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Ten minutes into the game the thrashing alert sounded--Georgia was down fourteen points, we were down six Warsteiner Oktoberfests, and the rout, for all intents and purposes, had begun. Then the rest of the game happened. Both teams went into swoons, coughing up easy points and making what should have been a Florida sprint for four quarters into the football equivalent of an Ironman finish: ugly, wobbling, limbs moving in directions dictated not by a confident body moving with all parts in harmony, but by desperate, discombobulated neurons moving randomly in search of a lucky strike.
Like Chris Legh, Florida's offense collapsed late. Hopefully the offense we'll have a Gatorade sponsored recovery, too.
Leak--who was evidently shaken up--appeared in his underwhelming Office Depot game manager duds again, missing open receivers, refusing to take shots down the field (which were there) against a team that had bled against the pass all season long. The o-line windmilled in vain on both pass and run plays, and not just against the obvious monsters like Quentin Moses on the UGA d-line. After the first three series, Florida's offense tanked and sent the bill to the defense, who classily picked up the tab as it has all season long, frustrating Matthew Stafford into rushing throws and making sure UGA couldn't break plays and tie up what became a close game.
Florida wasn't the only team to lay steaming heaps of offensive offal all over the field Saturday. This may be Mark Richt's reekingest team in his tenure at UGA: bad passing, feeble blocking on the offensive line, and a severe aggravation persistent rash of dropped passes by Bulldog receivers across the board doomed them. We'd toss some blame Martrez Milner's way, but he'd just drop it, so we'll just leave it over here with his name on it, since he dropped fine passes from Matthew Stafford all day. Stafford, by the way, will be very, very good. Richt should just let him play the rest of the season, get his ass kicked in an educational sort of way, and then reload for next year. Joe T. can enjoy the privilege of being on the roster and earning his way into the banking/real estate/other lucrative good-ol'-boy network job he'll undoubtedly get as a result of being on the Georgia football team. He'll always have that...and the Cherrishinksi, of course.
The stankfinger award of the week goes to Florida's offense though, and mainly for this reason: we want to see them kick some quality ass. Serious, bloody, merciless asskicking of a nature so definite, thunderous, and crushing that the opposing team leaves with a permanent twitch in their right eye and a case of scabies. An ass-kicking like something out of the Bible. An ass-kicking that moves the Caribbean plate three inches to the right. (Lives of the innocent be damned--we need points, Gator fans! Who cares if cities burn--Percy's gotta run!) Florida's beginning to be stuffed to the gills with talent, and yet the numbers--as any five cent pundit will tell you--haven't even begun to equal the numbers put up by Larry Fedora, the offensive coordinator under...[NAME REDACTED.]
We do, we do.
Plenty's wrong...here's just a few guesses from someone who, at this point, would shoot off their own pinkie toe to see a game against quality competition where the offense scores more than 30 points. (Really--we might.)
How 'bout a slant? Dan Mullen's playbook contains seemingly every route constructed by man...except the blitz-beating slant, which defenses live in fear of on downs containing four and five man pressure. Instead, we throw curls.
Please for the love of God exploit the seams. Perhaps it's Chris Leak's T-Bill mentality (the safest of all football investments: the check down!), but the vaunted spread lives and dies off exploiting the seams in the defense created by spreading them out. Florida doesn't seem to do that at all, save for one td pass against Georgia to Caldwell. If we're going to cash in all those runs for two yards up the middle, how about a few play action breaks between the hashes?
Trust receivers in single coverage. Mike Leach may get somethings completely and totally wrong, but this is not one of them: wideouts have a distinct advantage over dbs because they know where they're going before dbs do. Leak only trusts one of his receivers in single coverage, and even Dallas Baker doesn't get the ball when he's singled up as often as he should. We think we'd trade a few picks for the rare sight of a ball going further than ten yards down the field. Don't blame us, blame Spurrier, since the vast majority of Florida fans were weaned on bomb-and-run offense, but the nine-man fronts Florida has seen as of late have been daring Leak to throw deep. Thus far, that's been an effective defense.
Wynn. Deshawn Wynn is healthy and has four or five games left in him as a Gator. Wear. Him. Out. He iced the Tennessee and Georgia games. He's worked his way out of Meyer's purgatory and back into the starter's position. Let him earn some bucks in an NFL signing bonus and possibly even give some bite to the Florida run game Meyer is so enamoured of creating. He's going to be a ghost in old programs in two months--let him win a few single-handedly and let him throw some sugar on what has been an often sour tenure as a Gator.
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