Pittman did a rather humorous two-step around saying Franks is No. 1

Sam Pittman’s aw-shucks style at press conferences is, at times, highly entertaining and at other times deflects folks in the direction he wants them to be looking.

The only problem with all this tap-dance around personnel and even the offense like he did during part of Tuesday’s press conference is Georgia’s Kirby Smart is probably giggling a little.

Like when Pittman was asked about who’s going to be the starting quarterback.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make a public announcement of who’s going to be our quarterback, but I might,” Sam said as even he had to chuckle a little at that. “Our team knows. That’s all I’m really concerned about.”

The Bulldogs know barring some kind of injury Feleipe Franks is going to be the starting quarterback when they line up Sept. 26 to finally kick off the season.

Before he got to that part, though, Pittman pretty much did everything but proclaim Franks as the starter.

“We may already have (determined the starter) but we just haven’t told anybody,” he said. “We’ve got certain people playing with the one’s and certain people playing with the two’s. To be honest with you we haven’t switched that.”

From what little we’ve seen and what we’ve heard, that’s Franks. If there is any quarterback competition going on it’s between K.J. Jefferson and Malik Hornsby to see who the next guy is going to be.

Whichever one that is will get to see the field is the guess here.

By the way, Pittman probably isn’t going to start off a season trying to redshirt anybody. He’s smart enough to realize that if you’re signing guys to redshirt ’em, more than likely you’re helping your replacement.

Ask Chad Morris about that last part.

“(I) used to be concerned about redshirting guys, develop guys and all that,” Pittman said Tuesday afternoon. “I’ve had so many guys leave in three years that I think we’re going to err on the side of playing ’em. Get ’em out there, play ’em.”

You get the idea in a normal year this could be an interesting quarterback competition. Not this year. Due to the coronavirus wiping out spring practice and anything resembling normalcy, Franks is the only viable option.

“I’m kinda the guy that wants to play the guy that’s going to help us regardless of their age,” he said.

What he won’t say right now is he’s got one quarterback on the roster that’s won a game in the SEC and those are the only folks on the schedule this year.

But that won’t be the case going forward and it’s why if there is an interesting competition in the quarterback room it’s between Jefferson and Hornsby to be who will be No. 2 behind Franks … and last year doesn’t mean much.

“If I’m halfway close on a young guy to a guy that’s a little bit older, I’m going to err on playing the young guy because I think he’ll pass the older guy.” Pittman said. “We know what (the older guy’s) been able to do.”

Right now he doesn’t really know that much. The Hogs have only beenin full pads for one practice and Pittman has only had a double handful of any kind of real practices.

He simply doesn’t know if either of the two younger guys offer any improvement over sticking with Franks, who has won games in the league before.

“We will [know] in the future,” Pittman said.

Oh, and then there’s the tap-dance he did early in the press conference about the team’s offense. Somehow Kendal Briles has managed to get 85-90% of his offense installed, according to Pittman.

The past two years we’ve heard only about 30% of the offense got installed, which was either an outright lie or admitting incompetence at teaching.

On Tuesday, Pittman was trying to slow down what everyone thinks is going to be an offense that runs at warp speed.

“If I wasn’t confident we could do it we wouldn’t do it,” he said.

Then he tried to send a message to maybe throw up a little pause for other teams … at least right now.

“We’re not up-tempo all the time,” Pittman said. “We talk about a fast offense because when we want to play at that speed we’re going to be ready to play at that speed. Do we practice it? We certainly do, but we’re not up-tempo all the time.”

Down in Athens they probably just rolled their eyes and chuckled a little over that.