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AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2006 > January
January 2006
Taking care of business
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Does Mark Richt deserve a hefty raise?
Hell, yeah.
Two SEC championships, three trips to the conference championship game, four straight Top 10 finishes, four straight seasons with at least 10 wins and a 52-12 record in five seasons. Certainly that kind of performance justifies him earning at least as much as any other SEC coach. Pay him what the market demands.
Does that mean I’ve changed my mind about wishing Richt would quit calling his own plays on the sideline?
Hell, no.
As good as Georgia has been under Richt, there have been games we could have and probably would have won had the head coach not had his attention divided by trying to do two jobs at once.
But I recognize that Richt loves calling his own signals and is bound and determined to continue doing it rather than becoming a CEO-style coach like Vince Dooley was. As long as Georgia continues being this successful, that probably won’t change.
Still, he could alleviate some of the problem by naming someone else on his staff to be in charge of the Dawgs’ sideline during games. Too many times, we’ve seen disarray in the form of wrong players on the field and clock management issues.
Worse, no one seems to be looking at the Big Picture. A perfect example was in the Sugar Bowl, when Georgia was caught napping by the West Virginia fake punt. I’m sure as play-caller Richt was busy worrying about what the Dawgs were going to do when they got the ball back rather than worrying about IF they got the ball back. All the coaches were concerned with their little piece of the team and there was no one considering the game as a whole.
If there had been, he probably would have concluded — like thousands of fans in the stands and watching at home had — that WVU wasn’t about to give Georgia the ball back if they could help it. There was no one to remind punt-team coordinator Jon Fabris, “Prepare for the fake!”
So naming a coach to stand back from the fray and take an overall view as sideline coordinator would be a big help.
Let’s also hope that in extending Richt’s contract Georgia looks to the future (and Bobby Bowden’s eventual retirement) by not only including a very hefty buy-out clause in the deal, but also backloading it with some incentives that Richt only gets if he stays the full term of his contract.
Let Florida State look elsewhere for their next coach.
Where else but in Athens?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As the recruiting season enters the final stages, the UGA coaching staff no doubt has already made the case for the school’s facilities and playing opportunities in Coach Mark Richt’s championship-winning program. And, hopefully, they’ve also sold them on the education they can get at a public university whose academic standing continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
For many recruits, that may be enough. Those elite players capable of playing on Sundays after college probably are primarily concerned with how quickly they can start and whether the program will properly fine-tune and showcase their abilities. Others want to know their chances of playing time, and whether they can leave Georgia with a degree that will set them up for making a decent living after football.
The town in which a school is located might not be uppermost in a lot of recruits’ minds in picking where to play college ball — otherwise you wouldn’t see many kids considering spending three, four, five or even six years (with redshirts) in the desolate environs of places like Auburn, Ala., or Clemson, S.C.!
But for those savvy kids who realize there should be a lot more to their lives during college than just football, the Dawgs coaching staff hopefully is using the Athens Experience as a seal-the-deal selling point. And I’m not talking about the crowded downtown bar scene — though that’s no doubt an attraction (and one that, unfortunately, has proved too attractive for a few Dawgs over the years).
I’m talking more the kinds of things that lead so many UGA students, athletes or not, to wind up never leaving Athens, or trying their best to make their way back to it.
Besides being a beautiful, historic setting for a major university and having the best-looking women in the SEC, the Classic City is small enough to be easy to get around in (except on game days, when football players won’t be driving anyway), and yet is second only to Atlanta in this region when it comes to entertainment and cultural offerings. National magazines have named it one of the best places in the nation to go to school, in no small part because of its internationally known music scene — it gave birth to the B-52’s and still is home to acts like R.E.M., Widespread Panic and Drive-By Truckers. (And Atlanta, with its glittering offerings, is only a little over an hour away.)
The local politics can be maddening, but Athens has big-city sophistication combined with small-town charm. It’s a regional business and shopping hub and yet is mere minutes from rolling farmland, recreational lakes and gorgeous forests. (Heck, just a few blocks from the university is a beautiful hiking trail in parkland that used to be Fred Birchmore’s woods when I spent many a happy afternoon roaming there as a kid.)
And where else but in Athens’ Five Points can you enjoy the ridiculously cheap old-fashioned soda fountain treats dished up by Hal and the gang at Hodgson’s Pharmacy (where the UGA cheerleaders pay a good-luck visit to Coach Mike’s Corner before every home game), while next door rising-star chef Hugh Acheson is serving up his New Southern cuisine at Five & Ten, a restaurant so good that “metro” Atlanta claims it as one of its own!
And all this in a town that attracts some of the world’s best cyclists each year for a race through the streets of downtown, which also plays host to music, art and human rights festivals.
I like the way retired UGA history prof Emory Thomas, a nationally renowned Civil War scholar, summed up Athens recently in the local paper when he was talking about his time living on Hill Street:
“I could stand on my front porch and next door was Bill Berry, the drummer with R.E.M.; catty-corner across the street was Dean Rusk, the former secretary of state; and another neighbor was Velena Vego, the booking agent with the 40 Watt Club. I could see Vic Chesnutt’s house, the folk singer and composer, and I could see the apartment of Bill McFeely, who won a Pulitzer prize for a biography on Ulysses S. Grant.”
“If you can do all that,” Thomas said, “the place can’t be all bad.”
On the contrary, sounds like a great place to go to school — and play college football!
Sugar loss didn’t ruin the season
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It really gripes me to read, as I did in the sports section last week, a reference to Georgia’s season having “gone sour” as if the 2005 Bulldogs somehow should be branded a failure because of their Sugar Bowl loss.
OK, they lost their bowl game. But it was a BCS bowl.
And they still won the SEC championship for the second time in four years. And they won 10 games for the fourth season in a row. And they still finished in the Top 10!
If this is how you define a “sour” season, then I shudder to think how next season is likely to be branded.
Of course, you’ll recall that before the season the sportswriters covering the SEC had labeled 2005 a “rebuilding” year for the Dawgs, which really made no sense at all. Yeah, we’d lost a few high-profile players from the year before, but the bulk of the starters were in place already, and the “new” quarterback had quite a bit of experience under his belt.
You want to see a “rebuilding” year, check out NEXT season’s Georgia team. The Dawgs are losing a dozen starters, including six on offense and six on defense. Both lines and the secondary will have green players. And whoever ends up as our starter at quarterback will have very little (or possibly no) prior game experience.
Unless the Dawgs catch some breaks next season, it could make 2005 look like a cakewalk.
Did someone miss their wakeup call?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Maybe next time Georgia should try turning up BEFORE the second quarter.
Yeah, yeah, everyone seems to have underestimated how good West Virginia was, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Dawgs defense show up less prepared for a game. They were flat-footed, slow, couldn’t tackle and looked as if they hadn’t watched any film or even been on a practice field for a month.
As ABC’s Bob Griese put it when the Dawgs were down 28-0, how could Georgia look so good against LSU a month ago and then play like they did Monday night?
The Georgia D eventually managed to slow down the Mountaineers’ spread-run juggernaut, except for a key lapse in the fourth quarter that allowed the last WVU score. And the offense, which had had its problems with fumbles, stupid penalties and dropped catchable passes early on, turned things around thanks to the creative play of D.J. Shockley and staged a remarkable comeback that SHOULD have put them in a position to win the game.
And then the Georgia coaching staff completely booted the ball.
WVU was facing fourth-and-long. Now, I’m no football genius, but it was perfectly obvious to me that considering the way the Dawgs had been moving the ball and scoring, Mountaineers coach Rich Rodriguez wasn’t about to give the ball back to Georgia with 1:45 on the clock if he could possibly avoid it. A fake punt was the obvious ploy.
Obvious to everyone except the Georgia coaching staff, that is.
Result: WVU runs the fake, catches the Dawgs punt receiving team napping, and gets the first down, icing the game. If ever there was a situation that called for a fake punt, that was it. How the Georgia coaching staff couldn’t see that just boggles the mind.
Asked about it after the game, Jon Fabris, the Dawgs’ punt team coordinator, had this to say: “I don’t discuss strategy, whether it’s good or bad.”
No discussion necessary, Jon. It was bad. And you blew it.
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