A Few More Points ...

I just had a few more points, many of which were covered in the comments today to the story below.

To start, the first half was played like the team reads my stuff.  Bobo was going to A.J. as often as possible, Richard Samuel was breaking tackles, and Blair Walsh was booming them into the end zone.  But, there's still some odd things about our offense.  Carlton Thomas had some plays that were much better suited to Richard Samuel.  A.J. still needs to work on ball security (is that the third pitch-fumble for A.J. in our territory early in the game?  Bama, Okie State, and SC).  And Joe Cox stared down Tavarres King so long before that INT return, I thought he was a Tech student seeing a decent looking woman for the first time. The series that ended with the safety was almost as bad as an offense can get.  Consistency, as usual, is lacking.

On the whole, though, we had some strong plays and a crafty reverse call that went 61 yards.  Lots to improve, but you should feel much better about the offense than a week ago.  

Now, I know many of you will serve up Saturday night as more evidence for the indictment of Willie Martinez.  However, he has some mitigating circumstances.  First, most of SC's scoring drives started in UGA territory.  Second, the defense was out there all night.  Carolina had about thirty more snaps than UGA.  They had the ball for ten more minutes than the Dawgs.  Any defense is going to bend under those conditions.  Third, Willie was trying everything.  We blitzed linebackers, safeties and corners, but Carolina picked them up or Garcia squirted out of the collapsing pocket to make a short gain.  In fact, Garcia and the Cocks seemed to bog down on their drives when we stopped blitzing and dropped more guys in coverage.  So, while the score and Garcia's numbers looks bad, our D wasn't as bad as you might think.  (By the way, the sermon at church today was about focusing on the positives.  Can you tell?) But, at some point, you might think we would adjust to stem those short underneath routes that shredded our zone defense all night.

On a sad note, for the second time in two games, a Dawg tore his ACL.  This week it was Rod Battle.  (Get well, Rod!)  Justin Houston comes off suspension this week just in time.  

In sum, there was enough improvement to be optimistic about this year, but Georgia still has lots of work to do.

Quinton