"If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts...wait how does that go?"

Sometimes I hate being right.

The Dawgs lost, yet again by a TD or less, to Florida. But I finally feel a sense of justified optimism. The Dawgs blatantly ignored my urges to catch the ball and not turn it over, and were a fumble return for a TD from OT at least. 5 turnovers, against Florida, plus 5 dropped passes...and we lost by 7? So let's give the whole thing a nice, Morricone-themed postmortem:


























The Good

The defense was job-savingly good. Florida, likely as a result of the bye week, came out running only WRs and QBs and basically anyone not named DeShawn Wynn against us. Not something they'd done a lot of on film. Yet Martinez and the D adjusted, clamped down, and for the most part tackled. Hats off and maybe even a bow to the D for the performance Saturday. Let's keep up some of that unpredicitbility and pressure...it was nice. Barring the first drive and one big Leak pass play, Florida got nothing, and Cro-Magnon QB got frequently stuffed for the first time all year. It was also pointed out that Tebow looks a little like Rex Grossman...but really, I think he's someone else entirely...





















("You know son, next year you'll actually have to throw passes in games to win. That Leak fella won't be around.")

The Bad

The offense is still quite a work in progess. While Willie Martinez is no longer on my On Notice List, I will still gladly beat the drum for the "Replace John Eason" camp. Dropsy was back in full force Saturday and...oh, what's that? That's really a disease, and not just something made up by Grampa Simpson? Oh...well the ball dropping was back in full force. Think of the offense as a boy band: ball dropping just isn't good for it. My hope for Martrez Millner is that he wasn't 100%, because at this point he's apt to have serious nightmares about Alltel stadium for years to come. Sadly it also seemed to take falling behind 21-0 for Georgia to realize that running it everytime on 1st down and waiting until 2nd or 3rd and 9 wasn't putting Stafford in a good spot. The upside here is Florida was the best defense we'll play all year, and we were able to eventually get a legit drive or two against them. And as far as the whole "worst is behind us" school of thought goes, it's likely we've already faced the best offense on our schedule (UT) and the best defense (UF). The upside there is that no one's near as good as either team offensively, the downside is that Tech and Auburn are damn close defensively.


The Ugly













(Yeah, going "The Ugly" and showing a Florida fan is obvious, but it works).

The serious answer? Richt is taking Dr. Eason with him to the Hula Bowl. Unless they go out on a boat for a warmer, tropical take on The Godfather Part II, I'm skeptical that Richt will really correct the dropped pass problem at its source.














(What, you expect me to show you the Godfather clip and pass on a great South Park reference?)

And worse: 10 turnovers in the past two games. The tiny silver lining: that big if that the coaches even asked the team two weeks ago, about "How good could you be, if you cut out the stupid mistakes?" still hasn't been answered. And maybe it'd be easier on me overall to have abondoned all hope on the season after the Vandy debacle, but it feels a lot better having not.