If Mike Bobo leaves for Colorado State, UGA will miss him greatly

Mike Bobo, shown with Hutson Mason, is interviewing for the Colorado State job. (Brant Sanderlin/AJC photo)

Esteemed colleague Chip Towers reports that Georgia offensive coordinator Mike Bobo will interview for the job of Colorado State head coach . We can't know whether he'll be offered the position or if he'd take it if offered -- I can't imagine he wouldn't; CSU's previous coach just became the head ball coach at Florida -- but at such a moment I feel the need to say something.

Georgia could find another capable offensive coordinator. I don't know if the Bulldogs could find one as skilled as Bobo. The criticisms of Georgia's various defensive coordinators over the years have been at least partially justified; the criticism of Bobo has been so overblown as to be laugh-out-loud funny.

I know how it goes. If a play doesn't score a touchdown, fans deem it a failure. If you run the ball twice in a row for not very much, you're an idiot. If you don't run the ball on first-and-goal at the South Carolina 4 and your quarterback gets flagged for intentional grounding, you're the king of idiots. This is the nature of football and fandom.

But nobody -- at least nobody who has bothered to check the actual numbers -- can look on Georgia over the past nine seasons and say the offense hasn't been the best part of that team. In my mind, Bobo is a better OC by far than Chad Morris of Clemson, who was occasionally branded a "genius" but whose teams only occasionally scored in bunches against any defense halfway decent. (And who just became the head coach at SMU.)

There are a lot of lousy OC's out there. (Scott Loeffler, recently of Auburn and now of Virginia Tech, is about to take down another big-name program.) Mike Bobo isn't lousy. Mike Bobo is good at his job. I don't know what kind of head coach he'd be, but I've seen his work at Georgia.

I'm not saying he's irreplaceable. But I am saying he'd be very hard to replace.