Well, my fellow old men and women, that was a great victory. We did not pound Mizzou into the ground, but our men stood strong in the face of adversity and played our "old man" game, and it paid off in the end with a very convincing scoreline. And our team once again confirmed that, "There ain't nothing like being a Bulldog on Saturday night after a Georgia victory!"
This week's game is against probably the weakest team on our schedule, the Florida Atlantic Owls. And since I can't make any "old man" jokes because Howard Schnellenberger has retired, I'm going to be putting people on notice with an eye towards the rest of the season, not just this week's opponent. I normally hate doing that, since you have to take games one at a time in the SEC, but Florida Atlantic might lose to Georgia Southern if they played, so I feel ok about that call in this one instance.
Therefore, I'm letting the following people know that, for Week 3, You're On Notice, Dawg!
In no particular order:
1) Michael Adams - Why Michael Adams? Because he's a jerk, has stolen money from and is a disaster for University, and everybody that has ever worked with him hates him. Plus, I have it from a very authoritative source inside the UGA administration that when he was old the field before the game with Mike Slive last night, he leaned over and whispered in Slive's ear, "Hey... when are you retiring as SEC commssioner? How does a guy put in his resume for that job... theoretically speaking, that is. I'm asking for a friend."
2) Vineyarddawg - Hey, did you notice that the new "on notice board" featuring Russ/Uga IX is not included in this article? Well, that's the because the slacker that writes this column has to manually photoshop in the names of the things/people he's putting on notice every week, and he does not have the photo editing software on his laptop that he took with him on the road to Mizzou, so he could not create the board for this week.
Come on, Vineyarddawg. That's old man blogging. You need to get your act together and take the tools you need with you next time! And no pictures?? What the hell, man? You deserve to lose your entire Dawg Sports game check this week.
3) Mike Bobo - Well, predictable "on notice" entry is predictable. And, after all, we did score 41 points, right? So what's the problem? The problem is that the entire margin of victory came directly off of turnovers that put us in very favorable positions on offense. Without the defense's huge game-changing plays, there was no indication that our offense would have pulled away in the manner we did.
In the first half, our offensive play-calling was utterly awful. On many drives, Mike Bobo would call the same dang play 3 or 4 times in a row, it would fail, and then we would punt. What, did you accidentally leave the playbook at home, so you had to scratch down the plays you remembered on a napkin, but those were only, like, 3 plays, so you had to just keep running those??
I was utterly mystified by the plays called in the first half, and I cannot think of a logical explanation for it, especially since Bobo went back to more typical calls for him in the second half, including I-formation running, which was still used sparingly.
We need to know what our offensive identity is when we play against teams with great defenses. If you don't know who you are, then you won't win... and I'm not confident that Mike Bobo knows who we are on offense.
4) John Theus - I know Theus is a true freshman, but this is still the SEC, dude. Theus had at least 3 false start penalties that I counted, and he missed at least half a dozen blocks that resulted in Aaron Murray being either sacked or hit hard after a pass. When you're a starter in the SEC, you need to step up and make the plays. That defensive end across from you doesn't care that you're a freshman. You need to eliminate the mistakes if we're going to keep Aaron Murray healthy and not-smashed-into-the-ground all season.
5) Booing injured players - The crowd at Mizzou was pumped, into the game, and loud for most of it. They were a great SEC crowd. The sole exception to this rule came when Cornelius Washington got injured, during an offensive possession when Mizzou was playing the hurry-up game. Washington stayed down on the field, injured, and the Mizzou crowd mercilessly booed him, presumably thinking he was faking it. Even after he was tended to for longer than a "faking it" period of time on the field, and while he was being helped off the field because he couldn't put all his weight on his leg, the crowed booed him loudly again. And unless I'm mistaken, he didn't play the entire rest of the game.
I know you don't like injuries slowing your team down, Mizzou fans, but booing injured players is a total jerk move. I can understand frustration at first when you see the guy is down and you think he's faking, but when he's clearly legitimately injured and you still boo? There is no excuse for that, and I'm calling you on it. It was literally the only blemish on my entire experience with Mizzou fans, who were generally awesome all the way around... but what a hell of a blemish.
6) Marshall Morgan - I really shouldn't be down on this guy, because after all my complaining about his missing a 42-yard field goal last week, he went up and banged home a 52-yarder this week. The problem is that came on the back of missing an extra point and clanging the goal post (again) on another.
I see Morgan's potential here, but he really needs to get more consistent. Like, before we play Tennessee, Vanderbilt, and South Carolina. You obviously have the tools kid... you just need to lock it down.
7) People who make the TV schedules and set game times - Ok, so we're playing FAU this week... so it's obviously gonna be on PPV/CSS... so, 12:30 or 1:00 kickoff, right? I'm sorry, what's that? A 7:00 PM kickoff? For a game against a Sun Belt team that's on PPV?
(Via)
8) Students with Tickets - Hey, guys, trust me... I'm getting just as tired of putting this here as you guys are about seeing it. The fact remains that when the Buffalo game kicked off, even though the lower level of the stadium was packed, the upper level student sections had, cumulatively, about 100 people in them (and that's across 4 or more sections of stadium).
Come on, students. That's old man game-attending. You need to show up and support your team, even when they're playing a walkover paycheck-game.
/Old man meme is already getting old, man
That's it for this week... come out and support your Dawgs at Sanford Stadium this week and let 'em know you appreciate them starting out 1-0 in the SEC!