSU’s only challenge on the road this year while the Trojans visit Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oregon, and Cal. Southern Cal is not the team to be picking on.

So LSU’s position can be said to be much the same. Win a game or two – at home – plus the SEC championship, and they’re in the title game.

Look, Les. The SEC is cool. Great football and fans. Don’t lean on the conference too much though. Just find a quarterback, win your games, win the mighty SEC first, and then we’ll see where things stand.

If the Tuberville Rule holds, bet the house on Virginia Tech.

PS…Can you blame him though? If he can convince a pollster or two that the 2007 LSU schedule is a death march, good for him. It might even help to swing things his way should there be another batch of one-loss teams at the end. That’s how the process works.

Ron Franklin is still the voice of college football on television to me. He and Gottfried together on ESPN Saturday nights were pure gold, even better than the Blackledge-Lundquist team on CBS. Though Gottfried has declined (to the point of ESPNU), Franklin still seems to be a quality man in the booth.

Now Franklin, already moved down the pecking order to ESPN2 games, has been reassigned to ABC regional coverage. That makes his chances of calling a Georgia game in the near future virtually nil.

In all of the Munson talk last week, someone (I will try to find a link) mentioned Franklin as a possible addition to the Georgia broadcast booth after Larry finally hangs it up. I thought that a bit of a stretch given his national TV gig, but as he gets pushed further and further down the list at ABC/ESPN, I have to admit that the idea sounds pretty interesting.

Read on about other changes to the ESPN/ABC lineup.

Erin Andrews…really…Saturday afternoon on ESPN? And Sean McDonough, still complaining about a Bryan McClendon touchdown at Vandy in 2005…hope you enjoy Friday nights.

The Greater Atlanta Bulldog Club will have its traditional late-July gathering again this year on Monday, July 30, but the location is changing this year.

The meeting is not at Colony Square. This year’s location is the Cobb Galleria Centre.

The program begins at 7:00 p.m. with social time beforehand.

I always feel a bit dirty after buying a Tech three-game package (hit the Georgia Sports Blog for details). But it’s not a bad slate this year, and they let you create a three-game pack from any of their home games. So I’ve got my Georgia tickets, my Tar Heel father can catch the UNC game, and I also picked up a pair for a Thursday night to see Virginia Tech who should be in the mood for a little payback.

I too was able to get into section 228 which is near the perch from which I saw Bryan McClendon write his name into my personal Bulldog Hall of Fame in 2005. Even as Tech struggles to fill their best seats, these seats (particularly those in friendly sections) will probably go quickly. You can follow GSB’s instructions to make sure that there is again plenty of Red and Black in the stands.

UGASports.com has a piece today looking back at UGA’s role in past NBA drafts. It’s a good read. But at first glance I had to think that something about UGA and the NBA draft seems as if it would rank just behind Famous Jewish Sports Legends on the "light reading" list. Hopefully that will change down the road.

First, a bit of unsolicited travel advice:

Visit Nova Scotia. What an incredible place. You can just drive around the corner and come out at a spot like this:

Now, on to some of the Dawg news that caught my eye after a quick scan:

Munson cutting back

Count me among those who feel that Larry has earned the right to call as few or as many games, quarters, or plays as he wishes.

At the same time, we have to consider the role of the broadcast in the first place: telling the story of the game. John Kaltefleiter of the ABH took a little heat last week when he suggested that Munson was slipping badly in this area, but is that really news to anyone? "We’ve got a guy in the corner" has become the default call for any play now. But Munson isn’t there for that anymore…his presence is almost ceremonial like British royalty, and the fact that the broadcast team can so easily adapt to Munson’s reduced schedule this year is evidence of that. No one expects Roger Clemens to go 9 innings anymore, but it’s still a special thing to see him on the mound. The rest of the broadcast team is capable of picking up the slack.

To me, the question isn’t who replaces Larry. It’s who replaces Scott Howard when Howard moves into the lead role.

Mark Richt’s Summer Vacation

College football coaches don’t have much down time, but this time of year is about as close as it comes to R&R before the staff begins intense preseason preparations in a few weeks. Coach Richt and his family spent some of their summer recently checking up on a mission they support in Honduras. He kept a journal for UGASports.com, and they’ve put it up as free content. Read here:

• Richt heads to Honduras
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Richts leave Honduras

Besides the virtue of the mission work itself, I find it admirable even in a "safe" situation like this that Coach Richt would engage the online community in such depth. He also took questions directly from the DawgVent. It goes with the understanding that these same people will be cursing him again after the next loss, so it’s very gracious of him to take the time to put these entries together and share this very important work.

Andy Landers’ June

First, thoughts and prayers are with the Landers family as Drew recovers from an automobile accident earlier this week. Unfortunately, the accident cost the life of a North Oconee coach, and we can’t begin to imagine the toll that has taken on that community and his family. The relatively good news from this tragedy is that the others in the car survived, and Drew seems poised to recover. It’s still touch-and-go for a while though, and Andy Landers can’t help but feel helpless as he watches and waits down at Grady.

It’s been a tumultuous month for Landers. The highlight clearly was his induction into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville. It was fitting that a large number of former players and friends were on hand to help him celebrate, because as he is so quick to point out they played a large role in building the program to this point. But make no mistake that it takes a special person to build and sustain an environment where such great players want to come and can excel. If you’ve ever heard him speak, he certainly doesn’t come across as shy, but he is modest when it comes to his own accomplishments. Had he blown his own horn or pulled some strings, he surely would have made the Hall of Fame much sooner.

He’s also completed a pretty significant shakeup of the staff. Cameron Newbauer filled the final assistant coaching vacancy. On the surface, the hire raises some eyebrows. He has very limited coaching experience, and all of his work to date is on the men’s side. He’s expected to help in recruiting. Cameron will no doubt draw comparisons to the chance that Landers took on Michael Shafer. With the changes to the staff complete, the three assistants are now much younger but not necessarily less experienced. Kim Hairston seems like a nice addition. La’Keshia Frett, recently 32, is now the senior assistant. Hairston and Newbauer both graduated college in or after 2000. Will the young staff be the injection of new blood that gives both team performance and recruiting a boost, or will they be an ankle weight to the program as they come up to speed?

…via the NCAA’s Double-A Zone blog:

Remember the restrictions announced back in April on text messaging and other electronic communications with prospects? Don’t relax your thumbs just yet.

The NCAA has received enough (30+) objections from member schools to force the Division I Board of Directors to reconsider three proposals at its meeting in August, and that text message ban is among them.

The issue might not be settled until January at the earliest.

The Board will have several options at its August 9 meeting: reaffirm the April decision, aquiesce to the override requests or adopt alternative legislation. If the Board reaffirms its decision, the matter will be settled by a vote of all Division I delegates present and voting at the January 2008 Convention in Nashville. The proposal is not effective until August 1, 2008. If the Board decides to adopt new legislation, it would be subject to another override period.

Another proposal among the three being reconsidered is the overhaul of the financial aid distribution rules for baseball. I touched briefly on the details of those changes here.

I’d have to agree with the folks at the Double-A Zone and argue that both proposals should be reaffirmed.

If you read David Ching’s blog (and if you don’t you should), you noticed last week that he live-blogged Columbus State’s appearance in the Division II baseball championship. You probably skipped over it if you’re just there for the Georgia stuff, but the posts were a great service to a local (Columbus) readership in a situation where TV and radio coverage was spotty or nonexistent.

It turns out that Ching was an outlaw.

Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Brian Bennett was tossed from the press box during Cardinal’s historic Super Regional performance over the weekend because he was blogging during the game. The NCAA decided to enforce a new policy in order to protect the broadcast rights of "the NCAA’s official rights holders".

Josh Centor has a really tough job. Being a public face of the NCAA must be right up there with IRS public relations and Georgia Tech football marketing in terms of its thanklessness. In the times I’ve seen his responses to some pretty controversial issues (including the football clock rules debacle), he’s always been professional, level-headed, and informative even when the critics of the NCAA aren’t. He has some quality thoughts on the subject while disagreeing with the policy, noting in particular that no one is going to prefer sporadic blog updates to a high-def ESPN television broadcast if they have that option.

For now, I agree with Deadspin’s observation that "the NCAA has now, by definition, given the proverbial guy in the basement better access to his/her readers than someone in their own press box." Just over on the DawgVent we see this very practice almost daily now as people provide running updates on everything from NASCAR races to Georgia’s national championship tennis match. The NCAA holds that blogs are a "live representation of the game", a concept I find pretty absurd unless you can type really, really fast. The Courier-Journal’s attorney is right on here: "Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV, everybody sees it. They (the NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis."

If you follow the NCAA’s memo and policy to its logical conclusions, every SMS message, phone call, or e-mail you’ve sent from a game describing the action is a violation of the rights of the official broadcast rights holders.

It was around 1998 that I remember seeing live fan reporting in action. A guy with a cell phone at Will Witherspoon’s press conference reported Witherspoon’s commitment to someone on the other end of the call who was in a Dawg chat room. Those people reading knew the news before anyone at the press conference had left the room. The immediacy (not to mention unlimited column-inches) of the Internet is a big problem for print journalists. They’ve responded with blogs and updates to their own Web sites between publications, and someone like Ching live-blogging a local event of interest is yet another innovative way for a print journalist to serve a readership looking for near-real-time information.

A properly credentialed journalist providing these brief updates to their readers should be encouraged instead of punished. They are doing nothing to diminish the value of the broadcasts. If anything, they are creating more exposure for and interest in the event, and it’s likely that a few of those readers will tune in to the broadcasts when they can.

UPDATE: As I hoped, Ching has his own comments up now. Read the whole thing. Two great points: 1) the rule was applied capriciously – no one cared if he live-blogged an event that ESPN wasn’t covering. 2) this is an issue fans should be interested in because it affects the quality and quantity of options for following their teams.

They said it couldn’t be done, but I found a wonderful woman with better season tickets than mine. We’re set to be married this weekend, and this site won’t be high on my list of priorities for a couple of weeks.

I have some things set up to auto-post over the next couple of days, but after that it’s going to be quiet for several days.

Any relationship where Allen’s, Stegeman Coliseum, and the Dawgs play central roles can’t be that bad. Then again, we lost to Vandy the day after I proposed.

Doug over at Hey Jenny Slater has done the work of combining the preseason rankings to date. Southern Cal seems to be the favorite, and the Dawgs come in around the low teens. As the senator reminds us, a lot of these early preseason rankings don’t take into account the Paul Oliver news or any injuries and suspensions that might come up between now and the season.

Chris Stassen has been tracking this kind of thing for over a decade now, and it’s interesting to look back at Georgia teams over that time and see how they did relative to expectations.

The overrated/disappointing season that most remember is 2000, and sure enough the eleven position slide from the preseason ranking is the largest drop on the chart. 2004 might also be considered a disappointment because the Dawgs were overshadowed by Auburn and even Tennessee, but a final ranking of #7 isn’t a bad year. Losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky meant that the 2006 team also turned out to be "overrated", and it took that great finish to the season to only drop seven spots from the preseason.

It makes sense that the 1997 and 1998 teams were two of the most underrated Dawg teams. The 1997 team followed a 5-6 1996 team that itself followed the unspectacular end of the Ray Goff era. A 10-2 record and #10 ranking after all that shocked many of us. The Dawgs lost a lot of key players after 1997, and it was easy and reasonable to write them off in 1998. Richt’s first three teams were slightly underrated. Doug’s work seems to tell us that pundits aren’t particularly worried by last year’s slide, but it will be worth watching if the later preseason polls include a correction for Oliver and anything else that comes along.

Since the polls play a part in determining the national champion, it’s also worth looking at where the past eleven national champs started out.

(LSU started at #14 in 2003 for those in the one-peat crowd.)

So as you might expect, you don’t have to start in the top 5 to win the national championship – just five of the last eleven did. Four champions started outside of the top 10. The teams that came the longest way to win the title (Michigan, Oklahoma, SoCal, tOSU, and even LSU) are all traditional powers who came off sub-par seasons. Of those teams, only SoCal did not have a four-loss or worse season before their national title.

I look at preseason polls a lot like qualifying for a race. You don’t have to start on or near the pole to win a race, but it does help. The further back you start, the more help you need in front of you and the more traffic you have to work through on your way to the front.

Actually, the Dawgs got yet another verbal commitment yesterday from Ft. Lauderdale DE Jeremy Longo. Longo had offers from schools like LSU, Auburn, and hometown Miami. Not bad at all. He’s a teammate of another Georgia commitment, kicker Blair Walsh. Longo gives the Dawgs three defensive line commitments.

PS…Ching’s dead-on when he says that Georgia will hear the “doesn’t close well” griping from our own when the Dawgs have just one or two scholarships left on the table in January and other programs are getting the recruiting headlines. Like clockwork.

But just look at the separated-at-birth photos of Longo and his future defensive coordinator:

I have to agree with Kottke that YouTube sucks for sports highlights. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful for what’s out there and have spent hours looking at clips. It just seems like we’re where we were during the mid-1990s with internet audio. We were just so overjoyed to get something over our speakers that it didn’t matter if it sounded tinny, distorted, and dropped off every few minutes. YouTube is good enough to get the point across and show the red blob scoring against the orange-ish blob.

It’s especially bad with prospect videos, since so much of them are low-quality to begin with before you compress the hell out of them for YouTube. I was looking at the A.J. Green video that pwd had the other day and could barely follow the plays. And I have better than 20-20 vision.

So what’s next? The success of YouTube is obviously not due to the quality of the videos. It’s the simplicity of viewing, sharing, and embedding videos. That makes for an instantly viral site that has built up a good enough community around its brand to fend off knock-offs. The acquisition by Google doesn’t hurt either. Ideally, we’d want the ease of watching and sharing a YouTube video with HD quality which loads and streams nearly seamlessly. And a pony.

We’re still far away from that day both in terms of Internet bandwidth and client processing power – cable companies have enough issues just delivering their TV signals. There are services coming like Joost which are streaming video at higher qualities, but people can’t upload to them. Then there are the issues of ownership. Broadcasters might not care if some ultra-low quality clip of a game shows up on YouTube. But a service that offers HD-quality highlights and game clips might run into the "express written consent" folks.

It’ll be just like old times at Minnesota:

New Minnesota coach Tubby Smith has finalized his staff.

Ron Jirsa is the associate head coach, Saul Smith and Vince Taylor are the assistant coaches, and Joe Esposito is the director of basketball operations.

We just want to let Golden Gopher fans know to enjoy the next two seasons and then buckle up. Trust us.

6’8″ with a heart to match

While it’s usually the negative that makes headlines (see Odell Thurman’s latest), several Georgia and NFL players are getting together for a very worthy project organized by Leonard Pope.

On March 1st, a tornado broadsided Americus and Sumter Regional Hospital . The hospital is damaged nearly to the point of requiring complete replacement. Pope, an Americus native, has pulled several Georgia and NFL friends together for the Leonard Pope’s All-Star Weekend to Benefit Sumter Regional Hospital and the Community on the weekend of June 15-16. Among those scheduled to participate are Anquan Boldin, Charles Grant, D.J. Shockley, Randy McMichael, and Danny Ware. Others, including Thomas Davis and Ronnie Brown, have recently joined the list, and there might still be others.

The weekend’s schedule:

On Friday (tentatively 8 a.m-4 p.m.), there will be a charity golf tournament at Southwestern Golf Links where golfers will get a chance to golf with the aforementioned celebrities in a four-man scramble. The cost will be $100 per person ($400 per team) and there will be prizes, lunch and more.

There will be a Black Tie Charity Dinner at the Pope Center on the campus of South Georgia Technical College on Friday ay 7 p.m. Tickets for this event will be $50 per person ($500 per table). The aforementioned players will be in attendance, along with a surprise Georgia celebrity as one of the main speakers for the event. There will be food, entertainment and a silent auction with many signed memorabilia from the players and other sports teams and celebrities.

On Saturday at 2 p.m., there will be a charity basketball game that will pit the NFL players and their friends against local Americus-Sumter and Southland legends. Local children will also have a chance to sign up for Leonard Pope’s 2008 Football Camp. Tickets will be $5 for adults and $2 for children. Children under the age of 5 get in free.

Related Links:

• Sumter Regional Web site
• Make a donation directly to recovery efforts
• Americus tornado photos