Cold Water on the Hot Debates

I guess I knew this was going to happen, but hoped it wouldn't. Still, here we are.

People think I'm crazy for saying Aaron Murray is still the favorite to win the QB job. Others are talking about how Murray will eventually transfer because Zach Mettenberger will win the QB job. Others have floated even more ridiculous thoughts after Saturday's G-Day game.

Folks, I don't mean to sound condescending when I say this, but you're reading waaaaaay too much into one scrimmage.

First off, nothing we saw Saturday was real. The offense was kept under wraps so the defense could remain even more under wraps. Mark Richt didn't want to show anything from a defensive standpoint, and to ensure that could be the case, the offense was tailored to remain vanilla, too. So even if you want to call everything else equal -- which it wasn't -- all we saw was three quarterbacks tasked with managing the most basic concepts without seeing how they'd respond to anything more complex -- or any pressure from the defense.

You may not be the biggest Aaron Murray fans, and you may not want to believe anything you haven't seen with your own eyes, but every report I've had from a player or coach for the past year has said how well Murray does with picking up the more nuanced concepts of running an offense. Saturday did not play to his strengths.

Moreover, there's a lot more to evaluating the QBs -- or anyone on the team -- than the stat lines. No, Murray didn't look great. And yes, Mettenberger looked very good.

But look at the previous two scrimmages and their stat lines are virtually identical. Then remember Murray only got to throw three passes in the first half Saturday, and Mettenberger worked the entire game against the No. 2 defensive unit. Oh, and that No. 2 unit wasn't even a true second-team since a decent portion of the second-team actually played on the first team, too, so that two players in a relatively close position battle both got reps with the 1s.

But even all of that is nothing to worry too much about. Because the truth is, G-Day has virtually no relation to what happens in the fall. It's just something to talk about until August gets here.

Here's a little something from Marc Weiszer to shed some light on why you might not want to write off a QB who had a poor performance on G-Day:

"David Greene, who won more games in major college football than any quarterback not named Colt McCoy, didn’t exactly light it up in his first couple of G-Day showings.

Greene and Cory Phillips combined to complete 17 of 45 passes in 2001 and Greene completed 2 of 13 in the 2002 G-Day game."

But hey, that Greene character was a bum anyway, right? Oh, and that fellow who won more games than Greene, he thinks pretty highly of Aaron Murray.

I went back through the blog archives, and here are a few things I wrote after last year's G-Day game…

-- "The defense has played with a chip on its shoulder, a goal to be reached and a mission to put the memories of last season's failures far behind them. It showed during a dominant defensive performance Saturday that saw just 16 points scored in Georgia's annual G-Day game."

-- Carlton Thomas was the breakout offensive player of the game and we all thought he was in line for a lot of playing time.

-- I wrote about how deep the O line would be and how dominant a group it might be in the fall.

-- In a links column, I actually wrote these words: "Mark Bradley says there's a number of reasons to be optimistic about the Bulldogs following yesterday's final spring workout."

I can only assume that was the last time Bradley offered much optimism about 2009.

In fact, please please please go back and read the column Bradley wrote after last year's G-Day. It's stunning to see how little the stories of the spring corresponded to what happened in the fall.

(And that's no knock on Bradley... we all wrote essentially the same things.)

And if you're wondering, you can find the stat lines from last year's G-Day game HERE.

If you're looking for correlations between G-Day and the season, there really weren't any -- aside from Justin Houston's performance, perhaps. Then again, two weeks after that game, he was suspended.

So, while I know it's a long offseason and we all need things to talk about, let's please stop short of making grand pronouncements about the future based on one scrimmage. There's a lot more to what goes into these decisions than that.