Kirby Smart and Company are working their way through spring practice, and will play the annual G Day spring game on Saturday, April 22nd. The game will commence at 2:00 pm, will be free for all attendees, and is expected to be televised on CSS.
It will be interesting to those of us concerned with position battles, which midyear enrollees look sharp, and which players are in better shape than they were in January.
That’s an admittedly small segment of the general human population. Heck, I'm betting Ludacris won't even be there this year.
All of which got me thinking: how can we make this thing a little more interesting? There’s always gambling, the true degenerate’s way to make even the most blasé sporting event have a little spice. But it's pretty hard to do that with a spring game because the action is so controlled (read, “rigged”), there's no way of knowing which players will really participate and which will sit until they actually take the field, and the play calling is, shall we say, experimental.
So while I would discourage you from betting on the G Day Game, I would like to encourage the coaching staff to make it interesting for the participants. Coach Richt liked for the winning team’s postgame meal to be steak and lobster while the losers ate beanie weenies. That's great, but I think we can do better. So here are a few more ideas to get a little more out of he participants in the annual Red and Black scrimmage:
- Losing head coach has to pay Ben Cleveland’s grocery bill this summer. Is it an NCAA violation? Sure. But the violation is also its own penalty. The Dante’s Inferno of secondary violations.
2) Loser has to sit through an Of Montreal reunion show with Gladys Varner, an 87 year old great-grandmother from Talbotton who has absolutely no interest in or knowledge of Of Montreal. Then dinner afterward. Because Gladys is going to have questions.
3) Winning head coach gets to eat lunch at the Varsity while the losing offensive line watches and enjoys a salad. Just one, shared among them. With light balsamic vinaigrette dressing. And one crouton.
4) Losing head coach has to donate 10% of his salary to whatever project Greg McGarity expects you and I to pay for via whatever donation he expects us to make in addition to the Hartman Fund donation we already made.
5) Winning team gets a “get out of speed trap free” card from the Bishop police department.*
*Offer good only on days ending in “q.”
6) Losing head coach has to drive back from Jacksonville next October rather than flying. In an orange ‘74 Plymouth Duster with no A/C and an iffy transmission. Like Top Gear, South Georgia edition.
Im sure there are other ways to make this King a little more interesting. Feel free to include yours in the comments, and...
Go ‘Dawgs!!!