Former UGA coach Donnan to enter Hall of Fame

By Tim Tucker

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It is the nature of the coaching profession that one can be fired from his final job and 8½ years later become a Hall of Famer.

That will happen this weekend for former Georgia coach Jim Donnan, who’ll be enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., on Saturday. He’ll enter the Hall primarily for his work at Marshall, where he compiled a 64-21 record and won a Division I-AA national championship before Georgia hired him in 1996.

Donnan’s enshrinement caps a career and serves as a salve of sorts for the wounds from being fired by UGA at the end of the 2000 season.

“Nobody wants to go out like I did,” Donnan said. “But things happen like that in coaching. I feel like if you look at the whole body of work, from Oklahoma [where he was offensive coordinator in the 1980s] to here, we had a really good run.”

Donnan has not coached since losing the Georgia job and, although still dabbling in radio and TV work, considers himself “basically retired” at 64. He still lives in Athens, only a couple of miles from his old office in the Butts-Mehre building. His life is good, with four grandkids to enjoy and lots of tennis matches and golf rounds to play.

After being elected to the Hall of Fame in May, Donnan was gratified by outpourings of congratulatory calls from former players, coaching colleagues and friends. But he also took note of some renewed criticism in the blogosphere of his job performance at Georgia, where he was 40-19 overall but unsuccessful against Florida (1-4), Tennessee (1-4) and Georgia Tech (2-3).

“All the Georgia fans that were good to me or the ones that weren’t — one thing I would ask is, how many of those would turn down $5 million three different times to be the coach at Georgia?” Donnan said this week. He recounted that he rejected such overtures from North Carolina after his second season at Georgia, Oklahoma after his third and N.C. State after his fourth.

“So I feel like I was loyal to the Georgia program,” he said. “Regardless of what people say about what I did or didn’t do, I feel like I made a commitment here and did all I could.”

After bouncing around the country for much of his career, Donnan stayed put after Georgia fired him, figuring he would take another coaching job in a year or so and move only once. But as the years passed, he realized he wouldn’t coach again and wouldn’t leave Athens.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you live in the same town where you got fired?’ ” Donnan said. “Really, we love living here. We’ve got a lot of good friends, and my son and his kids are here.

“I had some [coaching] opportunities. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I enjoyed just having time. ... Once you’re in a job like Georgia, it’s very difficult to get another job of that magnitude unless you have some prior relations somewhere. The main thing is, I just felt like I worked hard to get to this level and didn’t want to go start over again, really.”

He did extensive broadcasting work for ESPN for several years but tapered off last year so that he could travel to Oklahoma each weekend to watch a grandson play high school football.

In Athens, he keeps his distance from the program of his successor, Mark Richt.

“I know without reservation I’ve done a good job of backing Coach Richt and the staff,” Donnan said. “And I’ve just tried to stay out of the picture because I’d want the same thing from any other coach. Coach Goff [Ray Goff, Donnan’s predecessor] did that when I got here.”

This weekend, though, Donnan will be back in the spotlight.

He’s among 21 former players and coaches in this Hall of Fame enshrinement class — a group that includes defensive lineman Ron Simmons, a former Florida State star who lives in Marietta; quarterback Troy Aikman; and coach Lou Holtz.