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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > November > 29
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Georgia’s loss falls on coaching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Athens — From No. 1 in these United States to No. 2 in this state: That’s how complete Georgia’s failure was. Yeah, these Bulldogs won nine games, but who among us will recall those? Instead we’ll remember:
The first-half no-show against Alabama. The second-half swoon in Jacksonville. And now a third-quarter collapse against the school they’d owned since Mark Richt moved north from Tallahassee.
When the going got tough, the 2008 Bulldogs didn’t just flinch — they fainted dead away. On Saturday they turned a 16-point halftime lead into a seven-point deficit is less time than it takes to say, “Willie Martinez, your realtor is on Line 1.”
Afterward Martinez, the defensive coordinator, would point with pride to the three-and-outs his unit managed in the first half — the total was two, plus one four-and-out — but the trouble after halftime wasn’t so much keeping Tech off the field as barring it from the end zone. Twice the Jackets scored on one-play “drives,” and suddenly the favored team was so addled Richt had to gather his players on the sideline to remind them there was still football to be played.
But there really wasn’t. Tech had hit its domineering big brother between the eyes, and Georgia reeled the way it had reeled twice already this underachieving autumn. Forget the final score: All you need to know is that the Bulldogs, playing between their hallowed hedges, never had the ball and the chance to nose ahead over the final 16 minutes.
“We missed tackles,” said Martinez, against whose defense opponents managed 40-plus points three times (and 38 points in two other games). “There were guys there to make the plays.”
Said Rennie Curran, the linebacker: “We were well-coached.”
Said Josh Nesbitt, the Tech quarterback: “They had no idea what we were going to do.”
Georgia yielded 45 points — OK, so there was a defensive touchdown thrown in — and 428 yards against a Tech team that completed one pass. The Bulldogs weren’t disciplined enough to defend the option for more than two quarters, and why at this late date should a lack of discipline surprise us?
Working after a full season of practice, Georgia finished as it had begun — by being flagged for seven penalties. Twice its placekicker couldn’t keep the ball in bounds, and setting up a trailing team at its 40 coming off halftime is just asking for that team to do what the Jackets did to Georgia.
A squandered season? “Definitely not,” said both Curran and Knowshon Moreno, but how else can we characterize it? Back in August, was anybody saying, “My dream is to be champion of the Capital One Bowl”?
Said cornerback Asher Allen: “I don’t think we met our expectations.”
Said Richt: “You can’t control if you play for the national championship, but you can control if you win your division and conference … This was not a season where we reached our specific goals.”
This was the first abject failure in eight seasons under Richt — even his 2006 team won its final three games — and this looked to be his most talented squad. Speaking of Martinez, Richt said: “When things don’t go exactly the way you want, people try to find someone to blame. And I’m not going to do that.”
But Georgia was rarely (and then only briefly) the Georgia we expected to see this season. Perhaps it has gotten too easy to play for Richt. Perhaps it has become too easy to work under him. For the Bulldogs to close the gap on Tech — after seven seasons, saying such a thing sounds strange — this winter, it would behoove them to get tougher.
This team didn’t fail because it lacked talent. It failed because it never developed an edge. And that’s a failure of coaching.
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