Mark Bradley

Brian Gregory offers a friendly reminder. (AJC photo by Johnny Crawford)

GT (Georgia Tech) had just beaten BC (Boston College), and BG (Brian Gregory) was in a GM (good mood). His Yellow Jackets had won their first game in three weeks and their second since Christmas, and when you don’t do it often winning comes to seem a very big deal. “You need tangible evidence sometimes,” Gregory said, and Saturday’s modest victory offered a snippet.

Everyone realized this would be a difficult season: A team that went 13-18 and lost two of its three best players (Iman Shumpert and Brian Oliver) would shuttle between arenas under a new coach, and not just any new coach but a temperamental and tactical departure. But knowing what was coming didn’t make being 8-14 less painful.

“It’s hard on the guys,” Gregory said. “I’m cognizant of that. And it’s not just this year [Tech has been losing] — there’s a piling-on effect. And I know I’m a lot different than what they signed up for. Not to say …

Continue reading Year 1 hasn’t been easy, but Tech and BG are making strides »

This is basically what pro football has become: One guy slinging the ball. (AP photo)

Always before, old-school football would rise up in the Super Bowl and save the day for us codgers. The 1983 Washington Redskins set an NFL record with 541 points in the regular season, but managed only nine against the Raiders of Lester Hayes and Michael Haynes. The first installment of Buffalo’s hurry-up offense was grounded by the New York Giants, after which Bill Parcells exulted, “Power football, baby!” The St. Louis Rams and their Greatest Show on Turf were undone by Bill Belichick’s Patriots.

And now you’re saying: “The Super Bowl is Sunday. It still could happen.”

And here’s where this old-schooler concedes defeat and says: It won’t.

This champion will have the lowest-rated defense of any Super Bowl winner ever. The New England Patriots, still Belichick’s team, ranked 31st in the 32-team NFL. And the Giants, who are seen as the more traditional of the teams still standings, ranked …

Continue reading Can the Super Bowl really be Super if nobody plays defense? »

Joe Johnson gets that hemmed-in feeling against the Grizz. (AJC photo by Hyosub Shin)

The Atlanta Hawks, as we know, are a strange crew. They lost Jamal Crawford, their fourth-best player, to free agency. They lost Al Horford, considered their one indispensable man, to a torn pectoral. Yet they entered Thursday’s game against Memphis tied with Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia for the fewest losses in the NBA East.

They were 7-4 with Horford; they’d gone 9-2 without him. You might be wondering just how. If you watched the Hawks lose to Memphis by 19 points after trailing by 30 Thursday night, you’re wondering still.

“We got out-toughed,” said coach Larry Drew. “That’s something I hadn’t seen in a while.”

Speaking before the game, Drew had said: “When you lose one of your big guys, one of two things will happen. Guys will start to feel sorry for themselves, or guys will elevate their play.”

For three weeks without Horford, the Hawks had elevated like Pogo Joe Caldwell, once a …

Continue reading The Hawks were rolling, but on this night they rolled over »

Mark Richt addresses the again-faithful Bulldog Nation on Wednesday. (Photo by M. Bradley)

UPDATE:According to esteemed colleague Michael Carvell, Georgia received Josh Harvey-Clemons’ signed letter of intent Thursday morning.

Athens – Forget, if only for a moment, national signing day. As an indicator of which way Georgia is headed, Todd Grantham pointed to incumbent players who remain, not incidentally, incumbent.

“We had nine guys on defense who could have left for the NFL,” said Grantham, Georgia’s defensive coordinator, “and all nine would have gotten drafted somewhere. But all nine guys chose to stay. We’ve been talking about having a dream, having a vision, but to see these guys buy into that and help recruit new guys, that has really ignited our program.”

After the 6-7 record of 2010, after the 0-2 start of 2011, it was possible to wonder if the Bulldogs under Mark Richt had become a ghost ship. On signing day 2012, Georgia again bears the look of a shining ocean …

Continue reading UPDATE: Another strong class pushes UGA closer to the top »

Bulldog Nation — at least a portion of it — gathers in anticipation. (Photo by M. Bradley)

Athens — Here we are at Butts-Mehre, sometimes known as Dawg Mahal, and you can cut the tension with a … well, you know. It’s Signing Day, and the biggest undecided name in Georgia’s sights is about to pledge his troth. (Or, to use a more contemporary image, don some school’s baseball cap.)

And Josh Harvey-Clemons, the linebacker from Lowndes, picked …

Georgia.

For the record, Harvey-Clemons did not do the now-tiresome hat trick. Instead he allowed his younger sister to take off one sweatshirt to reveal a red Georgia shirt underneath. Style points!

And that, you’d have to think, would ease the doubt some Bulldog fans had over this class not being ranked as highly — at least not by Rivals and Scout — as last season’s. Harvey-Clemons gives Georgia the No. 1 player (at least in somebody’s ratings) in four different states.

UPDATE: As of 3:07 p.m., Georgia hasn’t received Harvey-Clemons’ …

Continue reading Live from Athens: UGA hooks Harvey-Clemons – or does it? »

Jonathan Dwyer: One of the exceptions who proves the rule. (AJC photo by Johnny Crawford)

One of the charms about ESPN is that the Worldwide Leader has enough correspondents to satisfy every viewpoint. Just yesterday, ESPN recruiting correspondent Jamie Newberg was lauding Georgia Tech for its success in finding prospects of lesser portfolio. But now comes LaRue Cook of ESPN the Magazine to serve as the bad cop.

Georgia Tech, Cook writes, is the nation’s second-worst program at attracting high-end in-state players. (Only Arizona keeps Tech from being No. 1.) Cook’s rationale: Over the past five years, the Jackets have landed only two of the 74 Georgia recruits ranked in ESPN’s top 150.

Wait. It gets worse.

Neither of the two — Jonathan Dwyer and Morgan Burnett — was landed by Paul Johnson and staff. Those two were signed by Chan Gailey, who last coached Tech in 2007. Only one Tech signee under Johnson, Cook writes, has cracked the ESPN 150, and that was Vad Lee of North …

Continue reading ESPN: Tech is the second-worst at keeping in-state talent »

Josh Harvey-Clemons of Lowndes: With whom will he sign? (AJC photo by Phil Skinner)

If you follow college football, you cannot ignore recruiting. Even if you think it’s overblown, attention must be paid. As Jamie Newberg, the ESPN recruiting analyst, said Monday: “Those stars [rankings for each recruit] do mean something. You just have look at the national champions the last 10 years to know that.”

Then this: “But then you look at a guy like [Virginia Tech's] Frank Beamer — he’s never in the Top 10 [of recruiting rankings] but he gets the guys who does what he wants … Paul Johnson has done a good job in that way, too.”

Paul Johnson, as we know, coaches Georgia Tech, and Tech is often seen as an afterthought on National Signing Day. The SEC schools load up on five-star guys and the Jackets make do with lesser lights, and when you look at the rankings — and we all do — Tech is never in the Top 10. But here’s Newberg on this Tech class,  rated the nation’s 57th-best by …

Continue reading Recruiting mavens weigh in on Tech, UGA and recruiting itself »

"So why aren't we better than this? You're asking ME? " (AJC photo by Hyosub Shin)

Hoops Hysterics

1. Georgia is tied for last in the SEC. Georgia Tech is dead last in the ACC. Which team is more disappointing? Georgia, and not just because the Bulldogs managed to lose to Tech in Athens. (The Jackets are 3-9 since.) A team in Year 3 under its coach, as Georgia is, should be much further along than a team in Year 1, as is the case with Tech. If the Bulldogs don’t win a big game or two the second half of the league season, the advances of last season will be canceled out.

2. How many NCAA tournament bids will the ACC command? How many for the SEC? The ACC could get stuck on four — North Carolina, Duke, Florida State and Virginia — if North Carolina State continues to slide and Miami doesn’t make a big push. The SEC has four almost-certains — Kentucky, Florida, Vanderbilt and Mississippi State — but Alabama lost four in a row and, its RPI of 33 notwithstanding, could be overtaken …

Continue reading Hoops insider: So which is the bigger dud – Tech or UGA? »

Peyton Manning, shown here not playing. (AP photo)

The Super Bowl dwarfs all else in North American sports, but the Super Bowl will be only the second-biggest story in this year’s host city. Of greater interest in Indianapolis is what’s happening with Peyton Manning, the only NFL player who’s a team unto himself.

Everybody knew Peyton Manning was a great player, but just how great was revealed only when, for the first time since he was drafted out of Tennessee in 1998, he wasn’t able to play. For 13 seasons and through 227 consecutive starts, Manning made the Colts a viable concern. Then he had offseason neck surgery and was so slow to heal that he missed not just a start but a season.

With Manning, the Colts had made the playoffs 11 times in 12 seasons. Without him, they did well to win two games. They were the NFL equivalent of the Cleveland Cavaliers after LeBron James took his talents elsewhere, and here we thought that in football no one man could mean half that much. For …

Continue reading Peyton Manning: A weird and ugly ending is at hand in Indy »

Which Tech will fly higher? (AJC photo by Johnny Crawford)

Georgia Tech hasn’t confirmed that it will move its game against Virginia Tech in Blacksburg to Labor Day evening, but an announcement should be forthcoming. (The holdup is because the Jackets are shuffling some other games.) So if Tech-Tech, which has become a midseason ACC marquee game, becomes a high-profile opener instead, who benefits?

Tech, I say. (Heh, heh.)

Virginia Tech benefits in that it gets the only other team to win the ACC Coastal since the league moved to divisional play at its place so early. As we know, Paul Johnson’s offense is unlike most others, and teams that have extra time to prepare tend to fare a bit better than those that don’t. (Johnson argues that this bit of conventional wisdom is overblown, but here we note that, of Georgia Tech’s five losses in 2011, three — against Virginia, Virginia Tech and Utah — came against opponents who had more than one week to ready themselves.) That said …

Continue reading Georgia Tech vs. Virginia Tech on Labor Day: Who benefits? »