What a win. Patton Robinette came in relief of ACS at quarterback and really got the job done with a lot of help from Jerron Seymour, JMatt and Jonathan Krause, who had an amazing game. Linebacker Darreon Herring (10 tackles, three pass breakups an interception negated by penalty) and the defense were stellar. The defense held Aaron Murray to 114 passing yards on 16-of-28 passing with no TDs and one int. Just a tremendous effort by a rejuvenated group of football players who had a week off before Georgia and just got to work and got better. ACS may be out for the season with what looked like a knee injury. No report on that yet. But Patton looks like a highly capable replacement. Patton, a redshirt freshman who had committed to North Carolina two years ago, but didn’t attend their classes and changed to us, is 6″5″, 225, a prototype quarterback. He scored a perfect 36 on the ACT and also finished with a perfect 4.0 GPA in high school. He’s an outstanding kid too. Listened to him after the game in an interview on the vu website. Great kid. Quarterback is in excellent hands the rest of this season and in the future with Patton, Johnny McCrary (frosh 4-star) and K.J. Carta-Samuels, a four-star coming in next year. We also have another high three-star, Trace McSorley, coming in next year. So we’re good a quarterback. Patton needs to stay healthy. His backup is Joshua Grady, who I’d love to see us get on the field, but at wide receiver. But Josh may be OK if Patton gets hurt. We would probably have to take off McCrary’s redshirt if Patton got banged up. Anyway, very hopeful that Patton can stay healthy and improve even more this week against A&M. We moved to 4-3 overall and 1-3 in conference. Loved the fake field goal at the two that resulted in the always reliable Carey Spear running it in for a score. That was awesome. Didn’t love the trickeration play on the formation with half the offense on the left side of the field. Georgia had that one figured out, intercepted ACS’s pass, and ran it in for a score. Thought that might be devastating.
But it wasn’t. The team, down 10 in the fourth quarter, just never let up. Jerron was awesome. He just does something positive every time he touches the ball. Jonathan Krause made a huge catch on the sideline. JMatt played like he always does which is stellar. And I thought our defense was outstanding. We got a couple of fumble recoveries, one by star cornerback Andre Hal and another on a fumbled punt by Georgia which backup safety Torren McGaster recovered. I really like Torren. He’s going to be a good safety for us in the future. May play some corner too. Just a tremendous job of preparing the team by James and the staff. Loved what Coach Shoop did on defense. Really an excellent game plan. We got great pressure on Murray and did a really good job of tackling. We didn’t allow any big plays, which was huge. Kenny Ladler played his usual solid game getting nine tackles, second on the team to Darreon, and corner Steven Clarke and safety Javon Marshall had seven apiece. Javon intercepted Murray to ice the game. We got good pressure on Murray even though we didn’t sack him. He was under duress a lot of the time. We had four tackles for loss. We shut down their running game pretty well. Just played a physically tough football game. Very, very proud of our guys.
OK, A&M this Saturday at 12:21 PM ET/11:21 AM CT on the SEC Network. Johnny Football is pretty banged up from the Auburn game, so that could help. Don’t want him to be severely hurt by any means, but it’ll help if he’s somewhat bothered in his right shoulder which he hurt Saturday. Mike Evans is a load at wide receiver; just a phenomenal football player and they’ve got playmaker after playmaker. It’s going to be hard at College Station, but if Manziel is not 100 percent, and we keep playing defense like we played Saturday, we can score on their defense and possibly pull this out. Our team is now playing at the level we expected them to at the beginning of the season. We were banged up pretty good going into the Mizzou game, and they’re stellar on offense particularly with James Franklin at quarterback; their James Franklin not ours. But they are a very good football team even with backup Maty Mauk at quarterback. They are loaded with playmakers on offense, their oline is outstanding and their defense is tied for first in the country in interceptions with 14. They have a good defense this year. They have it all, and Franklin will be back before the season is over, so they’ve got a shot to do some special things. South Carolina visits Columbia this weekend, so that should be very interesting. 7 PM ET/6 CT on ESPN or ESPN2, to be determined in the middle of the week.
A group I forgot to mention is our offensive line. They are playing exceptionally well. Wes Johnson, Joe Townsend, Andrew Jelks, Jake Bernstein, Barrett Gouger and the other guys are really getting it done. I liked this group coming into the season, and they are living up to their billing. Great group up front.
Some more good news came on the recruiting front. We received two commits after Saturday’s game. High three star cornerback Amani Oruwariye (6″1″, 180) committed to us. Then solid three-star wide receiver Kameron Uter committed to us as well. Amani, from Gaither High School in Tampa, is an 89 three-star, almost a four-star, by 247 sports, and Kameron is an 87 three-star, that’s a pretty high three-star ranking by 247. Rivals has Amani as a 5.6 three-star and doesn’t rate Kameron yet. But Kameron is 6’4″, 205 and can really catch the football. Watched film on both. Amani is a ball hawk. He intercepts a lot of passes and he’s fast and physical. Kameron catches everything and is a very physical runner after he catches the ball. Like both of these pickups a lot.
We now have 20 commits. Amani’s commit gives us seven defensive back commits; three safeties and four corners. Kameron was our first wide receiver commit, but we are in the market for more. Names to keep an eye on are 88 three-star Trevon Lee (6’1″, 175 Fort Lauderdale), four-star Travis Rudolph (West Palm Beach, Fl. 6’1″, 185, it’d be a coup to get him), 88, three-star Michael Gallup from Monroe, Georgia and 87, three-star Emanuel Bell from Powder Springs, Georgia. One other guy is 82, three-star Chris Taylor, who is presently a Duke commit. A grade of 90 is a four-star, so these high three-stars are all excellent players. Jay Cutler, Earl Bennett and Casey Hayward were all three-stars. We have a nice group of wide receivers in this year’s freshman class led by four-star Jordan Cunningham, who I’d like to see get the ball more. He’s playing. Jordan is 6’3″, so we need to find him to give ourselves a third option at wide out. Have heard good things about freshman Latevius Rayford. Carlos Burse and DeAndre Woods were highly rated recruits and Gerald Perry has 4.4 speed and had a solid three-star rating. We’ll see if we keep the redshirts on some of those guys. JMatt is incredible and Krause was brilliant on Saturday. Trent Pruitt made a really nice short catch and run. Trent might be able to help us. Would like to see Wesley Tate get some more opportunities at running back. Jerron is excellent, but Wes can still help us a lot. Would like to see more out of tight end. Really like Steven Scheu. The staff seems to really like Kris Kentera, and maybe Kris can keep getting better. Like Steven though.
Anyway, outstanding team win on Saturday. Congratulations to James and the coaches and the team. What a fantastic effort. Now onto College Station as the 2013 journey continues. Looks like we are now definitely committed to excellence.
Jay hurt his groin yesterday against the Redskins when he got tackled and it doesn’t look great right now. The Bears are expecting the worst when the MRI comes in this afternoon, but you never know. It could be a mild strain. I remember playing football in high school and going through three-a-days in the summer and my groins being really sore from practice. It’s a pretty painful injury if it’s severe and pretty debilitating. Hopefully, it’s not severe. There are a lot of classifications of the injury. Hopefully this one is mild. But Josh McCown came in to replace Jay and was outstanding. He got it to our playmakers Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffrey, Martellus Bennett and Earl had some nice catches. I liked what I saw from Josh, so if Jay is out for some time, Josh looks like he can get the job done. We lost 45-41 to the Redskins at D.C. Defense had a lot of trouble stopping RG III and their offense. Lance Briggs and Charles Tillman going out with injuries didn’t help. Anyway, gotta regroup. We go to Lambeau in two weeks to face the Packers on Monday Night football at 8:30 PM ET/7:30 CT on ESPN. We’re 4-3, the Pack are 4-2 and the Lions are 4-3, so we have our work cut out for us. Still like this team a lot. We’ve got playmakers on offense and a good offensive line, and Josh looks like he’ll be good if Jay is out for some time. Our defense is a lot better than we played yesterday. We have a bye this week.
Proud of our guys and the Bears will get it back together. More later in the week.