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Georgia's field of nightmares
Posted: Friday June 23, 2000 07:38 AM
Most coaches are professional worriers. They worry about their depth chart. They worry about whether their best athletes will keep their noses in the books and out of trouble. They worry about job security. Way, way down the list, they worry about whether they will have grass on which to play their games. But Georgia coach Jim Donnan's university has spent about $700,000 during the last 11 months just renovating its field. Not for artificial turf. Not for some strain of grass created in a lab. They've spent about a bowl-check worth of money trying to grow grass. This is not news to anyone who has been to Georgia's garden center in recent years. Americans spent $17.4 billion on their lawns and gardens last year, according to the Professional Lawn Care Association of America, which may have been the only consultant that Georgia didn't employ in trying to figure out what happened to its field. Over the last four years, the grass between the hedges at Sanford Stadium has been torn up more often than Ki-Jana Carter's knees. In 1996 groundskeepers ripped out the hedges that line the field so Olympic soccer games could be played there. At the conclusion of the Olympics, the university planted new hedges. Last year, the stadium began having drainage problems. A university landscape engineer detected a sewage-like smell at field level. It's not as if the stadium stunk -- insert joke about the Georgia defense here -- but something had gone wrong. After last season, as my CNNSI.com colleague Stewart Mandel first told you, the university brought in three different engineering concerns to try to figure out why the field wouldn't drain. As is often the case with experts, they didn't agree on the cause of the problem, and to this day no one really knows what happened. Georgia just decided to rip everything out and start over. This spring workers rebuilt the pipes and put down layers of various porous materials -- insert joke about the Georgia defense here. Over the last few days, during one of the biggest droughts in the southeast in decades, they put down new sod. The good news is that on Wednesday afternoon a rain shower soaked the new grass. The university is confident that the field will be ready for the home opener Sept. 2 against Georgia Southern. If you believe in an afterlife, think about this: None of these problems began until after the university moved the graves of all of its UGA mascots during the 1996 renovations. Looks to me as if the dogs wanted to stay where they were. Long lines in LubbockAt Texas Tech, there's a different sort of sewage problem. Jones Stadium is undergoing a $75 million renovation. During the spring, construction workers ripped out all the bathrooms on the west side of the stadium. Getting the structure ready for the first home game on Sept. 2 would have been difficult enough. But a few weeks ago, the Red Raiders decided to play host to New Mexico in the first Hispanic College Fund Classic on Aug. 26. Think about it -- Texas Tech has eight home games and half its fans will miss them. They'll be standing in line at parking lot Port-a-Potties, or at the gas station down the street. Mississippi is down a handOle Miss is one of those schools where depth will always be an issue. The Rebels play in a relatively sparsely populated state, which they share with two other Division I-A teams. That makes the departure of veteran wide receiver Maurice Flournoy a tough one. Flournoy got crossways with coach David Cutcliffe's rule book, and has been "disappeared," as they say. Without him, the Rebels have only one receiver who caught as many as 20 passes last season. That receiver, Heisman hopeful tailback Deuce McAllister, already has enough to do. The load must be picked up by junior Jamie Armstrong, who caught 17 passes last season. Armstrong has one thing in his favor: He was a high school teammate of Ole Miss quarterback Romaro Miller. Ivan Maisel is a Sports Illustrated senior writer who covers college football and is a frequent contributor to CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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