Moonday Moosings

sponsored by Chick-Fil-A

-Hey, I don't know if you guys saw it on Fox Sports prior to the game but they did a nice special "At Home with Mark Richt". I've seen Richt briefly in person on a couple occasions when he was a normal guy, seen him when he's 'on' in front of national TV, and seen him doing this little fluff piece and he's the same guy every time. If they replay it, set the Tivo, it is neat to watch him at home with the kids and the dogs.

-The Moreno leap was famously left off ESPN and there was some flap about it with ESPN blaming the tape that Fox sent and Fox saying ESPN had their own feed and could've shown whatever they wanted. Anyway, the whole thing is irritating and I try not to be a goof and buy into conspiracies but the morons at ESPN (Holtz and May) really DO seem to hold some malice there.

I normally don't put much stock in these articles followed by random comments from random people but there was a few interesting comments here on ESPN. The actual writer Chris Low:

Moreno for Heisman: The hottest Heisman Trophy candidate right now in the SEC isn't Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. Nope, it's Knowshon Moreno, who ripped off a couple of runs for the ages Saturday in Georgia's 56-17 drubbing of Central Michigan. His 52-yard touchdown run (one of three scoring runs) was pretty sweet. But he had a non-scoring, 29-yard run in the third quarter that will be one of those plays you see over and over again all season long. It was that good. Moreno hurdled Central Michigan safety Vince Agnew in the open field and sailed right over Agnew's helmet with his legs stretched out as far as they could go. Afterward, his teammates were simply in awe and couldn't believe what they'd just seen.

Some comments were interesting

Knowshon is the best. Chris Wells shouldn't even be named in the same sentence as Moreno.

OK, I am a Gator alum. But Knowshown Moreno's leap is something to behold.

superman may wear tebow pjs but tebow wears knowshon pjs

I'm not saying there's an anti-uga bias at ESPN, but if there was, how would it look different than this?

Richt: "Ol' Knowshon, he's a special kid. We saw him do that once before in practice and um, I redshirted him anyway. That wasn't very smart."

“I think the one thing that showed up more than I thought was Vanderbilt is a very fast football team,” Richt said. “Their team speed is nothing like it used to be. If there was any advantage in speed, it looked like Vanderbilt to me. They played well."

- You know what, though? The most telling play to me ended up being overturned. When Miko caught the ball and then bounced it on the ground, who was there ready to gobble it up in the end zone? Knowshon, of course, similar to recovering the fumble against Tech last year. The play was ruled down, but still, this kid has a level of football instinct I don't know if we've ever seen.

- I'm not going to be overly critical of our D. This seems to happen where the offense comes out and everyone worries about the D then the real games start and the D starts winning close games for us. One thing that does bother me is the kickoff situation. What in the world? From the Sporting News:

"He's not real consistent with the kickoffs," Richt said after a 56-17 rout of the Chippewas. "He kicked one out of bounds, and that gives the other team the ball at the 40. He didn't always kick it where he's supposed to, and they ran it back out past the 30 and 40. Some of it was the coverage, but a lot of it was hang time. You've got to give guys a chance to get down in coverage."

David Hale writes:

I tried to ask Blair Walsh what was wrong in the kicking game, and he said he was under direct orders not to talk about kickoffs. No kidding.

-Check out a very nice post by the Senator: http://blutarsky.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/when-the-early-stats-dont-match-the-early-narratives/