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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > September > 19
Friday, September 19, 2008
Richt’s Bulldogs are at home on the road
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Richt learned under Bobby Bowden, who carried the nickname, “King of the Road.” Since coming to Georgia, the apprentice has usurped the throne.
For all the gaudy numbers compiled by Richt’s teams — two SEC championships, three division titles, five Top 10 finishes — nothing trumps 26-4, which is his astonishing record on an opponent’s field.
Saturday night, Georgia will play Arizona State in Sun Devil Stadium, a place the Bulldogs have never visited. Richt being Richt, he has been there and won already. He was on the Florida State staff when the Seminoles drove 98 yards to beat Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 1, 1988. He remembers the winning play: “Fourth-and-15, and we hit Ronald Lewis on a little square-in.”
He smiles. “That was a great trip. Katharyn and I were pretty much newlyweds.”
His second Tempe excursion fared less well. Tennessee beat Florida State for the 1998 BCS title. “Our boy [Chris] Weinke had gotten hurt, and we were going with Marcus Outzen [at quarterback] and we just didn’t have enough juice.”
As Georgia’s coach, Richt has lost just once — to LSU, the eventual BCS titlist, in 2003 — the first time he has taken his team to a hostile stadium. He won in Knoxville on David Greene’s pass to Verron Haynes. He won in Columbia on David Pollack’s sack-and-snatch. He won in Tuscaloosa on Billy Bennett’s field goal. He won at Auburn on Greene’s fourth-down cast to Michael Johnson. All those famous victories came in his first two seasons, setting a tone that resounds still.
“If you don’t believe you can do something, it’s hard to do it,” Richt says. “When you start truly believing you can win, sometimes it’s hard to lose. Go back to that David Greene Tennessee game. If we don’t win that one, who knows what the mentality of our program would be? Who knows if I’d even be sitting here? I’d say it’s pretty debatable.”
What’s beyond debate is that the Richt Road Method works. There was no great innovation to it, he admits — “I just did it the way we did at Florida State” — but he’s happy to highlight the components.
“The No. 1 thing you have to have is a quarterback who can handle it. Of all the people who have to deal with the crowd noise and the emotion, he’s the one who gets affected the most. He can’t hear very well; we can’t hear him very well. When he makes a mistake it’s just unbelievably loud and crazy. He’s just got to be poised.
“David Greene couldn’t have asked for a better start [the Tennessee game] — a defining moment for a redshirt freshman. And we had him for four years, and [D.J.] Shockley just carried on the tradition. And now we’ve got [Matthew] Stafford. We suffered when he was a true freshman, and that’s what happens to quarterbacks if they’re not mature enough to handle it.”
After the quarterback? “The No. 2 thing is that your staff doesn’t panic, doesn’t overreact, doesn’t get too far off the game plan. You can make changes too rapidly when something seems worse than it really is, and that’s what a hostile crowd can do — accentuate your negative.
“Something bad’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. Somebody’s going to fumble. Somebody’s going to throw a pick … Don’t be surprised. You’ve got to prepare your mind for when it does happen: How are you going to react to it? You’ve got to decide that before the game.”
The third leg of the Richt Method is to be systematic. Georgia doesn’t bother with a walk-through in the opponent’s stadium on Friday. “We just meet and rest and go.” And it hews to its clock, not the time zone’s.
The plan for Tempe was to keep all watches and reset all hotel clocks on Eastern Time. Richt’s rationale: “It’s hard for a kid to see it’s 9 o’clock where they are and think, ‘It’s time to go to bed.’ It’s midnight, son … The bottom line is: We’re playing an 8 o’clock game, and we’ll treat it like that.”
Call that a royal decree from the new King of the Road.
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