Monday Morning Dawg Bites: Is it National Signing Day yet?

Good Monday morning, Dawg fans. Now is the winter of our discontent. Or is that dissed content? Well, either way, we embark today upon the first full week of the college football offseason.

Sorry, Ned... it's already here. (Via)

Fortunately, we are not without entertainment, as Georgia athletics teams do still have the heart to compete during times when the football team has no official games. Also, I'm informed that some of our excellent non-football programs still have yet to even kick off their seasons.

And, of course, though the our own annual game of thrones has ended, we are approaching the climax of the second portion of college football season... college football recruiting season. (After February 1st, we'll be moving on to the third portion of college football season: waiting for college football season. And that's really the toughest part.)

Without further ado, I give to you the following bits and information to start your week off right:

• Kyle brought you the news last night of the Georgia Lady Dawgs victory on Sunday, but to me, the bigger news is that Andy Landers appears to be showing some real optimism and faith in his team. Those of you (like me) who have followed Georgia's only full-time women's basketball coach for any length of time know that he is not given to overt optimism or unwarranted praise of his teams. He tells it like it is, and if his team sucks or just isn't good enough to compete in the SEC, he'll say exactly that. (Baseball coach David Perno is a lot like Coach Landers in this aspect, in fact.) Perhaps we could be looking at a run past the Sweet 16 for the first time in a long time for the senior-laden squad. We'll see!
• In football recruiting news, Nick Saban has (allegedly) told running back Justin Taylor of North Atlanta High School that if we wants to be a Red Elephant, he'll have to sit out of football for a year. These facts are merely allegations, at this point, so one must use the term "allegedly," just like the alleged actions of a certain former SMU star running back vis a vis his surreptitious dispatching of five hookers in college.
• The AJC seems to think that Georgia still has a chance to convince a Vanderbilt DE commit to matriculate in Athens instead of the country music capital of the world. Dang, can you imagine how righteously arrogantly indignant James Franklin would be about this one if we succeeded?
• And while we're banging on hapless little Vandy, if you read the last section of that story I linked to in the previous bullet, you will see that the scholarship offer of the first player to commit to Vandy's 2012 recruiting class was revoked. Not because he didn't qualify academically, mind you... he simply took too long to score a qualifying grade on his ACT. Yeah, Coach Franklin... that's how you build a program. Take your best commitments, even when they qualify admission to your school, and tell them to piss off.
• The NCAA Board of Directors came to its senses over the weekend and officially voted to leave the number of division I-A football scholarships at 85. They had been considering reducing the number to 80, but since Craig James isn't on the board, they didn't kill those five hookers scholarships. #RememberTheFive

Well, I know that's a rather paltry set of links for a Monday morning, so to make up for it, I'll give you this picture of Nicholas Cage, Holly Hunter, and "Nathan Jr." from Raising Arizona on the cover of a 1998 Serbian biology textbook:

(Via)

Have a good Monday, and...

Go Dawgs!