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Florida State players at NFL Combine explain Orange Bowl opt out decisions
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Florida State players at NFL Combine explain Orange Bowl opt out decisions
INDIANAPOLIS — Florida State players say to a man the Orange Bowl would have turned out differently if so many of them had not opted out of playing.
Comments
"INDIANAPOLIS — Florida State players say to a man the Orange Bowl would have turned out differently if so many of them had not opted out of playing."
I opted out of playing golf today, but I know that if I would've decided to play instead of coming to work I would have shot a 70. That's all that matters, I can hang my hat on that 70 that I would have shot if I hadn't opted out of that round of golf. You should have seen me, I was amazing (or I would have been amazing if I had been there)! Adopting this FSU philosophy has taken my golf game to another level. I can hardly wait to opt out of another round and possibly post a score in the 60's. Let me know if you would like to challenge me to a match, and later that day I'll let you know how it turned out. We don't even have to go to the course or take our clubs out of the car!
Ridiculous............
GO DAWGS!
Obviously a culture of brotherhood does not exist at FSU. Tough to lay it all at the feet of these young men. Leadership at the top level of coaching at FSU must take a lot of the blame. Life lessons can be brutal and these young men were not prepared.
Blah blah blah blah
Are these the guys you want in a fox hole next to you?
Excuses.
The FSU players can speculate all they want. Other than injury, there is no justification for the opt-outs IMO. The difference is leadership and culture. UGA is a brotherhood. Our Dawgs understand and believe they are part of something much, much bigger than themselves. That is the difference.
Go Dawgs!!
It's called character.....that is all on the coach. can't have a team without it.
nonetheless, still would have been a beatdown.
Years from now all people will see is that final score 63-3. They can boast all day about being the undefeated ACC champions, but the opt-outs will also get credit for the blow-out. It’s on their resume forever….no excuses or footnotes. Go Dawgs!!!
Any fool knows the Dawgs should have been in the playoffs. Had we been allowed in, we would have won a third consecutive NC, but there were other sinister forces at work... At any rate, Georgia players view being a Dawg as a brotherhood and will not let their team down as long as they can play. Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey epitomize that fact. They played hurt to the point where I honestly thought Ladd was going to fall out from pain. But the desire not to let their teammates down had Ladd and Brock playing until it was physically dangerous to do so. That's mental toughness; that's love; that's the culture at Georgia, and that's why we constantly win. I remember Stetson saying, after we beat Alabama for the NC, "I wasn't going to be the reason we lost." A quote from the movie "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" sums up the mentality at Georgia: "I've seen knights in armor panic at the first hint of battle. And I've seen the lowliest, unarmed squire pull a spear from his own body to defend a dying horse. Nobility is not a birthright. It's defined by one's actions." Rewritten for the Dawgs, it might go something like this: "I've seen five stars panic when they get hit hard the first time. And I've seen the lowliest 3-star or walk-on dominate a 5-star primadonna. Playing time is not a given; it's defined by one's heart and actions."
lol
I wonder how the "we thought we should've been in, but we weren't so we didn't play" really goes over with the NFL. I mean, at some point in a season, a team may be out of playoff contention - does that mean these players will stop playing their best because they aren't going to the playoffs? I wouldn't want that person on my roster.
These comment are hilarious.
It just emphasizes the types of young men Kirby is turning out vs other programs.
If, if, if..the same old lame excuses losing players have used for years, to make themselves feel better after getting embarrassed on the field. I see the excuse is used at uf, as well as fsu..
No one is going to care about the 2024 Orange Bowl. Bowl games stopped being meaningful when the BCS eliminated regional ties and tradition, and even more so with the playoffs when the 4 best teams no longer went to bowls at all. The athletes at the combine right now were in middle school when the playoffs started in 2014 and in many cases their parents probably barely remember football prior to the BCS in 1998 when winning your conference's major bowl (Sugar for SEC, Cotton for SWC, Orange for Big 8, Rose for Big 10 and Pac-10) was "almost" a national championship.
UGA fans this time around are tubthumping because it keeps the "we were the best team and were robbed by not being given a playoff spot over teams who had better records, won a conference title and actually beat other contenders because we won the 2021 and 2022 national titles and oh never mind the fact that we lost like 27 NFL draft picks and half a dozen potential starters to the portal off those teams but trust me the 2023 version is just as good" narrative going. It makes the playoff committee - and for some the SECCG referees - the bad guys instead of pointing out that a "not as good as 2021 and 2022 but still loaded" UGA had no business losing to Saban's worst Alabama team since 2007. So that is the point of pretending that this Orange Bowl matters more than, say, the 2019 Sugar Bowl, where a 4 loss Texas dominated UGA (no claiming otherwise, the game was 28-7 in the 4th).
Best evidence of this? How @MikeGriffith and UGA fans still claim that UGA was one of the 4 best teams in 2018 and should have made the playoff. So yeah, good luck making the case that the 2024 Orange Bowl somehow mattered in some grand scheme of things when the 2019 Sugar Bowl obviously didn't.
It isn't as if FSU's players did anything unusual by opting out either. Christian McCaffrey created the precedent for opting out of big bowl games when he skipped the 2016 Sun Bowl. A ton of LSU players sat out the 2019 Fiesta Bowl (against UCF who had a 25 game win streak at the time ... yes this was the same LSU team that beat the alleged playoff-worthy UGA by 3 TDs in 2018 ... hilariously @MikeGriffith and other UGA fans who still insist that UGA was one of the 4 best teams in the country in 2018 ignore that UGA was only the 3rd best team in the SEC).
NFL scouts didn't care about McCaffrey sitting out: he was the #8 overall pick. They didn't care about LSU's Greedy Williams in 2019: he still went in the top 50. They didn't care about Ohio State's Chris Olave and Jaxon Smith-Njigba sitting out the Rose Bowl or the playoff game against UGA: they still went #11 and #20 in the draft respectively. So with this you guys are weaving a narrative that goes against the reality of big time football.
Everyone knew as soon as the 2023 schedule came out that UGA was going to have a one game season: Alabama in the SECCG. Yet Kirby Smart chose to play a still-injured Brock Bowers in a 38-10 blowout against a 4 loss Tennessee team. Not only did Bowers leave the field limping but went back into the game. UGA also accelerated his rehab just to get him into the Tennessee game in the first place. So shutting him down entirely those two weeks, still beating Tennessee by 3 scores without him, working him in slowly against Georgia Tech so he would have been closer to 100% against Bama would have cost UGA what, exactly? Instead he misses the Georgia Tech game and against Bama we saw why ... only 5 catches for 53 yards and 0 TDs against the same defense that 3 guys from Texas who will get taken after Bowers in this draft torched. But given a choice between questioning Kirby Smart for playing Bowers in a meaningless game against Tennessee - yes meaningless because if UGA loses to Tennessee but beats Bama they still make the playoff! - you all rather predictably talk about the value of bowl games despite just 5 years ago claiming that the Sugar Bowl loss to Texas didn't matter: you were still a top 4 team.
At least for now. Because once the 2024 season starts it is going to be all about beating Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, Ole Miss, Clemson and Oklahoma. 63-3 is going to be in the rearview mirror for UGA fans just like it already is for everyone else.
These comments and the article are mainly focused on the comments made by the FSU players. McCaffrey, Williams, Olave, and Njigba didn’t talk trash about what would’ve happened if they decided to play.