G-Day D.J. Shockley

ATHENS -- D.J. Shockley is well-known as a mainstay in the Atlanta media scene, but before his journalism career he starred as a quarterback at Georgia and played for the Atlanta Falcons.

Shockley, the Fox 5 sports director and “Bulldogs Now” show host, spoke about his experiences playing between the hedges and this year’s edition of the Georgia G-Day spring football scrimmage at 1 p.m. on Saturday.

Q: What did G-Day mean to you as a player?

DS: G-Day was like the culmination of all your hard work in the spring, and for a lot of guys, it was a chance to show fans and the coaches that if you weren’t starting last year you were ready to have a spot and be a guy who can contribute to the team. A lot of players, a lot of guys want to show, ‘Hey, I’ve gotten better from one year to the next,’ and that is what the spring game is all about. G-Day is cool, man, you get a chance to see the fans, you haven’t seen them in a few months, you know, obviously, since a bowl game. And it gives the fans a chance to see the new crop of Dawgs. So, G-Day is always fun, the fans are always cool. They’re always loud and ready to go.

Q: What does G-Day mean to you now as a sports anchor?

DS: So now it’s a little bit different because I have a different scope. I’m still on the sideline, so I’m there in a working capacity for that. But then I also do stuff for Fox. So I have kind of two hats on during the game where I’m talking for Georgia, and I’m also thinking about stuff that I can do for Fox. So this is a chance to show our viewers what Georgia looks like, give them a chance at a first look at some of these new freshmen that are coming. A chance to see some of these guys who played a little bit last year now in bigger roles. Or a chance to see a Trevor Etienne, or a new person who just transferred ‚and so it’s a chance to show them but also give them a chance to see their face and talk and hear them speak during interviews. Maybe Georgia fans aren’t used to, or don’t know, who they are. So it gives them a chance to kind of highlight who these guys are and what they’re about off the field as well as just ‘okay, we saw you score a touchdown.’ Now you can hear how he sounds and what he looks like, you know, a lot of times you’ll see that it’s also a cool experience to do that.

Q: From your freshman spring game to your junior spring game, what are the differences from the newer guys, freshmen and transfers to the more experienced players?

DS: As a freshman, you’re like, just trying to stay out the way, you don’t want to mess up. You don’t want coach yelling at you, you don’t want to be the guy that makes a bad play. Because you can see it on film or have fans be like, ‘Oh, that was a five star? I don’t know about that.’ But as you get older, you understand what G-Day is about. You understand that it’s a chance to kind of hone in on your craft, especially if you’ve played in it for a while and you’ve been at Georgia for a minute, you know, this is a culmination and you may only get one or two more of these and you kind of soak it up like, ‘Alright, I gotta understand these are big moments in my career.’ For the older guys, it’s less stressful, for the younger guys it’s a little bit more stressful because it’s your first chance in a real live game. You know, I mean, you get some practice. Yeah, yeah, scrimmages, and sometimes you get tackled to the ground. But this one, no coaches on the field. Well, there’s one that will be out there, it’s probably coach Smart. During practice or scrimmage, you got all your other coaches out there. Now it’s the closest you’ll get to game time atmosphere, game action with actual fans, because during the regular scrimmages, there’s no fans in the stands. Now you worry about crowd noise. Now you get a chance to be in front of fans, you worry about that. Also, your coaches are not next to you so you have to make sure that you’re on your P’s and Q’s. So it’s a little bit different, as it’s your first real game time kind of atmosphere that you get when you’re younger, older guys have been through it, too, and it’s not as big of a deal for them as it is for the young guys.

Q: Was there a favorite G-Day memory you had as a player?

DS: I think it had to be probably my freshman year or sophomore year, and I got a chance to throw a deep ball. I remember throwing it, and it probably went 65, 70 yards and I could hear the whole crowd say ‘Yes, oh,’ and so on. Now, the receiver didn’t catch it. I overthrew it. But it looked cool. You know, say for me, I was like, I’m showing on my arm. I got a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from the crowds, and then I wouldn’t watch the film and Coach Richt and Coach Bobo were like, “But you didn’t complete the ball so it doesn’t matter. You overthrew him by 10 yards. It looked good, but we didn’t get the completion.” So I had to take that in but it was a cool moment for me to be able to show the fans that I had a big arm and that I could sling it. And, of course, when you get the oohs and ahhs, that’s always you know, pretty dope.

Q: What are things you see as a former quarterback looking at a scrimmage that the average Fox 5 viewer or G-Day fan doesn’t see?

DS: I think that’s a good question. The biggest thing is coaches want to see you be able to get in the huddle, call a play, get everybody to the line of scrimmage and then execute that play. Once you get to the line of scrimmage you say ‘Do you have to make a check? Do you have to make an audible? Do you have to slide the line to pick up a blitz coming from over here? Do you see the coverage change from when you snap the ball and then does the safety move? Does the corner move? Does the linebacker go from zone to man?’ They want to see you be able to kind of comprehend everything that’s going on within a play and that’s something that a normal viewer, a normal fan watching a game doesn’t recognize that a quarterback has to go through. So there’s a lot of what they call fundamentals of playing the position that the coaches want to see in a game that makes it unique, and that you can judge a quarterback from and from a fan point, you’re like, ‘oh, he just completed a 10 yard pass.’ But for a quarterback, it was “the defender moved out of the zone, I threw it to an open area, I was accurate with the football and I did a good job of what I call going through my progression.” So all that has to go in hand for a quarterback’s standpoint, in a play and I think that’s what’s the biggest thing that coaches want to see. As a quarterback, you want to make sure that you execute everything within every single play, and you make the right decision. Most importantly, don’t turn it over. You turn it over, the coach is going to be on you.

Q: Was there ever just a G-Day you were watching and you saw a guy that stood out and he went on to be a future star?

DS: I think it had to be my guy Thomas Davis. He was a guy who came in, he was maybe like a three-star guy. He was from Shellman, Georgia. You know, he wasn’t as highly recruited as I was coming in, but you could see instantly this dude was gonna be a Dawg. He was gonna be a star. He was fast, he was big, he could run, he would hit you and he was fearless. He could play anywhere on the defense, but he played safety. Davis went on to play, you know, I think it was 13, 14 years in the NFL for the Carolina Panthers (Editor’s note: Davis played two additional seasons for other teams). He had three ACL injuries and came back from all those. You just knew from day one, he was going to be one of those unique athletes that you see and was just super-talented. You knew from day one that this guy was going to go to the next level. But when he was at Georgia, he was a freak athlete.

Q: What kind of G-Day content can ‘Bulldogs Now’ viewers expect

DS: That’s a good question, too, because we do a lot of a lot of great stuff. Whether it’s from pregame to end of the game, to postgame, we bring on experts like Rusty Mansell, who is close to the program. He is big with high school football and has a lot of different MVP camps, all that kind of stuff that goes on. I mean we have a talented crew here who can give viewers a lot of different angles. I always say the perspective of the game from, you know what you can see from the field to what you can see from up top, but then also the interviews afterwards. You know the one on one opportunities that we have and being a partner with Georgia is great because we get a chance to talk one on one with Kirby (Smart), we get a chance to talk one on one with Carson (Beck), we get to do all these in-depth looks that a lot of stations would not be able to get. So we have the people who can present it to you, and then we jave that unlimited access. It makes it for the best viewership of the scrimmage you can have.

Nigel Whittington is a student in the Sports Media Certificate program at the University of Georgia’s Carmical Sports Media Institute