Moving to the front

Ching, as he always does, gives us an excellent rundown of yesterday's teleconference with Coach Richt.

Man, I am fired up. These are just excerpts:

On whether he expects any of the juniors to leave:
I’d be very surprised at this point, just talking to Dannell, talking to Brannan Southerland…Jeffrey…I don’t think any one of those three guys are interested at all. We had a team meeting to talk about academics Sunday night prior to classes beginning and with the new meeting, there’s a new seating arrangement and our seniors always move to the front. And I think they enjoy sitting in the front and they look back and were kinda reminiscing that it wasn’t that long ago that they were sitting at the top…at the back of the room – I say the top because it’s tiered seating…and they were kinda looking up and back and going, ‘Man, it seemed like yesterday I was way back there and here I am on the front.’ It was kinda that realization that they’re in a leadership role now. I think they enjoy being there and they’re excited about the opportunity to lead the team.

On playing LSU and Florida on back-to-back weeks in the fall:
I’m not looking forward to that at all. I don’t know who was in charge of that. Sometimes the SEC schedule, they just hand it to you and there’s not much you can do about that part. Your out-of-conference games, you have some say. But I would not say that’s ideal. I doubt that anybody in the country would envy that situation.

On the 2008 schedule:
It does look like a very grueling schedule, and then you add Arizona State at Arizona State, and they’re a fine football team. And in the West, you’ve got Auburn, Alabama, LSU. That’s probably the toughest draw, or one of the toughest draws, you could get in the West. And then of course, you have the usual suspects in the East. And we always finish with Georgia Tech. It’s definitely gonna be a schedule that I would imagine to be preseason ranked as one of the toughest in the country. The computer polls I guess do take some strength of schedule into consideration, and I think voters, when they do even the human vote, even though they may not say, ‘Hey, strength of schedule is a criteria for my decision,’ I think it always comes into play.

On whether they need to do anything different this offseason because of all the preseason No. 1 talk:
Not really, but I think if guys want to start talking about it out in the open, they’ve got to understand there’s a lot of responsibility that goes with it – mainly work, preparation. They’ve gotta understand that those types of seasons don’t happen on accident, they happen because people pay the price. If that motivates our guys to work even harder, then that’s great.