SB Nation Atlanta - Georgia Vs. Ole Miss: Dawgs Outclass Desperate Rebels

Bacarri Rambo Excelled Vs. Ole Miss Days After Losing Unborn Son

2011-09-28T20:50:36Z

As a parent, I'm not sure how this is possible, but Georgia Bulldogs safety Bacarri Rambo was able to do it anyway:

Only a day earlier, Rambo learned he had lost his unborn son. Braylin A. Rambo died Thursday because of late-pregnancy complications. He was laid to rest Monday in Seminole County. Rambo was there for the funeral.

In between all that, Rambo played a football game. He played very well, in fact.

SEC Power Poll, Week 4: In Which Lovable Ne'er-Do-Well Les Miles Finally Makes Good

2011-09-27T14:00:49Z

The Associated Press pollsters finally wised up and moved the LSU Tigers up to No. 1. The coaches are still married to their notion of Oklahoma as the nation's top team, because while mowing down three ranked teams in your first four games is nice and everything, you haven't really proved your mettle until you've had to come back from a 14-3 deficit against unranked Missouri at home.

The coaches are gradually coming around, though. The one who really deserves some dirt kicked in his eye here is College Football Pundit, who attracted a heaping helping of richly deserved scorn during the summer for putting LSU coach Les Miles at No. 1 with a bullet on his list of the 10 Worst Coaches in College Football. I've already laid into that bizarre judgment here, but let's update that skewering with a review of what LSU's silly "potted plant" of a coach has accomplished: He's started the season 4-0, with three wins against ranked teams, away from Baton Rouge no less -- and two of those wins came against guys who made CFP's Best Coaches list. OWWW IT TASTES LIKE BURNING.

Now that we've enjoyed that little bit of mirth, here's this week's Power Poll ballot, with the results being tallied up at Team Speed Kills later on this week:

1. LSU -- There are defenses that play good fundamentals and keep you from scoring points, and then there are defenses that want to make sure your bones are aching as you walk off the field. We've got a pretty good idea which one LSU is.

2. Alabama -- Something tells me Arkansas will be only the first of several high-octane offenses that the Crimson Tide defense makes look very, very pedestrian.

3. Florida -- Dominant Florida team has terrible Kentucky team burned to the ground by the end of the first quarter. Takes me back to the Spurrier years, except the passing/rushing yardage split (115/405) would've been reversed.

4. South Carolina -- I'm really starting to think Stephen Garcia (16-of-30, one TD, four picks against Vanderbilt) is doing this on purpose to punish Steve Spurrier.

5. Arkansas -- The good news, Razorbacks, is that at most you're only gonna face a couple more defenses like that this season. The bad news is we now know you're really not an elite offense without Knile Davis in the lineup.

6. Georgia -- Managed to unload on Ole Miss for 475 yards in a game in which they pretty much stopped caring after a half or so. Which is all well and good, but now is probably a good point in the season to start caring for the full 60 minutes.

7. Auburn -- Heading into a stretch where they have to play four straight top-20 teams, all but one away from home. If the Tigers keep playing like they did against Utah State and FAU, it's going to be one ugly October.

8. Tennessee -- Scheduling Buffalo immediately following a bye week is so dumb it pretty much had to be Mike Hamilton's idea. Unless it was Lane Kiffin's. "Got the idea after reading that Malcolm Gladwell book. Last thing they'll be expecting, bro."

9. Mississippi State -- Hard to figure out why the Bizarro Bulldogs look so mediocre after a breakout season in 2010. Could it be as simple as the fact they aren't sneaking up on anybody anymore?

10. Vanderbilt -- Playing the Commodores is like getting into an argument with an Internet troll: Even when you win, you still look stupid, and you feel bad about it afterward.

11. Kentucky -- I'm almost running out of ways to describe how bad they are, but I have a feeling I'll have some new metaphors by the time they finish getting blown up in Baton Rouge next week.

12. Ole Miss -- Houston Nutt is a better coach than he's looked like the last two seasons, but how do you let your quarterback situation get this bad when you're signing 63 players in each recruiting class?

College Football Stats: Isaiah Crowell, Stephen Hill Earn Week 4 Praises

2011-09-26T16:49:16Z

From Bill Connelly's ever-essential Numerical, a weekly delving into college football stats:

Georgia also attempted the "keep-away" gambit, pulling off three similar second-half drives. The difference for the Bulldogs: all three drives resulted in missed field goals. Luckily, they were playing Ole Miss, and Ole Miss has no offense: the Rebels gained just 183 yards (3.3 per play), and Georgia won easily, 27-13.

18.9: Average gain, in yards, of the eight passes directed at Georgia Tech receiver Stephen Hill against North Carolina. If he had caught a wide-open bomb in the fourth quarter, the average would have been 25.6. But since the Yellow Jackets won (35-28), and since Hill made a spectacular, one-handed catch earlier in the game, he's forgiven.

Georgia 27, Ole Miss 13: The Dawgs Stare Into The Grove, And The Grove Stares Back Into Them

2011-09-25T19:02:48Z

I had two things on my mind a week ago as I trudged toward our tailgate before the Coastal Carolina game: One, how I'd ended up wearing shorts and a polo in 60-degree weather, and two, the Ole Miss Rebels. Not that I was looking ahead or anything, mind you, but I'd noticed some uncomfortable parallels between our situation and theirs. Could I live with my beloved alma mater becoming the Peach State's version of Ole Miss: venerable state institution in a gorgeous town, with a great party scene and all-world female talent -- and a marginally relevant football program? Then, of course, there was the realization by day's end that when the two teams met up in Oxford a week hence, they'd both still be looking for their first win over an FBS opponent.

Georgia ended up getting that win, of course, and in fairly dominating fashion, despite what the plain-vanilla final score would tell you. If Houston Nutt wasn't fired coming into this game, he surely is now, though it remains to be seen whether a year or two from now we'll all be chuckling about him getting "Richted" the same way we used to talk about poor suckas getting Croomed.

But the more pressing issue is that Georgia's not quite out of the woods yet when it comes to Ole Miss comparisons, because while we got confirmation that the 2011 Dawgs aren't a bad team after all, neither did anything necessarily point to us being a great one. We may not be as bad as the Rebels are now, or as bad as they were when Ed Orgeron was leveling the Ole Miss program and doing his best to salt the earth behind him; but on Saturday, at least, you couldn't necessarily find a lot of daylight between us and, say, the Rebels' 2009 team, or the squads of the mid-David Cutcliffe era. Like them, we beat an opponent we were supposed to beat, but we found ways not to do it in a fashion that would make people think, "Dang, those guys are really gonna make a run this year."

If two things really nagged at me about Georgia's performance in Oxford, it's probably because those things have bugged the crap out of me for the last five or six years. Actually, make it even longer than that when you're talking about Georgia's propensity to settle for field goals, because it seems like that's been a feature, not a bug, of Mark Richt's entire tenure in Athens. Yeah, I'd probably be less inclined to pick at that particular scab if Blair Walsh had actually, you know, converted more than two of his five tries on Saturday, but whatever yips he was experiencing in his game, they weren't responsible for Michael Bennett dropping that pass in the end zone on Georgia's first drive of the day, and they darn sure weren't responsible for the following coaching decisions:

Very end of the third quarter, Dawgs have driven down to the Ole Miss 39, and then Isaiah Crowell busts a nine-yard run that lands him just short of the first-down marker. Quarter ends, Georgia has time to draw up something nifty on fourth-and-1 from the Rebel 30, and Richt sends in . . . the field-goal team, for a 48-yard try Blair Walsh misses. Did any of y'all keep up with the "#notoriousTOB" tag that caught fire on Twitter on Thursday in anticipation of the N.C. State-Cincinnati game? Maybe the missed field goal was my punishment for contributing so gleefully to it, because that was a Tom O'Brien play call if ever I saw one.
Four or five minutes later, Dawgs are on a long clock-grinding drive down inside the Mississippi red zone, and second-and-4 becomes third-and-6 when a Rebel player jumps across the line and Aaron Murray kneels on it but the refs determine the defender got back in place first. Instead of trying some play-action or maybe tossing one in the flat to Orson Charles, who was having a pretty productive day, Richt calls a straight-up run and Crowell gets stuffed after two yards. Call in the FG unit, and Walsh misses a 35-yarder.
Four minutes and change left, Georgia has gotten the ball back in great field position after the Rebels failed to convert a fourth-and-10 in their own territory. Three runs, the first two from Richard Samuel (que?), and on fourth-and-2, we call in the kicking team yet again, and Walsh finally nails one.

Now, in the case of the last one -- and perhaps the one before it as well -- it's possible Mark Richt sensed that the Ole Miss offense couldn't get out of its own way and figured that a 14-point cushion would be so insurmountable that the extra risk of going for more points wouldn't be worth it. While perhaps inadvisable in the ass-out-of-you-and-me sense, that assumption wasn't unreasonable. Yet, leaving aside any judgments about how it might behoove any coach on a seat as hot as Richt's to exhibit a little more killer instinct, it's not like Ole Miss was completely incapable of scoring points. They'd put 13 points on the board in just four plays toward the end of the first half; even if Richt determined there wasn't an urgent need for extra points, it would've been nice to have them just in case anything else unpleasant happened.

And "anything else unpleasant" brings me to the other thing that bugged the crap out of me: Georgia's ongoing inability to maintain focus after something good happened. I've complained about this at length in other venues, and you could see us working overtime to squander momentum after building a big lead Saturday: Score a TD to go up 17-0, then let Ole Miss' drag-ass offense hit on a couple big pass plays and get seven of those points back just 61 seconds later. (Don't think those two long completions were utterly out of character for the Rebels? Those two plays comprised more than 50 percent of their passing output for the entire day.) Then, score another TD, hold the Rebels to a three-and-out, only to whiff on three straight passes and give up a second TD on a tricksy punt return right before the half. I gotta give the Rebels' special teams a little love here, because that toss from Jeff Scott to Nick Brassell was a thing of Boise-State-in-the-Fiesta-Bowl beauty, but still, when the Dawgs get the ball back with under a minute and a half left in the second quarter, I feel like I should get to be confident that the other team won't be putting any more points on the board before halftime.

Now, maybe I'm just being way too picky for a guy whose team started the season 0-2. We crossed our first conference road game off the list, we got back to .500 in the process, and the rest of the schedule looks manageable: Mississippi State is struggling, Tennessee lost their best player last week, and Vanderbilt is still Vanderbilt, meaning that they'll force you into playing the most ass-ugly game you can possibly imagine while you win by two scores anyway. (Er, unless you're Ole Miss, apparently.) Aaron Murray on an off day is still preferable to 90 percent of the QBs out there; Isaiah Crowell is everything he was hyped up to be and then some; our defense is even figuring out how to take down the quarterback.

Yet I think back to the guy sitting next to me at the Coastal Carolina game, the one who said Georgia wasn't going to lose another game for the rest of the season and finish 10-2, and I think: Is the team that beat Ole Miss on Saturday capable of that? Not at the moment they're not. Capable of winning more games than they lose, but not reeling off 10 in a row, not with Florida and Georgia Tech still down the road. When the Big Reckoning comes in December, Mark Richt's not going to be Houston Nutt and the Dawgs aren't going to be Ole Miss, but with all due respect to the Rebels -- whose tailgating skills are beyond reproach whether they're winning or losing -- it sure would be nice to put some more distance between us and them in the meantime. Not that the Rebels should be our yardstick or anything, but when they say "We may not win every game, but we never lose a tailgate," all I can do is think of how much fun I was having when the Dawgs were schooling people right and left in both those arenas.

Georgia Vs. Ole Miss: Another Improvement Has Dawgs Thinking Big

2011-09-25T13:29:24Z

Georgia Bulldogs fans might not like reading this, but UGA players are starting to feel pretty confident in their team's chances this season. The nation's most fretful fan base is going to have a mixed reaction to specific mentions of SEC championship games and South Carolina's record down the stretch, as observed here:

"It's kind of scary how we just get better and better every week," [Bacarri] Rambo said. "Just imagine at the end of the season how we might look. That's a scary sight."

White agreed.

"We run the table, and there's no reason we shouldn't be going to a BCS bowl or going to the SEC championship, unless South Carolina wins out," [Aron] White said. "And then what you can do?"

To be clear, Mark Richt and multiple Dawgs players emphasized that the team has a lot to improve on. This time around, special teams emerged as a specific concern, with typically rock-solid Blair Walsh missing three field goals and Nickolas Brassell running back a punt for a touchdown. If not for special teams, this game would've been beyond doubt early in the second half.

Ole Miss couldn't do a thing about Isaiah Crowell (147 yards), nor could it do a thing on offense (183 yards). Granted, the Rebels aren't the best yardstick, but players have cause to feel good about this win, so long as the same kind of mistakes that plagued the South Carolina game (Melvin Ingram's fake punt, for instance) don't keep popping up.

For more, visit UGA blog Dawg Sports and Ole Miss blog Red Cup Rebellion.

Georgia Vs. Ole Miss Final Score: Dawgs Pick Up Decisive SEC Win

2011-09-24T19:42:17Z

Did you watch the first half between the Georgia Bulldogs and Mississippi Rebels? Then you saw pretty much everything that happened here. UGA entered the second half up 24-13, and nobody scored until Blair Walsh booted in a short field goal with four minutes remaining.

Walsh, one of the best at his position in the country, actually missed three kicks on the day, meaning it should've been 36-13 at that point. Georgia put up 274 more yards than Ole Miss did, so yeah.

Bacarri Rambo's second interception of the day all but sealed the game with a couple minutes left, leaving Isaiah Crowell to run down some clock. Crowell finished with 147 yards on 30 carries, with another freshman, Malcolm Mitchell, leading the Dawgs in receiving yards (92).

Nobody knows whether this is a game Mark Richt needed to win or not, but pretty much everybody agrees Houston Nutt needed to at least look competitive here. His team absolutely did not. Richt has now won nine straight games against Ole Miss.

For discussion, visit UGA blog Dawg Sports and Ole Miss blog Red Cup Rebellion.

PHOTO: Nickolas Brassell's Throat Slash Vs. Georgia

2011-09-24T18:20:55Z

This touchdown celebration is technically supposed to be an insta-penalty, but whatevs. Via @sfoshee1:

UGA Vs. Ole Miss Halftime Score: Dawgs Control Ground, But Give Up Big Plays

2011-09-24T18:00:23Z

The Georgia Bulldogs have are being challenged by a Mississippi Rebels team with little to lose, but lead 24-13 at the half in Oxford. The most recent score: an 82-yard punt return by Nickolas Brassell that of course was followed by a bobbled extra point. The Dawgs have dominated the running game, 128 yards to 16, but have given up two unconventional scores, one on defense and one on special teams.

A scary moment in the second quarter: punt returner Branden Smith let a kick bounce between his legs. The Rebels downed it inside the one, but it was very close to allowing an easy Ole Miss touchdown. Not to worry: the Rebels defense went offsides on the next play to give some of that space back. A 29-yard burst by Crowell did the rest.

Fellow Dream Teamer Malcolm Mitchell caught a beautiful over-the-shoulder pass from Aaron Murray, then ran and eventually stumbled for 69 yards into the red zone. A leaping touchdown catch by Orson Charles was the result, and Ole Miss just gave up an every-yard scoring drive.

The Rebels came right back with a skidding, 38-yard catch by Brassell and a reverse-flickery pass from Randall Mackey to Donte Moncrief for the touchdown, making it 17-7. An onside kick recovery by Jeff Scott later, and uh oh.

Mackey followed his first touchdown with a soaring pick under pressure into Bacarri Rambo's hands. A couple plays later, Murray struck Aron White for a 35-yard touchdown. After a slowish start, Murray now has 158 yards and two touchdowns on only 14 attempts -- and at least three of his incompletions were drops.

For discussion, visit UGA blog Dawg Sports and Ole Miss blog Red Cup Rebellion.