Georgia Southern Vs. Georgia: Bulldogs still practicing in pads

The Georgia Bulldogs will practice in full pads later into the week than usual as they prepare to face the Georgia Southern Eagles, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Wednesday was the third straight full-contact practice for the Bulldogs, and Thursday will also feature full-contact efforts. Thursday is ordinarily a non-contact, walk-through day, but head coach Mark Richt thinks the teams needs the extra time:

"I don't know if we'll have them on the whole time, but I think we need some more work still. [Defensive coordinator] Coach [Todd] Grantham believes we need more work in full pads, so we're going to do that. Hopefully we'll get as close to game speed as we can. We know it's not the same but we're getting there."

Georgia is spending all of their time and effort preparing for Georgia Southern's triple-option offense and the cut-blocks that accompany it. The Bulldogs have also made moves at personnel, as the are also aware that following their game against the Eagles comes another triple-option offense, the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Richt indicated that the outcome of Saturday's game would determine how much pad work is done in the following week's practice, but stressed that this kind of preparation was key:

"You can't hardly practice against it without putting pads on. We just feel like the best thing we can do is teach our scout team to go full speed and try to do it just the way they do it the best they can. Normally we're not interested in cut-blocking our teammates. But if we don't do it and just try to act like we're doing it or do anything less than full speed, we're just going to be in really big trouble. We might still be in trouble. We'll just have to wait and see."

In a normal week, UGA has full-contact practices only on Tuesday.