Friday Dawg Bites (Basketball edition)

Basketball season begins for the Bulldogs in earnest Friday night with a trip to Clemson to open the revamped Littlejohn Coliseum. A lot of teams will ease their way into the season against smaller schools and cupcake opponents. That isn’t the track that Mark Fox elected to take this season.

“You want to learn something about your team. And you don’t really learn a lot versus Cupcake U.,” Georgia head coach Mark Fox said. “You want to play people. So this is a big challenge. We’re going to play a very good ACC team with a lot of experienced players, in essentially a brand new place. So we will find out a lot about our team on the first night.”

Georgia has a nice mix of returning players and fresh faces. Yante Maten and J.J. Frazier will be called upon to anchor the squad but the supporting cast will ultimately decide the fate of this team. The Bulldogs appear to be a team on the rise so a measuring stick game should provide an early glimpse of where they are at.

More basketball notes:

• The probably could have been the lead story but the Bulldogs landed a major signing on Thursday in 6-7 power forward Rayshaun Hammonds who was rated as the 12th best power forward in the nation. Hammonds is the highest rated player signed by Fox and Georgia since Kentavious Caldwell-Pope back in 2011.
• Maten and Frazier were named preseason first team All-SEC by the coaches on Thursday.
• Jason Butt of the Macon Telegraph has a great story up on J.J. Frazier.