The Junkyard Blawg has moved!
Along with the other ajc.com blogs, the Junkyard Blawg has moved over to WordPress, where the blogging and commenting experience promises to be better. Join us over at the new WordPress version of the Junkyard Blawg by clicking on the link below.
AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2006 > October > 01
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Offensive in the wrong way
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I like Mark Richt. He’s a good man, a classy guy. There’s no doubt he’s elevated the level of the UGA football program in winning two SEC championships since he came here, and he’s a fine head coach. Good recruiter, too, at least for quarterbacks and running backs (the verdict is still out but leaning toward the negative when it comes to his recruiting of wide receivers and offensive linemen).
Richt’s a smart guy, too. Which is why it’s so frustrating that he’s one of the most stubborn play-callers around.
Too often, Richt refuses to take what the other team gives him and continues to call plays that plainly aren’t working. That was the case again in Oxford Saturday night, especially in the first half. Everyone and his brother, including Wake Forest, has shown you can run on Ole Miss, so what does Richt insist on doing? Throwing the ball, despite the fact that he’s using two young, inexperienced quarterbacks and has perhaps the most badly underperforming corps of receivers in Division 1-A.
So far this year, the play of Georgia’s defense (which again started slow but finished fine) and the woeful level of our opposition has allowed Richt to slide through undefeated leading up to the Tennessee game. But if he thinks Georgia can get away with pulling the same stuff against the Vols, well, he’s probably the only one.
OK, I know that an offense balanced between run and pass is the ideal, but we’re not dealing with ideal circumstances here. The only quarterback who fully knows Richt’s offense has been sidelined with an ankle sprain, and his frankly more talented backups still aren’t there yet. While Demiko Goodman made four nice catches Saturday night (one setting up a TD), our receivers generally have been just awful. The deterioration of Mohamed Massaquoi, who dropped Matthew Stafford passes on two consecutive plays in Oxford, is particularly alarming. He used to be our sure-hands guy! What the heck has John Eason done to him? And when will A.J. Bryant begin to live up to his potential?
So the situation at Ole Miss called for Georgia to run the ball, run it again, and then run it some more. But Richt refused to do that. Every time Georgia’s running game (chiefly Kregg Lumpkin) started to get on track, Richt would call for another pass on first or second down (which usually wasn’t caught), putting us at third-and-long. As Chip Towers pointed out in Sunday’s AJC, after rushing three times for 20 yards on the Dawgs’ opening series (that’s 6.7 yards per carry), Lumpkin didn’t get another carry in the first half!
Even in the fourth quarter, when kindergarten-level students of the game knew what the Dawgs needed to do was run and kill the clock, Richt continued to call passes. So it was that Ole Miss got the ball back and might well have won the game had not clutch player Paul Oliver stepped up with an interception.
And then there’s that shotgun thing. In the first half, even when Richt called a running play, it was too often that misbegotten draw out of the ’gun where our back gets handed the ball while he’s standing still and defenders are bearing down on him in the backfield after racing through our ridiculously porous offensive line. So, what with the bad calls and lack of a passing game, Georgia’s offense ended up averaging just 2.75 yards per play in the first half. Against Ole Miss!
Sorry, that just ain’t gettin’ the job done. With a back like Lumpkin on the roster, not running out of the I-formation is practically a sin!
Richt is known for his occasional use of irony in his post-game comments and that showed up again Saturday night when he was talking about Georgia needing to catch the ball. “Maybe we can pound it every down,” he said. “We may try that, I don’t know.” But you knew that what he really meant was, “No way I’m going to run every play. I’ll keep slinging it until our guys finally start catching it.”
Before the see-no-evil crowd weighs in asking if I’d like to dump Richt and return to the Weedeater and Peach Bowl days of Goff and Donnan, let me make it clear: I’m glad Mark Richt is our coach. He’s been remarkably successful, and I think he’s capable of leading UGA to bigger and better things. But in a number of cases over the past few seasons, the Dawgs have won in spite of the coach’s tunnel-vision play-calling, not because of it.
And with success comes increased expectations: OK, many in the Bulldog Nation say, you’ve won a couple of SEC titles, now when are the Dawgs going to challenge for the national championship? Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s the way the game is played these days on the level Georgia aspires to.
Richt has indicated repeatedly he’s not likely to delegate the play-calling to someone else. But if he’s going to continue to do the job, he needs to become more adaptable and more comfortable sticking with the run when that’s what the game calls for. Might not look as pretty, but as Tommy Tuberville advised him a few years ago, it’s a key to winning big in the SEC.
MORE GOOD AND BAD: While our defense is the strength of this team — and that’s despite spending way too much time on the field after our anemic offense’s frequent three-and-outs — there’s still plenty of room for improvement on the defensive side of the ball, particularly against the run and defending mobile quarterbacks when they roll out. And there have been too many missed tackles. As Richt himself said in his post-game news conference, “I just saw a lot of yards after contact, and I didn’t like that much.” … The fact that Georgia’s OL played as poorly as it did when they outweighed Ole Miss’s DL by an average of 62 pounds should be one more contribution to buying Neil Callaway’s ticket out of Athens. … Right now, kickoff returns are the best use of Thomas Brown, as he showed Saturday night. I’d like to see us stick him in the flanker’s spot and throw it to him more, too. … While Goodman was the best of our receivers Saturday, he could have been even better. Stafford threw an absolutely beautiful Ball to him that Goodman allowed the defensive back to chop out of his grasp. … My son noticed that one reason Lumpkin has been our most successful running back is that he’s more prone to cut back and improvise when the blocking isn’t there. He isn’t as likely to let the blocking determine his fate like our other backs.
Wake-up call!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tonight’s first half was the sorriest half of Georgia offense I’ve seen since … last week. If Georgia can’t figure out what it needs to do until halftime next week (hint: run Lumpkin out of the I formation!), the Dawgs may wind up facing a three touchdown deficit at the start of the third quarter the way Eric Ainge is playing.
And will someone PLEASE explain clock management to Mark Richt!
More tomorrow.
Services »
