Archive for April, 2011

Don't look for any surprises from Aaron Murray and Mike Bobo in Saturday's G-Day game. (Brant Sanderlin / AJC)

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Athens, where we were pretty much immersed in all things UGA 365 days a year, but I never understood why a lot of folks in the Bulldog Nation don’t get too excited about the spring G-Day game.

OK, granted, it’s really just a glorified scrimmage and the plays called are either ultra-vanilla or throwaway bones for the crowd you’ll never see during the regular season like Mike Bobo briefly trotting out the wishbone a few years ago.

And quite often the “stars” that shine the brightest in the intrasquad game don’t go on to make much of a mark that fall when the competition is real. Remember Carlton Thomas tearing it up at tailback a couple of springs ago?

Still, I love the G-Day game and always have.

The main reason can be summed up in three words:

Georgia. Bulldogs. Football.

Doesn’t matter what time of year it is or whether everyone’s …

Continue reading UGA football. Athens. What’s not to love about G-Day? »

If you could draft among these four at their college peak, who would you take? (Georgiadogs.com)

In addition to playing fruitbasket turnover with the player draft, Mark Richt and company are spicing up Saturday’s G-Day a bit with a halftime quarterback skills challenge pitting Matthew Stafford, Eric Zeier, David Greene and D.J. Schockley against each other for charity.

That group includes UGA’s three career passing yardage leaders in Greene (11,528), Zeier (11,153) and Stafford (7,731), and the most recent QB to win an SEC championship for the Dawgs, Shockley.

Through Georgiadogs.com, fans can bid on the opportunity to participate in the challenge by catching passes from the QBs. (No word on whether you have to sign an injury waiver in case you’re the unlucky subject trying to snag one of Stafford’s bullets.) The winning fan will earn the chance to make a pass to win $25,000, to be split between the fan and the fund established for injured Diamond Dog Johnathan Taylor. If the …

Continue reading UGA quarterback challenge: Who would you pick? »

Trinton Sturdivant has a tough decision to make. (Associated Press)

Returning to the dispiriting news of Trinton Sturdivant’s third major knee injury definitely isn’t the way you want to come back from a week away from following the Dogs.

It’s hard to imagine a crueler blow to both the fifth-year senior and the team.

Having already rehabbed ACL tears twice on his left knee, Sturdivant, who was a freshman All-American in 2007 when he started all 13 games at left tackle, now faces some really hard choices.

Try to do it all over again and apply for a hardship sixth season as a Dog? The precedent certainly is there since he will have missed two seasons to injury.

Skip a return to UGA and try to go straight to the pros with two rehabbed knees? Sturdivant has talked in the past about how playing in the NFL has always been his dream and worried about being viewed as damaged goods by the league’s scouts. In fact, that’s why he decided to return to Georgia this season, he said, “to …

Continue reading Cruel blow leaves hard decisions for Sturdivant, Dawgs »

Bacarri Rambo's injury aside, safety remains a big concern. (Associated Press)

There are two ways to look at Bacarri Rambo being out for the rest of spring practice with a sprained MCL.

On the one hand, Rambo has been a solid if inconsistent presence in the secondary and missing all those drills and the G-Day game certainly won’t help him, but it probably won’t hamper him much in the long term. And it does mean the three players battling for the other safety position will get more badly needed reps, which is a good thing.

Overall, safety is the position that concerns me the most, since Alec Ogletree moving to linebacker means the top choices to play opposite Rambo are Jakar Hamilton and Shawn Williams, both of whom were eventually beaten out for the starting spot last year by a true freshman.

Hamilton, a JUCO transfer, looked awfully shaky in his five starts last year and after seeing what he had to say in the Athens Banner-Herald, it’s no wonder.

“Last year, I came out here …

Continue reading Hitman’s confession doesn’t inspire great confidence »

A lot of folks want to be here come September. (University of Georgia)

Thirteen FBS teams played in front of more than a million people last season, CNBC reports, and UGA was among them. (The others big-timers on the SEC-dominated list were Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State, Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Florida, LSU, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Carolina.)

Obviously, a whole lotta folks like watching the Georgia Bulldogs play football. That’s why Thursday’s digital meltdown in Athens has drawn more attention than your average Internet outage.

While nobody can say they don’t do a bang-up job of managing a multi-million dollar sports enterprise at Butts-Mehre since UGA is one of the most profitable college athletic programs around, someone apparently was asleep at the switch when it came to a little matter of renewing the domain registration for the official website, Georgiadogs.com.

Oops. Sometimes it’s the little things that trip you up.

And it just happened to be on what …

Continue reading Timing couldn’t have been worse for UGA’s online meltdown »