(Please note that MaconDawg is the basketball expert around here. My descriptions of basketball action are so rudimentary, they sound like they were thought up by Benjy Compson. Accordingly, this is my utterly ignorant immediate reaction to today's game, upon which you are invited to improve in the comments.)
Uh . . . dang. Bruce Pearl's Tennessee Volunteers were, like, good, and had, um, won some games against, you know, some other teams that also were good, and, well, Mark Fox's Georgia Bulldogs, I mean, beat them, and all.
The Fox Hounds started strong, took a fifteen-point halftime lead into the locker room, faltered a little in the second half, yet still matched the Big Orange point-for-point (36-36 after the break, if you must know) to claim a fifteen-point victory over a quality team. Travis Leslie and Trey Thompkins seem to be good, and stuff. The victory was historic, because Andy Landers's Lady Dogs beat Pat Summitt's Lady Vols a few days ago, so this was the first time Georgia had beaten Tennessee in both men's and women's basketball in the same week in approximately eleventy gazillion years. That's just a guesstimate.
As I wrote in the comment thread, "there’s the slightest sliver of a chance that, at some indeterminate point in the future, there may come a day when the possibility arises that, at least for sporadic periods, it might not totally suck to be a Georgia Bulldog!" Clearly, Mark Fox has this program headed in the right direction, which brings us to the two relevant questions:
- How long will the process take?
- How high is the ceiling on this program?
The last five games have offered some indication of the answer to the first question. In the next couple or three years, we're going to go a long way toward learning the answer to the second.
Go 'Dawgs!