Photo by Jamie Wallis
Georgia fans feel pretty good about things in football right now. It feels like everything is rolling our way. From recruiting to programming to the actual results of most games, the Georgia football fan leads something of a charmed life right now. (Overtimes notwithstanding) Even with the recent loss of Zamir White for the 2018 season, it feels like there's just not much to worry about.
You could argue that Georgia football is an elite program, despite the lack of national championships in recent memory. It almost feels like a matter of time now when one or more of those little gold trophies will float its way to the trophy case in the Butts-Mehre building, doesn't it?
UGA is blessed with a number of truly elite programs. Outside of football, we have incredible success in swimming and track & field to name a small sample size. Women's gymnastics has been elite in recent history, winning five consecutive national titles just a decade ago, and it feels like we're trying to get back to that level.
One program right now that feels so close to elite status, but can't quite crack through, is our women's basketball team.
Now I am in no way complaining about the job that Coach Joni Taylor is doing, nor am I belittling her program. To say that a program is, "just a shade short of elite" shouldn't be an insult so much as an acknowledgement.
But the reality is that we are not elite in that program yet, despite some excellent work and progress under Taylor.
I'm going to arbitrarily define some tiers to elitism here, and you can disagree with me at your leisure. I would say that we are a tier three team in women's basketball right now. Tier one is Connecticut. Just...Connecticut.
UConn has won how many of the last several national titles? They just recently wrapped up a three-season winning streak.
There is nobody even close to them right now. I know they've failed to appear in the last two title games, but come on. You would be insane to argue that UConn isn't the top tier of women's basketball right now and they sit on the pinnacle all by themselves.
Tier two is home to teams like South Carolina and Notre Dame, teams that have recently won titles and are still in competition, the teams that are just nipping at UConn's heels. They can't really consistently unseat the beast, but they are right there with them and can at least make UConn sweat.
Where Georgia comes in, though, is up next in Tier three. Georgia is a solid team that will win its share of games and will make noise in the postseason, but nobody outside of Athens expects a deep championship run out of the Lady Dawgs.
That's not to say that we aren't capable of making a run, but nobody would expect it.
If you doubt my summation of things so far, let me throw one name out there to prove my point: Olivia Nelson-Ododa.
I'm not an expert in women's athletics, I'm not the end-all, be-all when it comes to UGA women's basketball, but I covered Nelson-Ododa for two seasons of high school basketball and I saw her develop as one of the best women's basketball players in the country.
You could go beyond that and say that she's one of the best in the world. After all, she did represent Team USA in the FIBA Women's Basketball Championships. That's...that's kind of significant.
With my expertise in analyzing talent, let me tell you what makes Nelson-Ododa so good: She's fast, she's tall, and she's aggressive.
There's no doubt that Nelson-Ododa has a natural advantage with her height, her height has clearly benefited her in her athletic pursuits, but she is much more than a tall girl. She has the drive to excel as an athlete, she wants the ball, and not just on offense.
I would argue that she uses her height better on defense than on offense, and that's a rarity. Not to say she can't shoot, she averaged better than 20 points per game as a sophomore in high school and led her team to the Class-AAAAA state championship game.
Had the goals not been set up improperly (good job, GHSA), who knows how that one-point loss could have gone?
So for an athlete at Winder-Barrow High School, a girl who was raised just 20 minutes out of Athens, you would think it would be no problem for the Lady Dawgs and Coach Taylor to come in and swoop up this local talent, right?
And had the living legend Geno Auriemma not gotten involved...maybe.
Geno got in the way like Olivia would on the court. Curse him and his perfect hair!
Much to my chagrin, Nelson-Ododa will be starting her freshman year at UConn this fall. She will participate with a team of great athletes and will hopefully contribute early and very likely win a national championship with the Lady Huskies.
The simple fact is that UGA could not compete with UConn for a recruit at her level. Auriemma can walk into any gymnasium in the country that he wants to and get his girl because UConn is at that elite level.
The class of 2007 saw a similar player in Maya Moore. She graduated from Collins Hill High School (blegh) and skipped town for the icy wilds of Connecticut, too.
Even then with Andy Landers, a man who had almost just as much credibility as Auriemma, the Lady Dawgs just couldn't nab that elite local talent away from the jaws of that perfectly swooped back hair.
We've gotten spoiled with football lately, where elite players from the state of Georgia wouldn't dream of leaving to play for someone else. Sure, you can't get everyone, but the Dawgs have picked up the vast majority of the state's Top 10 players over the last several years.
Now I will admit that it isn't a one-to-one comparison between football and basketball, obviously. Football has to add about 20 to 25 recruits every year while basketball only worries about picking up three or four, unless you're facing some serious attrition. There's only a 15-man roster in men's basketball, and there's often a smaller roster in women's basketball even though the official size is the same.
So you can't pick up more than a couple of the top players every year. Obviously.
But that makes getting someone like Nelson-Ododa or Moore that much more important.
I have no ill-will against Nelson-Ododa (publicly). I loved watching her as a high school player, I loved covering her as a Lady Dogg at WBHS. I still remember when her high school coach of three years, noted Tech fan Brandon Thomas, told me that he'd spent time working out an eighth grader who was more than six feet tall. The glee in his face was apparent, and it didn't take long for me to see why once she hit the court as a high schooler.
Nelson-Ododa is a wonderful young woman and a fierce competitor, and I'm very proud of her for getting the opportunity to play on one of the best teams ever assembled.
And you can't really hold a grudge that a great athlete would want to join a great team. She knows that she'll be surrounded by people who want to achieve greatness themselves.
Think about Kevin Durant and his decision to jump from the Thunder to the Warriors. People hold it against him and say he hit the "easy button" on winning a championship, but I think there's a different lens you can look at it through.
Durant saw a team that believed in achieving greatness and he wanted to join them.
The same is true for players like Nelson-Ododa and Moore. They saw greatness in UConn, in everything UConn did and believed, and they wanted to be a part of it. When you're the number one player in the country according to some bureaus, you get to write your own ticket and there's no way Auriemma was going to say no. And there was no way either of these young women was going to say no to him.
The good news is that Coach Taylor is driving UGA back to that level. When Landers started the program, he quickly built it into one of the finest women's basketball programs in the country. And it always has been. Even though we dipped a little bit after Landers' departure, that was just the nature of transition and not a sign of the new norm.
Jeff Dantzler, the voice of the Lady Dawgs, loves to bring up a great stat. The Lady Dawgs are one of three programs in the country to never have a losing season. Ever.
There is no reason that UGA can't at least get up to Tier two of my totally scientific scale.
Some of the best female athletes in the world live in the southeastern United States, and Georgia produces a fair chunk of them. The facilities at UGA are certainly towards the top of the pack. The program has the pedigree that a star athlete would look for.
All we need now is greatness on the court.
When you look at just how massive of a leap the Lady Dawgs took between the 2016-17 season and the 2017-18 season, there is a lot of reason for optimism. The 2016-17 team finished eighth in the SEC with a 16-15 record, securing yet another winning season by literally the thinnest margin, while the 2017-18 team ramped that up into a third-place conference finish and a 26-7 record.
Now they aren't likely to improve by 10 games again, that would make them 36-(-3), but Coach Taylor is doing great work in Athens and will have this team playing great basketball very soon.
It can be especially frustrating when you're pursuing that greatness because you feel like it takes getting players like Nelson-Ododa. There's no doubt that she would have made a significant contribution to the team, but you often have to earn the attention of those types of players first and that's the position that UGA finds itself in now.
It's also worth mentioning that Auriemma is in his 33rd year with UConn while Taylor is just getting started. Sure, his tenure might be a bonus in recruiting, but Taylor's youth provides a lot of upside in that she still has a long career in front of her to turn this Georgia team into a juggernaut.
Missing basketball net. Be on the lookout for a man with perfect hair. (Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
Perhaps we could even supplant South Carolina or Mississippi State at the top of the conference in the near future and be that team that Auriemma wakes up in a cold sweat thinking about before falling back to sleep in his silk pajamas on a bed of nets he's cut down.