In a letter to DawgNation on Thursday, the father of Georgia kicker Rodrigo Blankenship blasted head coach Kirby Smart for not awarding his son a scholarship until next school year, at the earliest.
The letter, written by Ken Blankenship and signed by both parents, contends Smart refused to acknowledge the kicker's contributions to the team, even though the coach had no problem playing and praising Rodrigo throughout the season.
A snippet of the letter can be seen below, while the full version is available at DawgNation:
OK—this is for public consumption, and I am writing this only as a parent's attempt to defend his son's victimization of an injustice. This has gone beyond the point of money being an issue. The real issue is whether our son deserves to be on scholarship.
In two months, Coach Smart went from "We have a damn good field-goal kicker over there" to "I'm not sure if we trust Rodrigo to be the player we want in that position." That was the excuse/rationale/explanation he employed in our meeting on Jan. 2 after delivering a well-planned and well-conceived litany of deficiencies regarding our son's practice, injury, and emotional "issues." This would be AFTER he trusted our son enough to kick field goals and extra points for the last 10 games of the season.
At the same time Coach Smart was focusing on negative issues (that we have labeled as flimsy and contrived and weightless compared to all of our son's positives), he was also discounting, minimizing, and ultimately dismissing all of Rodrigo's on-field contributions and accomplishments, noting that they weren't good enough to deserve a scholarship and that "somebody else" could have done the same. At no time did Coach Smart mention anything about scholarship numbers, other than to say that he never puts anyone on scholarship mid-year.
Since there will be about a half-dozen brand-new Georgia Bulldogs riding on the scholarship gravy train on Jan. 5, we beg to differ with that statement. Somebody's going to get the scholarships left behind by Wilson, Briscoe, Choates, McGee, McGraw, McKenzie (they weren't simply vacated into thin air, were they?), and it is very distressing to us that our son, who has ALREADY made fairly significant, valid, and measurable contributions to this program commands a lower priority than those who have yet to provide a single play or single point for that same program. Isn't Rodrigo a somewhat viable candidate for future contributions? Has he not established a somewhat impressive track record on which to base future projections?
Blankenship made 14-of-18 field-goal attempts in his freshman campaign and was 26-of-26 on PATs. He took over the starting kicker job in late September after William Ham was lost to injury.
Ham has since announced his intention to leave the Bulldogs.