However will they manage?

I expect we'll see variations of this in every Georgia Bulldogs '09 preview that comes out over the next several months. I understand Matt Stafford and Knowshon Moreno were great, and that replacing them as individual players will be difficult/impossible.

Hoooooooowever. The "Moreno/Stafford Era" (taken here to mean 2007 and 2008) wasn't exactly the height of Mark Richt's success in Athens. It featured, by my count, one win over Florida (in a year that Florida lost three other games), one win over Georgia Tech, zero division titles, bowl wins over Happy-To-Be-Here Hawaii and Michigan State, and a lot of unmet expectations. And if you want to be petty and throw in Stafford's freshman year, things look worse.

Of course, most schools would kill for 21 wins and a Sugar Bowl trophy. But Georgia under Mark Richt hasn't been most schools. 2002-2005 saw three division and two conference titles, a bunch of wins over Chan Gailey's All-Stars, and, hell, one win over Florida***.

Obviously, this is not an indictment of Moreno and Stafford as individual players; it is, to be cliché, a team game, and there were problems with other parts of the team. But it's not like the Dawgs were a perennial 7-5 outfit that turned into the '04 USC Trojans once Stafford and Moreno came on board. In assessing the entire team's success over the last two seasons relative to previous years, I don't believe, as Mr. McCartney puts it, that "it's going to be awfully hard for Georgia to emerge from Moreno's and Stafford's shadows this season."


***I know, in four games, but still.