Monday, September 19, 2011

Rising to meet expectations

In his teleconference last night Richt told reporters he feels the team is "on the rise".
“The thing I like is we’re a team that is getting better as we go. We do have a lot of room to grow yet. I thought the last couple of performances minus the huge mistakes—the four or five plays that got us (against South Carolina)-I thought that we were making a lot of progress. I thought we were doing a lot of positive things. As you watch tape, it’s still pretty obvious we’ve got some youth and inexperience that needs to continue to improve. Just overall, I think we’re a team that is on the rise. We’ll see.”
One thing that has been frustratingly consistent the past few years is Georgia's inability to put less talented teams away, and in some cases beat them altogether. The schedule just took a turn towards easy street. Ole Miss was steamrolled by Vandy Saturday afternoon. And MSU looks even more beatable after Thursday night's game. Tennessee...well, they have Tyler Bray as their quarterback.


However, most teams (at least ones that don't fall apart during the season) get better as they go. Can Richt's squad accelerate faster? Can they surpass the rest of the schedule's opponents on the learning curve? After the off season headliners of new attitudes and hard work...and after an 0-2 start against two top ranked teams...can the Dawgs rise above their competition?


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UPDATE
Here's a link to the ESPN replay of Saturday's game. h/t HumDrummer

5 comments:

HumDrummer said...

If you watch the game again, you can see the guys looked sharper, no hyperbole. Yes, Rambo's fumble on the INT return was dumb, and the penalty and block in the back on Branden's return for td was dumb, otherwise, stellar play. Surprised how poor Murray looked, and not surprised how impressive Hutson Mason looked.

Here's the link to the ESPN replay if you want to watch it again:
http://espn.go.com/watchespn/index/_/source/espn3/#type/replay/

Bernie said...

Thanks for the link. Didn't know that was there. I'll add it to the actual post as well.

Anonymous said...

Not so fast about putting Mississippi State in the "win" column already!

The other Bulldogs got their hats handed to them by the Bengals, it's true.

But it's also true that the Starkville Hounds stayed up with the Cats well into the third quarter when they simply succumbed to LSU's overwhelming defense.

Relf and Ballard are bona fide SEC quality players. Their O-line is suspect.

But don't count our chickens until they're hatched!

Bernie said...

I've learned not to count chickens when it comes to college football. I was just saying that they showed some flaws Thursday night. One of which is to rely too heavily on QB draws with Relf.

The appeared beatable before, and not they appear even more so. But never an assumed win.

Anonymous said...

To paraphrase Bob the Builder, "Can we beat them? Yes! We Can!"

Should we beat them? Yes! We Should.

But we should not take any of the next four games leading up to Florida for granted. Nowhere near for granted.

Even Vanderbilt could take us to the woodshed, as Saturday well demonstrated.