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What latest wide receiver news means for the present and future of Georgia football
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admin
What latest wide receiver news means for the present and future of Georgia football
ATHENS — If there is a position that hasn’t been up to standard this fall for Georgia, it’s wide receiver.
Comments
WOw! WE're resorting to click bait now!
Just curious…..how is it click bait?
How do other teams have so many of these 5* freshman come in and play right away and produce? I know blocking is a huge part of the job for receivers at UGA but it always seems our young receivers sit for at least a year, sometimes two?
GA Tech has a receiver in the TP. A good one too! GA tech picture of an offensive player. We're on defense.
Beck still has a year of eligibility. He must weigh injuries vs improving his stats. If he stays, Gunner may stay but expect some other QBs to leave. Nothing new. It has happened many times in the past. No scholarship QB wants to ride the bench his entire career or chance it on 1 year of potential playing time.
kind of slow on the news today aren't we? I saw where maybe the DB David Daniel-Sisavanh put his name into the transfer portal, is this confirmed?
Beck has to go. Gunnar or someone else for next year. No confidence in Beck.
"which produced the likes of Ladd McConkey, Jermaine Burton, Marcus Rosemy-Jacksaint and Arian Smith."
I generally try to avoid joining the grammar/style policing brigade. The DawgNation staff is expected to crank out a tremendous amount of copy and apparently without the benefit of a copy editor.
But please, please, PUH-LEEZ stop using "the likes of" every time you're going to list players. It's an overused cliche in the first place and most of the time it's being used incorrectly. It's annoying as heck.
“We evaluate the transfer portal on who fits our culture more than we do who fits our talent level. There’s tons of talented guys out there. We just want to find people that want to fit our culture and really our ethic because it’s not a place to go to if you’re just looking for sheer numbers. I mean, you’ve got to want to win, and you’ve got to want to make sacrifices for the team here.”
Left unsaid: Money. Is this not (at least partly) a case of UGA ponying up the NIL for wide receivers?
@CandlerPark Not really because UGA's issues recruiting WRs long precede NIL and even precede the transfer portal. I mentioned this the other day: the most statistically productive WR in the Kirby Smart era only averaged 51 yards per game. This has been "discussed" on Dawgnation more than a few times. Usually the response is to deride the WRs as prima donnas etc. https://www.dawgnation.com/football/sunday-reader/georgia-football-recruiting-why-couldnt-uga-sign-an-elite-wr-in-2022/W4Z2HIP5MJEQNOS22A6OWODTME/
So if a WR can get basically the same NIL money for catching the ball 8 times a game at Texas A&M as he can get for catching the ball 4 times a game at Georgia, he is going to go to A&M because he will enjoy himself a lot more and have a much better shot at getting drafted higher than the 6th or 7th round.
Kirby Smart has produced 0 first round pick WRs and only 3 second round picks. He has produced only 2 starting NFL WRs: Ladd McConkey (a rookie) and George Pickens. This won't change in the 2025 draft - where some team rolling the dice on Arian Smith's 4.28 speed in the 5th or 6th round will be UGA's only shot to have a WR drafted at all - or in the 2026 draft without UGA getting a Jameson Williams type from the portal. Compare that with his NFL track record for the other positions.
Yes, UGA is having more success at recruiting WRs now but only because recruits have seen Carson Beck in the Mike Bobo offense for the past 2 years. That will give them a shot at better talent in the portal also. Were UGA still relying on a few mostly safe passes a game like they did during the Fromm and SB IV eras, stuff like the link above would still go on.
We need to pursue Eric Singleton—the EX GT receiver —he's a good one. Don't know where he's from, but you would think that playing in Athens would be a big step up for him.
I don't disagree with any of that. Great comment.
I was thinking about to NIL's potential impact on UGA being able to pull top receivers out of the transfer portal. Glory and money aren't exclusive motivators for today's professi- … er, I mean, amateur … athletes, though both are bound to be important. And it does seem that NIL plays a particularly big role in the TP.
The WR transfers we picked up for 2023 were the 10th and #11th ranked players in the portal, although we lost the #4 guy (per On3). This year, at WR, we picked up #45 and #156 overall.
Part of what happened is that the departure of McConkey, Rosemy-Jacksaint, Bowers et al changed the dynamic even more than anticipated, and losing Rara and Young to expulsion/suspension didn't help. The extra pressure didn't help Smith and Lovett in particular.
But what if any of the top WRs in the portal (all SEC)guys) had come to Georgia? As it happens, Evan Stewart (48 catches), Isaiah Bond (33) or Juice Wells (27) weren't the go-to guys for their new teams this year. Amid the Bulldog butterfingers, I'm guessing they would have gotten a lot more touches — and probably upped the game for the other guys.
It's not like we don't throw the ball a lot. If McConkey had been healthy for more than six or seven games in '24, he would have put up elite receiving numbers.
On the other hand, we don't know how much Phil Knight's fortune and Texas oil money brought Stewart and Evans over. There's not a lot of transparency in NIL.