ATHENS – Your hearty journalist just spent some time on the field at Sanford Stadium, stepping around on it, touching it, and overall just studying it closely. And here’s the conclusion:

If the game started now – about a quarter till noon – the weather conditions would have little effect. The grass is still in pretty good shape, damp but not soggy. It wouldn’t slow down most players, at least not too much.

But there’s also almost four hours to go before kickoff. So the question is how much it will continue to rain, and how worse it will make things. As I type this it’s only a light rain, but it was a harder rain just a few minutes ago.

And as for what the conditions will be at 3:30 and throughout the game, well the forecast doesn’t provide much clarity. Maybe it’ll only rain a little bit, maybe a lot, maybe not at all.

The feeling here is that if this were a big baseball game, they would be waiting a couple hours but would probably end up postponing it. But this isn’t a baseball game. It’s football.