Georgia’s Mark Richt knows that it won’t be long before the 2013 football season kicks off.  For Georgia, that means a first-month slate that includes games against Clemson (on the road), South Carolina and LSU is just around the corner.  Richt hopes his players will act accordingly this summer:

“I hope they would have the same commitment every year.  But they are human and they’re going to be hearing about it and thinking about it all year and they know that we can’t wait ’til midseason to be in midseason form.  We’ve got to be there Game One.  So that means you’ve got to be prepared.”

Or not.

Hey, we get what Richt is saying but it was just two years ago — facing a hot seat type of year — that Richt opened up against Boise State and South Carolina.  A pair of losses later and many Dawg fans were howling for the head coach’s job.

By December, Georgia had righted its ship, rolled off 10 wins in a row and secured an East Division championship.

So, yeah, it’s important to be ready early, but the game’s at the end of the schedule count just as much as the games at the start of it.

It’s the BCS Championship Game.  There shouldn’t be any need for extra motivation.  Of course, we all know that’s never actually the case and each and every team that’s ever stepped on a field, court, pitch or rink has convinced itself that it’s been disrespected… either by its opponent or the media or both.

Well, LSU has a new disrespect card to play courtesy of Alabama receiver and return man Marquis Maze:


“What we learned (from the first meeting with LSU) is we beat ourselves.  LSU didn’t do anything to beat us.  We made mental mistakes.  We have to focus on what we have to do this game. … I think we beat ourselves.  We got in the red (zone) five or six times and didn’t execute.  We did something to stop our progression in scoring.”


No disrespect to Maze, but that’s what losers always say.

You can be sure that Saban — in order to prevent his team from doubting itself as it preps to play a team it lost to — is telling his squad exactly what Maze regurgitated back to the press.  And if LSU had lost Game One, Les Miles would be telling his boys that they beat themselves, too. Mental errors.  Poor execution.

Here’s the trouble with that — it’s extremely rare for all 11 men on an offense or defense to execute a play to perfection.  Every man doing exactly what he’s supposed to do at the exact instant he’s supposed to do it?  Rare.  But if the other squad isn’t good enough — or executing well enough in its own right — to take advantage of those errors, it doesn’t matter.

Sure, a Bama player might have failed to make a block here or turned the wrong way there.  But LSU had players in position to take advantage of enough of those errors to win that first matchup.

“We beat ourselves?”  Technically, every losing team can say that.  But in doing so, they fail to give credit to the other team that executed better than they did.  As was the case when LSU beat Alabama 9-6 on its home field back two months ago.

Yeah.  We’ll admit it.  You can probably go ahead and wad these picks up and throw them away.  Picking basketball games in a conference tourney ain’t easy.  Not all teams are equally motivated.  And who knows who’ll sprain an ankle in Game One and not be available in Game Two.

But, like everyone else, we like to make predictions every now and again.  So here’s how we see this year’s SEC Tournament playing out:


Today: 
Georgia over Auburn
Ole Miss over South Carolina
Tennessee over Arkansas
Vanderbilt over LSU

Tomorrow:
Alabama over Georgia
Kentucky over Ole Miss
Florida over Tennessee
Mississippi State over Vanderbilt

Saturday:
Kentucky over Alabama
Florida over Mississippi State

Sunday:
Florida over Kentucky


And if we go 0-11, you can expect this post to mysteriously disappear from the site. 

Good luck to your teams today.