With mere weeks to September 1 and Georgia's first game of the 2018 football season, every Dawg blogger from Athens to Atlanta to Timbuktu is giving you their 2 cents as to who will start at what position. They offer depth charts, positions where there is a wealth of experienced players and others where underclassmen must step up.
They talk about JUCO stars and graduate transfers now on the roster. They give you Vegas odds on how many carries or tackles each of them will log by end of season. When they run out of minutia like that they tell you who to keep an eye on in the 2023 recruiting class.
One Dawg Blawg is not about any of that. One Dawg Blawg is about answers - though we make no guarantee these answers are or will be correct by the time what is now the future becomes the past.
One answer we are pretty confident to be correct addresses seemingly everyone's question:
"Who will start?"
One Dawg Blawg answer:
"Who cares?"
When it is all said and done, if UGA beats Austin Peay or South Carolina or Alabama, will anyone remember or care which 11 players took the field on the first set of offensive or defensive downs?
Will Charlie Woerner or Isaac Nauta themselves give a rat's arse if the other was among those first 11, yet they came in on the next play, next set of downs or next possession?
One Dawg Blog declares the official answer to these two questions above to be an emphatic "No".
Somewhere along the line it became pretty clear that current and future UGA football players will have a "team first" attitude as long as Kirby Smart is the head coach. This inherently means that whoever "starts" does not matter in the least.
By contrast, one person claiming to be a genuine Bulldogs fan recently posted this:
"I hope we drop the first 2 games of the year so that they’ll bench Fromm and start Fields."
Fortunately this person is only a contributor to a rather extremist UGA football social media group and not a blogger. He obviously did not get the "team first" memo. Hopefully his statement will be an obstacle if and when he ever applies for a blogger's license.
We include that little digression only to emphasize the absurdity of the starter vs non-starter discussion. That in no way implies that if you still care who starts you are as demented as the guy above.
Now we must address the new redshirt rule, something we are monumentally unqualified to do. On this subject we have only questions and no answers. And our questions center around the four game only limit and around only one position: quarterback.
Remember, schools have a max of four games in which someone can play and not have that count as a year of eligibility.
Let's make an irrelevant assumption that Jacob Fromm starts at QB. If there is a whiff of interest in redshirting Justin Fields, does it not make sense to play him sparingly? But when do you sparingly play him? Early in the season or late?
Does Georgia let Fromm get in his groove by playing him for most or all of what should be the equivalent of a scrimmage against Austin Peay? Or do they play Justin Fields in that game to see what he can do?
If we really want to see what Fields can do, would it not make better sense to insert him against game two South Carolina?
Of course, were Fromm to go down for even a possession, unless Georgia had the game safely in hand Fields would go in for as long as needed. If that amounted to one or more games the redshirt issue would no doubt become a moot point.
One Dawg Blawg Sincerely Apologizes.
One Dawg Blawg apologizes for actually wandering into a serious strategic issue like redshirt decisions. This suggests we think we know what we are talking about when we repeatedly insist we do not.
We shall try not to let it happen again.
Until next week or sometime approximately 7 days from now ...
... signing off, and How 'Bout Them Dawgs!
