On May 21, officials for the University of Florida and the University of Georgia completed a draft of a new contract that would keep the annual game between the two teams in Jacksonville, Fla., through the 2016 season.

According to the Athens-Banner Herald, which obtained a draft of the contract through an open records request, the contract, among other things, makes stipulations for monetary reimbursement for Georgia’s travel expenses as well as marketing assets being split between the two schools rather than three ways with the city of Jacksonville.

This would allow the two schools to sell naming rights to the game to corporate sponsors.

Now the only question is whether it will be same Dawg time, same Dawg blowout for the Georgia Bulldogs or if the departure of former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow might reignite the competitiveness for the Silver Britches.

For the past two seasons, watching this game has been like watching a dog chase its tail. It’s been a losing battle from the opening whistle and could only have been made worse if I had driven the 350-plus miles from Athens, Ga. to see them in person (I did.)

After an encouraging 42-30 victory in 2007— which included the now-infamous “Gator Stomp”— the Bulldogs were embarrassed in both of the next two season with losses of 49-10 and 41-17, respectively.

And, though it pains me to say it, Georgia deserved what it got in each. The team was painfully unprepared and overconfident when it arrived in Jacksonville two years ago, despite being humbled by the Alabama Crimson Tide earlier in the season, and last year took the field in black pants and helmets— proving the old adage that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks— only to leave the field with its tail tucked between its legs.

But this season will usher in a new generation for both teams. Florida will be lead by junior quarterback John Brantley while Georgia will turn to Aaron Murray, a redshirt freshman from Florida that would love nothing more than to be successful in his home state.

And while Georgia’s run of disappointments in the Sunshine State have spanned nearly two decades, there are reasons to believe that the team could find success sooner rather than later.

To begin with, Georgia returns 10 starters to its offense, losing only quarterback Joe Cox (which some would consider a gain).

While Murray, a freshman, should experience some growing pains throughout the season, recent history has shown that underclassmen can have big impacts on the offense at the quarterback position if handled correctly. This would be limiting how much the rest of the offense relies on his success and allowing him to simply manage the offense.

Florida, by comparison, returns just six starters to its offense in 2010.

Another cause for optimism in the Georgia camp is Florida head coach Urban Meyer. While he is widely considered one of the best coaches in the country, and justly so, Meyer experienced a rather turbulent off season which should be cause for some concern for the Gators.

After originally resigning from his position as head coach of the Gators, Meyer withdrew his resignation and claimed to be taking a leave of absence. Not long after, he claimed he would take a break during the off season and reassess his position after the spring.

The last I saw of Meyer this spring, he was angrily insulting journalists during a Florida practice. Not exactly the best actions for a man with potential heart condition.

And if all of these sound like stretches, then take into account that Georgia will now be without the “services” of much-maligned defensive coordinator Willie Martinez. New defensive coordinator Todd Grantham will implement a much more aggressive 3-4 system that could prove to be the difference in slowing down Florida’s offense.

The key will be whether Georgia’s defensive line will be capable of containing Florida’s speedy halfback Jeff Demps and whether the secondary will be able to blanket receivers long enough to allow Georgia’s versatile outside linebackers to reach and rattle quarterback Brantley.

With the annual rivalry game back in Jacksonville for at least the next six seasons, it is clear that tradition will not change for the two schools. Changing history, however, will be up to the Bulldogs.

Read more Georgia Bulldogs Football news on BleacherReport.com

Generally speaking, my take on all the offseason conference expansion talk has been to enjoy the baseless speculation game (“Gee, wouldn’t it be neat if . . .”) but otherwise to agree with Year2’s position that a bigger Big Ten doesn’t necessarily obligate the SEC to enlarge. I thought that . . . until Senator Blutarsky directed me to this:

For every BTN subscriber in the eight-state footprint of the Big Ten, the league gets 70 to 80 cents a month. For every subscriber outside the footprint it is about 10 cents. So guess what happens if the Big Ten starts adding states like Nebraska, Missouri and New Jersey to their footprint? Not only do the subscriptions increase but the income the Big Ten gets from those subscriptions goes up as much as eight-fold in that state.

I question whether a sixteen- or even fourteen-team conference really is viable as a self-contained entity; twelve-team leagues split into two six-team divisions playing eight-game conference schedules appear to be optimal, and the evidence for pushing the envelope successfully past that point is scant, if it exists at all. Like extending the distance between bases from 90 feet to 95, the jump from twelve to fourteen might be consequential out of all proportion to its numerical slightness.

That said, the Big Ten has positioned itself shrewdly for its threatened forthcoming growth spurt, whether expansion requires Midwestern graphic artists to reconfigure the conference logo to hide a 12, a 14, or a 16 within the lettering. The risk of imperial overreach is worth running because the burgeoning Big Ten would be more geographically contiguous than the sprawling WAC of yesteryear and the addition of new teams would expand the pie before dividing it up into more slices.

The model may or may not be sustainable, but it’s been designed about as well as it could have been, provided that the powers that be see fit to add the media markets that would be brought in by Missouri, Rutgers, or monomaniacal Nebraska rather than opt either for the redundancy of Pitt or the spent volcano of Notre Dame. (For all the eyelash-batting being directed toward South Bend, the Fighting Irish add nothing geographically and offer no room for improvement. Missouri and Rutgers at least have the potential to be sleeping giants, but the Golden Domers provide no 21st-century upside. Jim Delany says he wants “to look forward to 2020 and 2030” when considering expansion. Well, by 2030, Lou Holtz will be dead, and Urban Meyer, a Roman Catholic who turned down his onetime “dream job” to go to Florida, will be retired. Notre Dame’s maximum potential lies in the past, not the future.)2010 Big Ten football schedules

The problem is that Big Ten expansion may cause Big Ten Network revenue to skyrocket, forcing the SEC to expand in the hope of keeping up financially . . . and the Southeastern Conference has fewer options than the Big Ten when it comes to adding member institutions that make sense culturally, geographically, and financially.

Take, as a not altogether random example, Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets were members of the conference for many years, and they play in the heart of SEC country. The Golden Tornado would make good sense geographically, but adding the Ramblin’ Wreck to the lineup would make no sense economically.
2010 ACC Football Schedules

Atlanta is the site of the season-opening kickoff classic, the SEC championship game, and the Chick-fil-A Bowl. It also is approximately an hour’s drive from the campus of an existing SEC institution. The Engineers would add no market the league does not already control. As much as I would love to see the Bulldogs face the Country Gentlemen every year as SEC East rivals, Clemson similarly brings little to the table from a financial standpoint.

Even the addition of Florida State likely would not add sufficiently to the conference’s coffers to justify splitting the take with an additional two or four schools. The problem is that SEC expansion into areas already covered by the league’s footprint would bring in no new markets, and ESPN already broke the bank to buy the broadcast rights under the existing television contract. More money is unlikely to be forthcoming from the Worldwide Leader merely because existing SEC in-state rivalry games suddenly acquired conference implications.

If bringing in the logical cultural and geographic fits would not work financially, the only option would seem to be to do what the Big Ten hopes to do: conquer more territory and capture more markets. The problem is that none of the viable options on that front would easily be integrated into the Southeastern Conference.

Miami (Florida) would bring Miami, Fla.—maybe—but the Hurricanes bear little resemblance to the rest of the league and are farther away on the map than you might think. There are arguments for swiping an ACC school from North Carolina or Virginia, but the Cavaliers, the Tar Heels, or the Wolfpack would experience a bit of culture shock, the Blue Devils or the Demon Deacons even more so. West Virginia and Virginia Tech would fit in better than most, but they represent geographically non-contiguous and economically dubious options.
2010 SEC Football Schedules

Realistically, the SEC cannot look toward the ocean closest to us; to our east lie the two most moribund automatically-qualifying BCS conferences, and poaching from them—or, at least, poaching from them alone—would not well serve our long-term interests. For that, we must go west, young man.

Our best bet is for the Big Ten to snag Missouri and Nebraska, the Pac-10 to grab Colorado, and the Big 12 to split apart like the Soviet Union. It is good for us that Texas may consider the SEC an option, after all, because the Longhorns make absolutely perfect sense financially (both immediately and in the long term), very good sense geographically, and fairly good sense culturally. (Yeah, the Texas exes are probably closer to the older alumni in the Grove at Oxford than they are like the fans you’d find arrayed along the St. John’s River at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, but at least they like barbecue and speak without a funny accent.)

The Big Ten has positioned itself quite well. The SEC has positioned itself well, but not as well as you might think. (In retrospect, the decision to invite Arkansas into the league was a boneheaded move, but maybe we can make it work after the fact by using the renewal of the rivalry between the Longhorns and the Razorbacks as an added incentive to entice Texas into the fold.) The day may be approaching, and soon, when Mike Slive is called upon to unfurl the map of the college football world and begin carving it up like Woodrow Wilson in Paris.

Here is hoping the current commissioner does that far more deftly and wisely than the former president did when setting the conditions for the next century’s worth of European wars. If expansion is thrust upon us, we must make the right decisions for the right reasons. My heart looks eastward to the renewal of old rivalries with opponents who are more like us than not, but, like Salvatore Tessio’s decision to betray Michael Corleone, this is business, and my head tells me our first priority is to shore up our western flank. Whatever concessions must be made in order to make it happen—taking Texas A&M, even taking Texas Tech, if need be—the SEC must persuade Texas to join its ranks.

If, after the dust is settled, the Big Ten and the SEC both have swelled to fourteen or sixteen teams, then the goal of football fans in Austin must be to spend the first weekend in December in Atlanta. If the first comes to pass but not the second, we will have been outmaneuvered by the Midwesterners, and, suddenly, the fear of losing Sunshine State bowl games to Big Ten teams will be the least of our worries.

Go ‘Dawgs!

A few days ago, I wrote a rather pessimistic column about why football preview guru Phil Steele seemed in his assessment to overestimate the potential abilities of the 2010 version of the Georgia Bulldogs.

Allow me to place the shoe on the other foot for a few minutes and offer a more optimistic two cents.

Georgia athletic director Damon Evans stated today in an address to the Univ. of Georgia Athletics Association board of directors that he was less than pleased with the school’s all-sports national ranking of No. 25 and stated that he expected the program to be much higher than it is.

Damn. Tough crowd.

It is true that Georgia athletics on the whole had a largely underwhelming year.

The football team had one of its least successful campaigns of the Mark Richt era, the baseball team was less competitive than an apathetic housewife and the gymnastics squad failed to win a national title for the first time in five years.

For a program that has experienced extended success in all three of these sports, it was a perfect storm of inadequacy across the board.

My thoughts? So what.

While Georgia is home to far and away the best gymnastics program in the country, it would be naive to think that the squad could continue to win national titles on a yearly basis. The streak was bound to come to a close eventually.

Every football program has its ups and downs. Georgia is not immune. And while, as I stated in my previous column, the team has experienced its fair share of underachievement over the past few seasons, there is also plenty of reasons to be optimistic—starting first with the major changes in the defensive sector of the coaching staff.

And as far as baseball goes, two seasons ago, the team was five innings away from a national championship. A season ago, the team spent most of the regular season at the top of the national rankings. It has dropped consistently since the blown game in the championship series against Fresno State, but the team also consistently brings in a horde of talent.

This season was played without a number of key players from the past two. A No. 22 preseason ranking was always a bit optimistic in my opinion. And hey, the only direction for the team to go from where it is now is up. That has to count for something.

And to look simply at these three key sports would be an injustice to the rest of the athletics at the University of Georgia.

The men’s basketball team had one of the most exciting 14-17 campaigns in college basketball history with close losses against top SEC teams Kentucky and Ole Miss as well as surprising victories over rivals Tennessee, Florida, Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt.

With more consistency, the team could have easily been on the bubble come tournament time. Now, expectations are high for the upcoming season as the team will be in its second season under head coach Mark Fox. Top players Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie are both potential NBA first round draft picks and Marcus Thornton, a former Clemson commitment, and Mr. Basketball in the state of Georgia, was a pleasant surprise, capping off Mark Fox’s second recruiting class.

ESPN college basketball analyst Andy Katz has listed the Bulldogs as a potential top-25 sleeper and a tournament run is well within the realm of possibility.

And it isn’t just basketball either.

It’s tennis and golf, both of which just finished up solid postseason showings. It’s swimming where head coach Jack Bauerle has established one of the best women’s programs in the country and an ever-improving men’s squad. It’s women’s basketball which spent time in the top-10 and knocked off national powerhouse Tennessee before struggling down the stretch due to injuries. And it’s softball which will host California in a Super-Regional beginning tomorrow with a chance to go to the Women’s College World Series.

The list could go on, but the point is that although Georgia sports may not have had its best showing in 2009-2010, there is no reason to believe that it won’t spring back up the rankings in the coming year.

There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic, no matter what was said a few days ago.

David is a member of the inaugural Bleacher Report Writing Internship program. You can follow him on Twitter for news and opinions on anything sports OR send him an e-mail.

Pending USC Sanctions to Call for Redo on 2004 National Championship?

A lot of buzz the past few days over the looming sanctions to be taken out on USC for the Reggie Bush Incident (RBI). Although the hammers over at the NCAA know how to stretch a plot out better than the producers of Lost, sports talking heads are beginning to mumble about what they think will happen. Most believe that some if not all games that Reggie Bush participated in could be vacated. If any games during the 2004 season were involved, that could lead to USC being declared retroactively ineligible for that title. Most seem to believe that will be the case, and should the title be vacated, these writers have an idea who should be elevated to that lofty status: Auburn.


Clay Travis over at The Fanhouse lays out his case:

“First, keep in mind that Auburn finished 13-0 and No. 2 in the country in the final 2004 poll. That season USC defeated Oklahoma 55-19 to win the BCS title. Both of those teams, USC and Oklahoma, started the season 1 and 2 and Auburn, which wasn’t expected to be as good as it was behind Jason Campbell at quarterback, began the season ranked 17th in one poll and 18th in the other. Even though Auburn ran roughshod over the SEC and everyone else in the regular season, outscoring opponents by a total of 401-134, the Tigers were left behind by an unjust BCS, finishing third in the final BCS standings.”

“In most sports the voting doesn’t matter, but in college football it’s integral to the final champion; the reason we all watch. Sure, voting for a champion is a flawed system, but in 2004 it still represented a legitimate way to crown a champion. It’s how we ended up with split champs in 2003. If USC gets hit with sanctions, the BCS will reclaim its trophy and the rest of us — that sorry lot of us who are college football die hards — will be left with nothing to show for the entirety of the 2004 season. That’s a much bigger wrong than retroactively rewarding a team that deserves a championship.”

Kevin Scarbinsky over at the Birmingham News, urges Auburn to step up ever more slightly and even implore the University of Alabama model:

“What should Auburn do six years later? Please. That’s easy. Accept it. Celebrate it. And never, ever apologize for it. In other words, Auburn should follow Alabama’s lead. After all, the Crimson Tide has a lot more experience with the national championship thing. Alabama hasn’t filled a trophy case and built a statue for every national title that everyone from the Dunkel Index to Dunkin’ Donuts has tried to throw at it, but the school has said yes more often than not.”

Then we had Jay Coulter over at Auburn blog Track Em Tigers:

“Would a better late than never title change things for the players and the fans? Not really. Most Auburn people I know feel quite comfortable believing Auburn was as much the champion of 2004 as USC. When you don’t meet head-to-head how can you think otherwise? With four first round draft choices on that team, you have to believe Auburn would have had a shot.Being formally recognized for something you plainly deserve is always nice. But let’s not kid ourselves. A belated national title can never make up for the injustice. It’s like the guy that serves 30 years in prison only to be released after new evidence is presented exonerating him. It’s great when it happens, but it would have been a million times sweeter had it happened during the trial.”

Then there was yours truly, oh, about two years ago:

“So, are we just to vacate the 2004 season from the MNC roles, or is Miss First-Runner Up going to get a chance to wear the crown? Maybe conference championships can be successfully vacated over the years, but not so with MNCs. Know and understand this: NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS ARE TOO IMPORTANT IN OUR SPORT TO BE LEFT VACATED. It is one void that will always be filled.”

Keep in mind, the results still aren’t in. No one’s fate has been decided. But if this scenario DOES go down, what’s the fair thing to do?

Posted by War Eagle Atlanta

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Another day, another round of expansion rumors.

Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive reportedly met with CBS executives and discussed what the league might do if it is forced to expand because of a major move by the Big Ten.

Jimmy Hyams of WNML-990 in Knoxville, citing an anonymous source close to CBS, reported that Slive’s top-tier plan includes bringing Texas A&M, Texas, Florida State and Clemson into the SEC to create a 16-team league. If the Aggies and Longhorns say no, Georgia Tech and Miami would be targeted.

The report was shot down by SEC associate commissioner Charles Bloom, who told John Pennington of Mr. SEC that there “was never any meeting nor have their been any discussions between CBS and SEC commissioner Mike Slive about expansion.”

Pennington wasn’t ready to discount the report, noting that Hyams, a former reporter at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, “has 30 years of SEC contacts and a reputation for caring more about accuracy than ratings.”

“Does that mean there definitely was a meeting between the SEC and CBS? No. But I have a hard time believing Hyams would buy into a source who would completely fabricate such a story.”