The Georgia Dome will rock beginning this Friday afternoon at 5 p.m. when the renovated indoor facility will host the high school state football championships for the first time. All five games will be televised by Georgia Public Broadcasting, about which Bob Houghton, the general manger of broadcast for the station, said, “For all these years we have been able to conclude the basketball season and now we get to do so with football.”
It’s been a great year of high school football for both GPB and Score Atlanta, as we partnered to webcast 14 games from around the state while GPB televised one of the 10 semifinal games last Friday as we blogged live from the other nine games.
We will do the same type of blogging for the state finals beginning early Friday when Class 2A’s Buford takes on Calhoun and again at 8 p.m. for the local 4A showdown between Marist and Tucker. Saturday’s action will start at 2 p.m. in the afternoon with the A game between Wesleyan and Emanuel County Institute, followed by a 5 p.m. 3A matchup pitting Flowery Branch against Cairo and ending with the Class 5A matchup between Peachtree Ridge and Camden County at 8 p.m. The games will also be streamed live at GPB.org.
NOW, HERE’S SOME PREDICTIONS
Wesleyan dropped down to A so it could compete at a higher level and plays in its first state championship against ECI, who is very familiar with the championship game landscape. But I’m going with Wesleyan here, especially after its impressive win last week over A power Lincoln County.
At 2A, Buford will take out Calhoun, though I wish the Wolves would seriously consider moving up to Class 3A the next time there is a realignment. Buford playing at the 2A level is silly, as the Wolves will win their fourth state title in seven years.
The 3A matchup is a surprising one, as the Flowery Branch Falcons—sitting just a couple hundred feet from the Atlanta Falcons training complex—were a third seed while no one has come close to beating Cairo in the playoffs. This could be the best game of the five but I’m going with the Syrupmakers, who will bring the entire town of around 9,200 to the Dome.
At 4A, Tucker gets its chance to avenge what was a 38-0 loss to Marist in the regular season, though the Tigers should thank the War Eagles for giving them a needed wakeup call. Since their season-opening loss to St. Puis X, Marist has been the best team at 4A but the Tigers are healthy and will win their first-ever state championship.
In the big one at Class 5A, Peachtree Ridge has won 12 straight since losing their first two games of the season, while Camden County is 14-0. I’m going with the Ridge here, as I still think Grayson was the best team at this level and the Lions took them out last week in two overtimes.
So make sure to check out the games on GPB TV and log onto SCOREATL.com for real-time scores throughout the game and to check out our live blogging, which will give insight into what is happening on the field. And if you ever want to go back and watch any of the 14 games we webcasted this season, hit up our site, push the “videos” tab and it will take right there.
RYAN ALREADY ONE OF NFL’S BEST
On my show last Sunday on 790 The Zone, a sports fan called in and criticized me for saying that Falcons rookie Matt Ryan is going to lead this team to a lot of Super Bowls. The caller was still stuck on the memories of Michael Vick, even suggesting that this year’s Falcons team does nothing but fall on its face against good teams. Are you kidding me? Remember, there wasn’t a national NFL writer that thought this team would win more than four games and the caller’s criticism of Ryan was just laughable.
For me, Ryan is already one of the top five quarterbacks in the league and most certainly should have a Pro Bowl spot this year. What he has accomplished hasn’t been done by a rookie quarterback since Ben Roethlisberger hit the NFL in 2004 and you have to go all the way back to Dan Marino in 1983 to find another reasonable comparison. That year, Marino completed 58 percent of his passes and threw for 2,210 yards and 20 touchdowns, leading the Dolphins to a 12-5 record. As a rookie, Roethlisberger completed 66 percent of his passes for 2,621 yards and 17 touchdowns.
After 13 games, Ryan is ninth in the league with a quarterback rating of 92, completing 62 percent of his passes for 2,940 yards and 14 touchdowns. But more importantly, he has brought a team into playoff contention at 8-5 after a 4-12 season last year that included plenty of off-the-field turmoil. By the way, Marino and Roethlisberger both took their teams to the Super Bowl in their sophomore seasons.
EBB TIDE FOR ME
While my Alabama team lost to Florida Saturday in the SEC Championship, it was great to see some old friends, including several that played on the 1985 team, which I was on and wrote a diary about (check out my story on Scoreatl.com by going to the “previous issues” tab and pulling up our SEC Championship section).
While the game lived up to its lofty billing, the Gators were the better team, though I did come away thinking these two teams are going to dominate this conference as long as Urban Meyer is coaching Florida and Nick Saban is at Alabama.
There might not be two better coaches and recruiters in the country, and these two teams will most certainly come back next season ranked in the top five, with the Gators likely being No. 1 if quarterback Tim Tebow returns.
The Gators have no seniors in their two-deep depth chart on defense while Alabama has one of the nation’s smallest groups of departing seniors (only nine scholarship seniors) and gave 13 true freshmen action in at least six games. But again, the difference between these two teams and the rest of the league is Meyer and Saban. The way they prepared their teams for Saturday was tremendous and this may become the nation’s top rivalry.
Rosenberg can be reached at ijrosenberg@scoreatl.com and 404-256-1572.
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