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Monday, November 26, 2007
Tech must find its own Richt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Georgia Tech has spent seven years playing kid brother to the hated mutts from Athens, and over that span it has become easy to overlook the level of pride and the depth of resources inherent in the Institute and its football program. The right coach will make us all remember. The right coach will give Mark Richt a run for his money.
Chan Gailey was to Tech as Jim Donnan was to Georgia, a winning coach who was nonetheless unloved by the masses. (Oddly enough, it took the abrasive Donnan five years to get as unpopular as the benign Gailey became in one.) As painful as this is to admit, Michael Adams proved something to me with Donnan’s dismissal, which I then regarded as premature: The incumbent was never going to unite Bulldog Nation, and the president found the man who could and did.
Dan Radakovich’s mission is to find his own Mark Richt. The AD used the buzzwords “energy” and “enthusiasm” often in his media briefing Monday, and those commodities were lacking under Gailey. Tech football had become a joyless thing. People went to games out of a sense of old-gold obligation, not because they couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
As was evident from the increasing number of empty seats at Bobby Dodd Stadium, obligation isn’t enough anymore — not with such competition in the marketplace and so many other available distractions. Gailey admitted as much in his classy farewell address, saying, “It’s a lot different than it was when I started 35 years ago.”
And it is. And the man Tech should hire will, conveniently enough, turn 35 in February.
Some stipulations. Radakovich emphasized that the new coach should “energize and entertain our fan base,” and offensive coaches, simply by nature of their jobs, tend to be more entertaining than defensive men. (Randy Edsall of Connecticut was mostly a defensive coach.) And even though Richt hadn’t been a head coach before Georgia hired him, the bias here still rests with those who have. (One who hasn’t: Florida State offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher.)
Paul Johnson of Navy would seem almost an ideal choice. He knows the territory, having won two national championships at Georgia Southern, and he has proved he can win at a school where academics matter, having led the Midshipmen to a fifth consecutive bowl. But his teams run the spread option with a disproportionate emphasis on “run” — 685 rushes this season against 117 passes — and running the ball is seen by many as old-fashioned. (Though not, I should report, by me.)
There’s also this: Johnson is 50. That’s not old by my lights, but the pragmatist in me sees a need for Tech to tap a younger man, someone capable of growing with the program the way Richt, who was 39 when he took the job, has at Georgia.
Chris Hatcher is 34. He has been a head coach since he was 26 and hasn’t yet had a losing season. His career record is 83-16. He led Valdosta State to the Division II national championship in 2004, and this year he cleaned up the mess left by Brian VanGorder at Georgia Southern and went 7-4 to boot. He’s good with the media, and he has showed the ability to recruit in Georgia and Florida.
Hatcher was an All-American quarterback at Valdosta State and he apprenticed at Kentucky under Hal Mumme, tutoring Tim Couch but getting out before the scandal hit.
His Valdosta State teams played the sling-it-around style fans seem to embrace, though it should be noted that Georgia Southern rushed three times as often as it passed this season. (That’s another heartening sign: One-trick ponies get old awfully fast.)
Just as Richt was viewed as the anti-Donnan, Hatcher would be seen by the Tech community as the anti-Gailey. He wouldn’t be stodgy, wouldn’t be taciturn and would, by gosh, be able to develop a quarterback. He’d make Tech football a vibrant thing again, and he’d make the hated mutts sit up and take notice. If any program should know the difference a coach can make, it’s the one in Athens.
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