As we have several times this season, we bring you a question and answer session with a fan blogger of the opposing team. Doug Gillett of Hey Jenny Slater was kind enough to answer our questions about the Georgia Bulldogs before the Independence Bowl tomorrow. Visit his blog to see my answers to his questions.

1. Georgia was ranked in the top 10 in the preseason, and was expected to compete for the SEC championship and make a possible run at a national championship. What went wrong?

I don't know that anyone in Bulldog Nation entertained serious notions of an SEC title this year, but we certainly thought that 10 wins and a January bowl bid were entirely reasonable expectations -- we'd cleared that bar in six of Mark Richt's eight seasons, after all. But I think that speaks to how drastically we underestimated the impact of the early departures of Matt Stafford and Knowshon Moreno. Joe Cox, Stafford's replacement, has had some great games but hasn't been able to keep the ball out of the opponents' hands on a consistent basis, and a lot of those miscues have been the kind of throws that we figured a fifth-year senior wouldn't be making. The running game, meanwhile, took a long time to get sorted out in the wake of Moreno leaving early, and when it finally happened, the catalyst was not Richard Samuel, who'd been the presumptive starter coming out of summer practice, but rather Washaun Ealey, who wasn't even listed on the preseason depth chart. I hate to say anything that would put our coaches in a bad light, but there were times when it seemed like they were almost as caught off guard by the offense's underperformance as the fans were, as if they'd made the same assumption we had that we could simply rely on the overall talent level to bail us out.

So to the extent that we held less-than-reasonable expectations for a very inexperienced unit, that was on us. But I don't think you could blame anyone for thinking the defense would be better than it had been in 2008, considering that we were bringing back eight starters. In spite of that returning talent, though, the defense continued the slow but inexorable statistical slide it had begun under Willie Martinez, and that's why Martinez won't be on the sideline Monday evening. I hate it anytime a coach loses his job, but the numbers don't lie, and despite having recruited at an extremely high level ever since Richt arrived in Athens, the defense just wasn't getting any better. 

2. After losing your defensive coaching staff in a total housecleaning following the season, what are your expectations for your defense in the bowl game?

I don't even know if I have any expectations, honestly. With Martinez, we were inconsistent at best, holding a good offense (Georgia Tech) to its second-lowest point total of the season while letting a mediocre offense (South Carolina) hammer us for 37 points; now that we've shed three defensive assistants, there's just no telling. I do have confidence in our fundamentals -- we're finally tackling again, which we quite conspicuously did not do during the latter half of last season -- it's the scheme I'm worried about: A&M runs an extremely balanced, fairly uptempo offense, and both of those have traits have been problems for us this season. (Then again, without Martinez, who had notorious difficulty defending against those types of attacks, maybe we'll suddenly figure it all out. Who knows.)

Since we did retain Rodney Garner, our recruiting coordinator and DTs coach, I think we'll maintain our relative stoutness against the run, which comes as a huge relief with Christine Michael on the opposite side of the line. If we can stuff the run well enough to start keying in on the quarterback -- our QB pressure improved dramatically with the return of DE Justin Houston to the lineup, from five sacks in the first four games to 23 in the eight games since -- then we may actually do a lot better than people expect. But I'm still hunkering down for a shootout. If we hold y'all below 30, I will be ecstatic.

Well, all-SEC receiver A.J. Green has the size (6'4", 207) and the physical gifts to succeed at just about any level of play; fortunately he's only a sophomore, so we get him for at least one more year. On defense, Rennie Curran is somewhat undersized at the linebacker position, but they said the same thing about Sam Mills and Gary Brackett; he's got a motor that runs to the redline on every play, and he hits about as hard as any defender of the Richt era.

Then there are a couple guys who don't yet have the kind of name brand that Green or Curran do, but whom you might qualify as "sleepers": Drew Butler, a first-year starter, currently leads the nation in punting and took home the Ray Guy Award this year; some NFL team is bound to snap him up, and he's the kind of guy who might be good enough to be worth a late-round draft pick. And Aaron Murray, a quarterback we beat Southern Cal for last February and whom we redshirted this year, has been described as a rocket-armed passer very much in the Matt Stafford mold. Particularly after the struggles we watched at the QB position this year, a lot of Georgia fans are very, very excited about the prospect of getting to watch him next season.

That sounds just about exactly right, actually. In our last game of the regular season, we played the nation's 85th-ranked pass-efficiency defense at Georgia Tech, yet we ran it 44 times and passed only 14 -- and rolled up nearly 350 net rushing yards. I think that'll be the bread and butter of our offensive attack in Shreveport as well (though I doubt the playcalling will be quite as heavily biased in favor of the run; we're getting A.J. Green back for the first time in three games, and that's just too good a weapon to leave on the shelf).

Best-case scenario is our defensive players and coaches close ranks, take an "us against the world" attitude, and rise up to absolutely crush the A&M offense (to the shock of basically everyone) while Washaun Ealey, Caleb King, and the Joe-Cox-to-A.J. connection goes buck wild. Worst case is we start shooting ourselves in our own feet with turnovers, as we've done so many times this season -- we've finished only two games all year long with a positive turnover margin -- and keep handing the ball back to an A&M offense that we quickly run out of ways to stop. 

In the end, any margin of victory greater than a single score would surprise me. It's been no secret that our fans have not exactly been snapping up tickets to this game, and with bowl games that kind of apathy has a tendency to seep over into the players; there's a real chance that we start off slow enough to dig ourselves into a bit of a hole. But we dug ourselves out of early holes against South Carolina, Arkansas, and Auburn, so maybe we're more resilient than I've been giving us credit for. My prediction, as I made in the preview I posted over on my blog the other day, is somewhere in between: Like I said earlier, I don't think we can really avoid a shootout, at least in the early going, but I've got confidence in our playmakers to make a critical late stop and seal a very close win.

Either way, it should be a very exciting evening, and I wish y'all the very best of luck. Well, not the very best, of course. I wish us the very best and y'all the second-best. But I'm looking forward to both of us getting to watch a pretty good game.

 Thanks to Doug for answering our questions, and here is to a competitive but safe game devoid of injuries.