In a world where the University of Georgia football team will not take the field for five and a half months in live action, the basketball team is still licking its wounds while the Mercer Bears are still alive in post-season play, and you're stuck at work on a gorgeous spring afternoon, one man stands alone against the boredom. He is . . .Kyle King. But he's already hit his 35,000 word quota for the week*. So you're stuck with MaconDawg, who has put together a blog post about nothing and everything all at the same time. He calls it Free Form Friday. The Birmingham Bammer Tribune calls it "ROOOLLLL TAAAHHHHDDDD!!! FUNERAL!!! YUR DAWG DIED!!!!!" The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Dawg Sports has now gone 6 years without winning a Nobel Prize, Pulitzer, Peabody, or Grammy, and asks how much longer Bulldog fans will be willing to put up with such mediocrity. You'll pay for the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge.
Maestro, cue the theme music for an 80 degree March afternoon in Macon when the azaleas are in bloom. For the record, I'm that guy who just moved his couch out into the yard and has the speakers hanging out of the front window:
Speaking of free form performance art, Jon Bois over at the mother ship is currently overseeing the gif bracket, in which all of your favorite sports-themed animated images fight to the death until one of them reigns supreme. It beats the hell out of watching John Calipari and Rick Pitino prance and preen and pretend that they have a marketable skill other than slimily convincing extraordinarily tall 18 year old boys to vacation in the Bluegrass State for a year or so on their way to the NBA.
The second round of voting is open and the gif of Uga V defending himself against Robert Baker is matched against the gif of Randy Johnson obliterating a bird with his fastball. I urge you to go vote for Uga, who as of this writing is currently facing a substantial deficit. I can think of two reasons for you to head over and vote Dodge County-style on behalf of our beloved late mascot. Okay, one of our beloved late mascots. One, Randy Johnson is a scarecrow with a mullet who makes stupid insurance commercials. Two, his opponent is our mascot trying to bite an Auburn player in the nuts and in the process scaring the crap out of said player. It's a great public service announcement: do not bait canines with large teeth and poor vision. Seriously, that's right up there with "don't fry bacon naked" among lessons everyone should learn.
You know what goes well with bacon? Eggs. Like, half a dozen of them. Every morning. That's the secret to Ray Drew's successful weight gain from 245 pounds up to his current 270. It's been clear to most of us since before Drew arrived in Athens that he was ticketed for the defensive end slot, and I'm glad to see the coaches make that shift sooner rather than later. It's a shift that Brandon Miller, for example, should have made but resisted. A change that got Marcus Howard drafted in the second round by the Indianapolis Colts. In the long term this move has the potential to really pay off, and it allays my fears about a lack of depth at defensive end.
One move that I'm less enthused about? Malcolm Mitchell's experimental journey to cornerback. I'm assuming that it's merely a stop gap measure for the first two games of 2012 to provide some depth, and that he'll be back on offense by the time the 'Dawgs host Florida Atlantic in Athens on September 15th. Don't get me wrong, Malcolm Mitchell is a phenomenal athlete and a smart football player. But there's a huge difference between playing corner at Valdosta High and playing it in the SEC. In man coverage I think Mitchell will generally be fine. He's big and fast enough to lock on pretty much any receiver. What I worry about is opposing offenses assuming that with Mitchell in we'll have a limited coverage package, and then trying to exploit that. In the end, with Devin Bowman, Damian Swann, and Cootie Harrow at corner Mitchell should be splitting time and adding depth. If he's playing more than 15-20 snaps a game on defense, you'll know that we really are hurting for corners.
And speaking of hurting, I'm hurting for movie selections. I love going to the movies. Always have. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars, which I saw at the old theater on Riverside Drive here in Macon which is now the furniture store where my wife and I bought our sofa. I'm told that prior to that I saw The Muppet Movie at what used to be a movie theater in downtown Cochran. I fell asleep halfway through it, which wouldn't have happened if they'd had the foresight to wait until they could cast Jason Segal in it. But I digress. Lately we've been renting a lot of stuff on iTunes, but the plan this weekend is to go see The Hunger Games, based on the wildly popular novels of Suzanne Collins. I have not read the books, but my wife has, and tells me that the story revolves around the trials of teenagers forced to compete to the death in feats of skill and strength to entertain their overlords in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Along the way they find love, redemption, and Stanley Tucci. We had something similar when I was growing up in south Georgia. We called it 4-H Camp. I'll report back to the group on whether Donald Sutherland gets impaled by a crossbow-wielding 14 year old. That's kind of the ending I'm hoping for.
Until later . . .
Go 'Dawgs!!!
*Seriously, before we put a governor on the guy it was out of control. His 7,800 line paean to Michael Pallazone's s 2-2 pitch selection was both glorious and horrifying.