Georgia Wofford Sidebar: Size and Skill Prevail as Georgia Dominates Rebounding Game

By Nick Suss

Georgia senior Donte’ Williams looked unstoppable Friday night in the team’s season opener against Wofford. The fact that he’s 6’9” certainly didn’t hurt.

In just 18 minutes of play, Williams shot 4-7 from the field, scoring 11 points and adding nine rebounds, a mark which led the team. But Williams stood at least an inch above each of Wofford’s players, the three tallest Terriers combining to score just two points. This fact raised one question: did physical supremacy or skill-based strategy win the game for Georgia?

Despite his overwhelming height advantage, Williams tends to err on the side of the latter rather than the former.

“I know at halftime I think we were up by 8 [rebounds] and [head coach Mark Fox] said he wanted us to go up by 15,” Williams said. “That was one of the main parts coming out of halftime: just keep rebounding the ball, keep dominating.”

Dominate the second half is exactly what Georgia did. Finishing the game with 20 offensive and 29 defensive rebounds, Georgia’s total of 49 more than doubled Wofford’s paltry sum of 24. In fact, doing something which teams rarely do, Georgia’s offensive rebound total exceeded Wofford’s defensive total of 17.

“We’ve made an effort to get on the glass,” Fox said. “We’ve thought that’s an area where we could have an advantage so that’s something that we tried to make sure that we followed through with.”

All of the 13 Georgia players who touched the court except for one finished the game with at least one rebound, the sole exception being 5’10” freshman Brandon Young, and he played just two minutes. But rebounds weren’t all that Georgia’s size advantage amounted to.

Due to the advanced stature of Williams and fellow forwards Nemanja Djurisic and Cameron Forte, these big men were left open at the top of the key all night, with no Wofford guard having any idea how to defend them. This created opportunities for points on top of the rebounds.

“I seen that every time I got the ball they would back off,” Williams said. “So I just kept on shooting it every time I got a chance. So I just took what they gave me.”

Williams wasn’t the only big man who took advantage of this. Djurisic, who is 6’8” himself, led the team in scoring with 12 points, going 4-8 from the field in 21 minutes of play. Djurisic said he believes that the way he and his fellow big men played was a conscious effort, something they had practiced since the summer.

“It was a game plan,” Djurisic said. “It was something we had to build on. We did good in the first game but we didn’t do well in the ball turnovers. So we wanted to keep the rebounding game and improve on it and cut the turnovers, and that’s what we did.”

However, there was one person who was unsatisfied with Georgia’s rebounding prowess, and rightfully so.

“When you get outrebounded like that,” Wofford head coach Mike Young said, “I don’t care who it is – Georgia, Davidson – you’ve got to do a better job on the glass than that.”

But regardless of Young’s displeasure and the enormous depth Georgia exhibited, Williams was the star of the show, just as he was last time the Terriers visited Stegeman Coliseum when he set his career high in rebounds with 13. Despite that fact, Williams doesn’t see a correlation between playing Wofford and personal success.

“No, I just I don’t know,” Williams said. “We put so much emphasis on outrebounding teams that I just go out there and rebound.”