Friday Morning Dawg Bites Believes Everything It Reads.

It's the last day of the work week, so I'm sure you have plenty to take care of before the five o'clock whistle blows. But first let's take a moment to catch up on what's going on in Bulldog Nation. With no Bulldog football this weekend and a relatively content fanbase that's not a whole lot. But there are two items that seem worthy of discussion.

Mark Richt calls Clemson fan letter 'bogus' - SBNation.com
Deadspin claimed Georgia football coach Mark Richt responded to a fan trash talk letter with one of his own. Richt claims he didn't. The folks at Deadspin either have no idea who Mark Richt is or they're too stupid to effectively housesit your cat without killing it. Or both, I guess. In their defense they ran it by Manti Te'o and he said it seemed legit. The biggest tipoff that the letter was a fake was probably the Augusta postmark on the envelope it allegedly came in.

All of which is to say that anyone with any experience with Mark Richt would know this was the least Mark Richt-ish thing ever done with the possible exceptions of income tax cheating and taking a penny from the little tray at the convenience store cash register but never putting one in. Though, in the deepest, blackest corner of my heart I kind of wish it were real and meant that Dark Richt had blown back into town for 2014. We here at Dawg Sports fully support letting Dark Richt out of his cell every blue moon.

Evolving the option: The pop pass and the future of football - SBNation.com
The off week is a great time to pick up some Xs and Os learning. The NFL has discovered the hottest new trend in college football, the "pop" concept, wherein quarterbacks running the read option retain a downfield passing option. Really this "quad option" has been around for ages (Charley Trippi would certainly recognize it), but we football folks have very short memories and tend to forget what was done four decades before. Though if you want a mire recent example, Tim Tebow's awkward "jump pass" at Florida was really a protoversion of it. But since it's now sweeping the nation, now is a good time to study up on the play that's about to take football by storm, starting at the college level.

The thing that's most terrifying to me about this sort of play, if properly executed, is that it stretches defenses both horizontally and vertically. In the past defensive coordinators could respond to running quarterbacks with nickel defenses and fairly simple reads by the safety. As that Iron Bowl play makes plain, it isn't that simple anymore. The game is becoming more about reading and reacting on the fly, truly resembling basketball on grass. Until later...

Go 'Dawgs!!!