AJC > Sports > Blog > Archives > 2008 > November > 10
Monday, November 10, 2008
For UGA defense, it’s not coaching or schemes. It’s players.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Five things we learned over the weekend:
1. For UGA defense it’s not coaching or schemes. It’s players: By now everybody has psycho-analyzed what is wrong with Georgia’s defense, which has given up 125 points in its last three games. They blame everybody from the defensive coordinator (Willie Martinez) to the demeanor of the head coach, who some people say should be more of a screamer.
It’s all silly. Martinez didn’t suddenly forget how to coach this season. Mark Richt has won 80 games in less than eight seasons at Georgia by being exactly who he is. In the SEC it’s not about attitudes or schemes. It’s about players. The schemes that have worked in the past will work today with players who are talented enough to execute them correctly. The problem I see on the Georgia defense, and the one everybody knew about before the beginning of the season, was that Georgia did not have the All-SEC player coming off the edge to disrupt what the opposing offense was doing. And Georgia has really missed that kind of player when it has gone up against a mobile quarterback. This will be an issue in the final two regular season games against Auburn and Georgia Tech, who both have mobile quarterbacks.
The fact is that Georgia got beat by the No. 1 (Alabama) and No. 4 (Florida) teams in the nation. And Florida, I believe is the best team in the country right now.
Georgia has a chance to finish 11-2 for the second straight year and people are going around talking about firing coaches. Amazing.
2. As it should be, the BCS championship will be between the SEC and Big 12: It was sad to see Joe Paterno, looking every one of his 81 years, leaving the press box after Penn State had been upset by Iowa. But what that did was clear the decks for the BCS championship game that everyone wants to see between the SEC and the Big 12. All season we have argued about which conference is the best, the high-scoring Big 12 with all those great quarterbacks, or the SEC, a league that still plays defense. With the BCS top five now comprised of two teams from the SEC (Alabama, Florida) and three from the Big 12 (Texas Tech, Texas, Oklahoma), fans will get a mini-playoff in November and early December. It will take something fairly dramatic to keep the SEC-Big 12 matchup from happening. But it could happen. We’ll talk more about that later.
3. The Tennessee players really stepped up for their old coach: I hope you can pick up the sarcasm in that sentence. The Volunteers showed their anger and indignation at Phillip Fulmer’s press conference last week and spoke of the injustice of asking Fulmer to step down with football left to play on the schedule. But when it came time to play Saturday against a bad Wyoming team, the Volunteers did not live up to their name. Granted, everyone now has to admit that Tennessee just isn’t a very good team. But we’re talking Wyoming, who lost to BYU, Utah, and TCU by a combined score of 138-14. What the players did, unknowingly, was validate the decision of the administration. Fairburn’s Eric Berry has been a warrior on that team all season. He is a real football player. But I don’t know about the rest of those guys. The next coach at Tennessee, whoever he is, is going to have some work to do with this group of players. There may be a bunch of four-star talent up there, but I don’t see a whole lot of four-star hearts.
4. Steve Spurrier is doing his best coaching job at South Carolina: The Gamecocks started 0-2 in the SEC and looked like a team that was ready to collapse and have a really bad season. But Spurrier knew he had a good defense and that he had to manufacture enough offense to give his team a chance to win every week. Since that start South Carolina has won four of its last five conference games and the loss was 24-17 to LSU. The other two SEC losses were to Vanderbilt (24-17) and Georgia (14-7). The Gamecocks are 7-3 heading to No. 4 Florida this week and with that defense, which is still No. 3 in the country (256.50 ypg), they have a puncher’s chance. Remember that two years ago when Florida won the national championship, the Gators had to block a field goal on the last play of the game to beat Spurrier 17-16.
5. Tech’s game with Miami will be huge: You knew it was going to be hard for Georgia Tech to go up to Chapel Hill and win, especially after offensive tackle Andrew Gardner got hurt. Tech ran for 326 yards against a pretty good defense but just could not overcome the mistakes, which everyone knew would be a problem for this team. But consider this. When you look around at schools like Michigan, Tennessee, and Auburn that have fallen apart while trying to install a brand new offensive scheme, you realize what an incredible job Paul Johnson has done to have his first Georgia Tech team at 7-3 and still relevant in the ACC race in mid-November. A good exclamation point on Johnson’s first season would be a win over Miami a week from this Thursday. I’ll be anxious to see the fan turnout for that one.
