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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2009 > February > 04
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
UGA’s Garner knows talent also needs coaching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Athens — On the biggest day of his vocational year, Rodney Garner was asked a simple question: Which matters more — coaching or recruiting?
And Georgia’s recruiting coordinator said, “Coaching.” And then, surely remembering what it is he’s paid well to do, Garner hedged.
“I’m not going to say that,” he said. “Recruiting is the lifeblood of your program. No matter how good a coach you are, without talent you’re not going to have a very good team. You must be able to attract players to your campus and then coach players once they’re there. If you can’t coach them and put them in position to make plays and win games, you’re going to get fired.”
Garner is considered one of the nation’s best at the glamour part of his job, and National Signing Day 2009 yielded yet another Top 10 class for a program that has won at least 10 games six of the past seven seasons. But there are those, this correspondent among them, who believe the Bulldogs were undercoached last season. Then again, how can we tell if a prized recruit — Reshad Jones, say, the five-star safety who couldn’t tackle Georgia Tech’s Roddy Jones on Nov. 29 — is as good as advertised?
It’s the eternal riddle. No coach will ever say recruiting isn’t essential, but no coach has proclaimed on Signing Day: “If we don’t win the national championship with the guys we just got, it’s my own darn fault.”
Said Mark Richt, asked the same which-matters-more question that gave Garner pause: “They’re really one and the same. We do both. In the pros, they have coaches and scouts, but in college we’re responsible for both coaching and putting our stamp on the [incoming] talent. … I don’t know how you could separate the two.”
This class looks swell on paper, but pretty much every Georgia class looks swell on paper. And the sobering reality is that the presumably gifted Bulldogs have won the SEC East just once over the past five years.
Garner also coaches Georgia’s defensive line, which had a tepid season. Were there moments — the wipeout first half against Alabama or the unaccountable collapse against Tech — when the famous recruiting coordinator said to himself: “I need to find better defenders”?
Said Garner: “There were times this year when we fell short, and there were times when I couldn’t wait to get back in the office and think about recruiting better or coming up with a better defensive scheme. … Our product is out there on Saturday. When we don’t win, it diminishes everything.”
For the record, Garner doesn’t consider himself a recruiter who coaches. “I’m a coach who recruits,” he said, and his D-line figures to be bolstered by recruits Abry Jones from Northside-Warner Robins and Montez Robinson from Avon, Ind. But you should know that no rating Rivals.com affixes to this signing class will erase another set of numbers imprinted on Garner’s brainpan.
“My only numbers are wins and losses,” he said. “My number is on that scoreboard — 45-42.”
That was the score of the Tech game, and it will rankle for a full year. If nothing else, though, Signing Day 2009 enabled the famous recruiter to apologize publicly to Mrs. Rodney Garner. It was a year ago that her husband sat before the assembled media and said, of rating prospects: “It’s kind of like when you look at your wife, and you think, ‘If I’d have held out, maybe I could have gotten that one there.’ “
“For 365 days I’ve been in the doghouse,” Garner said. “I might still be in the doghouse.”
Let that be a lesson to us all: Even a famous recruiter sometimes needs help with his sales pitch.
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